Morning Star by Pierce Brown
“Liar!” someone screams. A shaman with crooked knees and a bent spine. He babbles something else but Sefi cuts him off.
“Liar?” Mustang hisses. “I have stood upon Asgard. I have seen where your immortals sleep. Where your immortals rut and eat and shit.” She twists the pulseFist in her hand. “This is not magic.” She activates her gravBoots, floating in the air. The Obsidians stare at her in wonder. “This is not magic. This is a tool.”
Alia sees what I have done. What I have shown her daughter and what I have now brought her people whether she wants it or not. We’re the same cruel kind. I told myself I would be better than this. I failed that promise. But noble vanity can shine another day. This is war. And victory is the only nobility. I think that is what Mustang was looking for here with Obsidians. She was more afraid that I would allow my own idealism to let something loose that I could not control. But now she sees the compromise I’m willing to make. The strength I’m willing to exert. That’s what she wants in an ally as much as she wants a builder. Someone wise enough to adapt.
And Alia? She sees how her people look at me. How they look at my blade, still stained with the blood of the gods, as though it were some holy relic. And she also knows I could have made her complicit in the Golds’ crime. Could have accused her before her people. But instead I offer her a chance to pretend she is just learning this for the first time.
Lamentably, my friend’s mother does not take the offer. She steps toward Sefi. “I carried you, birthed you, nursed you, and this is my reward? Treason? Blasphemy? You are no Valkyrie.” She looks at her people. “These are lies. Free our gods from the usurpers. Kill blasphemers. Kill them all!”
But before the first warchief can even draw their blade, Sefi steps forward, lifts the razor I gave her, and decapitates her mother. Alia’s head falls to the floor, eyes still open. The woman’s huge body remains standing. Slowly it tips backward and thuds to the ground. Sefi stands over the fallen queen and spits on the corpse. Turning back to her people, she speaks for the first time in twenty-five years.
“She knew.”
Her voice is deep and dangerous. Hardly rising above the level of a whisper. Yet it owns the room as surely as if she roared. Then tall Sefi turns away from the Golds, walks back through the gaggle of warchiefs to the griffin throne where her mother’s fabled warchest has sat unopened for ten years. There, she bends and takes the lock in her hands and roars gutturally, like a beast, as she pulls at the rusted iron till her fingers bleed and the iron crumbles apart. She throws the old lock to the ground and rips open the chest, pulling free the old black scarabSkin her mother used to conquer the White Coast. Pulling free the red scale cloak of the dragon her mother slew in her youth. And hoisting high her great, black, double-headed axe of war called Throgmir. The rippling gleam of duroSteel catches in the light. She stalks back to the Golds, dragging the axe on the ground behind her.
She motions to Holiday, who removes the gags from the mouths of the Golds.
“Are you a god?” Sefi asks, her tone so different from her brother’s. Direct and cold as a winter storm.
“You will burn, mortal,” the man says. “If you do not release us, Aesir will come from the sky and rain fire upon your land. This you know. We will wipe your seed from the worlds. We will melt the ice. We are the mighty. We are the Peerless Scarred. And this millennium belongs to…”
Sefi slays him there with one giant swing, cleaving him nearly in twain. Blood sprays my face. I do not flinch. I knew what would happen if I brought them here. I also know there’s no way I could keep them as prisoners. The Golds built this myth, but now it must die. Mustang moves closer to me, her sign that she accepts this. But her eyes are fixed on the Golds. She will remember this slaughter for the rest of her life. It is her duty and mine to make it mean something.
Part of me mourns the death of these Golds. Even as they die, they make these other taller mortals still seem so much lesser. They stand straight, proud. They do not quake in their last moment in this smoky room so far from their estates where they rode horses as children and learned the poetry of Keats and the wonder of Beethoven and Volmer. A middle-aged Gold woman looks back at Mustang. “You let them do this to us? I fought for your father. I met you when you were a girl. And I fell in his Rain,” she glares at me and begins to recite with a loud clear voice the Aeschylus poem the Peerless Scarred use at times as a battle cry:
Up and lead the dance of Fate!
Lift the song that mortals hate…
Tell what rights are ours on earth,
Over all of human birth
Swift of foot to avenge are we!
He whose hands are clean and pure.
Naught our wrath to dread hath he.
One by one they fall to Sefi’s axe. Until only the woman is left, her head held high, her words ringing clear. She looks me in the eye, as sure of her right as I am of mine. “Sacrifice. Obedience. Prosperity.” Sefi’s axe sweeps through the air and the last god of Asgard flops to the stone floor. Over her body towers the blood-spattered Princess of the Valkyrie, terrible and ancient with her justice. She bends and removes the tongue of the female Gold with a crooked knife. Mustang shifts beside me in discomfort.
Sefi smiles, noticing Mustang’s unease, and walks away from us to her dead mother. She takes the woman’s crown and ascends the steps to the throne, bloody axe in one hand, glass crown in the other, and sits inside the rib cage of the griffin where she crowns herself.
“Children of the Spires, the Reaper has called us to join him in his war against false gods. Do the Valkyrie answer?”
In reply, her Valkyrie raise their blue-feathered axes high above their heads to drone out the Obsidian chant of death. Even the warchiefs of fallen Alia join. It seems the ocean itself crashes through the stone hallways of the Spires, and I feel the drums of war beating inside, chilling my blood.
“Then ride, Hjelda, Tharul, Veni, and Hroga. Ride Faldir and Wrona and Bolga to the tribes of the Blood Coast, to the Bleaking Moor, the Shattered Spine and the Witch Pass. Ride to kin and enemy alike and tell them Sefi speaks. Tell them Ragnar’s prophets told true. Asgard has fallen. The gods are dead. The old oaths have been broken. And tell all who will hear: the Valkyrie ride to war.”
As the world swirls around us and the ecstasy of war fills the air, Mustang and I look at one another with darkened eyes and wonder just what we have unleashed.
For seven days after the death of Ragnar, I travel across the ice with Sefi, speaking to the male tribes of the Broken Spine, to the Blooded Braves of the North Coast, to women who wear the horns of rams and stand watch over the Witch Pass. Flying in gravBoots beside the Valkyrie, we come bringing the news of the fall of Asgard.
It is…dramatic.
Sefi and a score of her Valkyrie have begun training with Holiday and me to learn to use the gravBoots and pulse weapons. They’re clumsy at first. One flew into the side of a mountain at mach 2. But when thirty land with their headdresses kicking in the wind, the left of their faces painted with the blue handprint of Sefi the Quiet and the right with the slingBlade of the Reaper, folks tend to listen.
We take the lion’s share of Obsidian leaders to the conquered mountain and let them walk the halls where their gods ate and slept, and show them the cold, preserved corpses of the slain Golds. In seeing their gods slain, most, even those who knew tacitly of their true condition as slaves, accepted our olive branch. Those who did not, who denounced us, were overcome by their own people. Two warchiefs hurled themselves from the mountain in shame. Another opened her veins with a dagger and bleeds out on the floor of the green houses.
And one, a particularly psychotic little woman, watched with great malevolence as we took her to the mountain’s datahub where three Greens informed her of a planned coup against her rule, showing her video of the conspiracy. We loaned her a razor, a flight back home, and two days later she added twenty thousand warriors to my cause.
Sometimes I encounter Ragnar’s legend. I
It is my legend that begins to bind them. Not their sense of kinship with one another. These clans have warred for generations. But I have no sordid history here. Unlike Sefi or the other great Obsidian warlords, I am their untouched field of snow. Their blank slate on which they can project whatever disparate dreams they have. As Mustang says, I am something new, and in this old world steeped in legends, ancestors, and what came before, something new is something very special.
Yet despite our progress with gathering the clans, the difficulty we face is massive. Not only must we keep the fractious Obsidians from killing one another in honor duels, but many of the clans have accepted my invitation for relocation. Hundreds of thousands of them must be brought from their homes in the Antarctic to the tunnels of the Reds so they are beyond the reach of Gold bombardment, which will come when the Golds discover what has transpired here. All this while keeping the Jackal dumb and blind to our maneuvers. From Asgard, Mustang has led the counterintelligence efforts, with the help of Quicksilver’s hackers to mask our presence and project reports consistent with those filed in previous weeks to the Board of Quality Control HQ in Agea.
With no way to move them without someone noticing, Mustang, a Gold aristocrat, has conceived the most audacious plan in the history of the Sons of Ares. One massive troop movement, utilizing thousands of shuttles and freighters from Quicksilver’s mercantile fleet and the Sons of Ares navy to move the population of the pole in twelve hours. A thousand ships skimming over the Southern Sea, burning helium to set down on the ice before Obsidian cities and lower their ramps to the hundreds and thousands of giants swaddled in fur and iron who will fill their hulls with the old, the sick, the warriors, the children, and the fetid stink of animals. Then, under the cover of the Sons of Ares ships, the population will be dispersed underground and many of the warriors to our military ships in orbit. I do not think I know another person in the worlds who can organize it as fast as she does.
—
On the eighth day after the fall of Asgard, I depart with Sefi, Mustang, Holiday, and Cassius to join Sevro in overseeing the final preparations for the migration. The Valkyrie bring Ragnar with us on the flight, wrapping his frozen body in rough cloth and clutching him close in terror as our ship cruises just beneath the speed of sound five meters from the surface of the ocean. They watch in awe as we enter the tunnels of Mars through one of the many Sons’ subterranean access points. This one an old mining colony in a southern mountain range. Sons lookouts in heavy winter jackets and balaclavas salute with their fists in the air as we pass into the tunnel.
Half a day of subterranean flying later, we arrive at Tinos. It is a hub of ship activity. Hundreds cluttering the stalactite docks, taxiing through the air. And it seems the whole city watches our shuttle as it passes through the traffic to land in its stalactite hangar, knowing it bears not just me and our new Obsidian allies, but the broken Shield of Tinos. Their weeping faces blur past. Already rumors swirl through the refugees. The Obsidians are coming. Not just to fight, but to live in Tinos. To eat their food. To share their already-crowded streets. Dancer says the place is a powder keg about to erupt. I can’t say I disagree.
The disposition of the Sons of Ares is dour. They gather in silence as my ship’s landing ramp unfurls. I go first down the ramp. Sevro waits beside Dancer and Mickey. He slams me into a hug. The beginnings of a goatee mark his stoic face. He holds his shoulders as square as he can, as if those bony things alone could hold up the hopes of the thousands of Sons of Ares who fill the docking bay to see the Shield of Tinos brought back to his adopted home.
“Where is he?” Sevro asks thickly.
I look back to my shuttle as Sefi and her Valkyrie carry Ragnar down the ramp. The Howlers are the first to greet them. Clown saying a respectful word to Sefi as Sevro steps past me to stand before the Valkyrie.
“Welcome to Tinos,” he says to the Valkyrie in Nagal. “I am Sevro au Barca, blood brother to Ragnar Volarus. These are his other brothers and sisters.” He motions to the Howlers, all of whom wear their wolfcloaks. Sevro produces Ragnar’s bear cloak. “He wore this to battle. With your permission, I’d like him to wear it now.”
“You were brother to Ragnar. You are brother to me,” Sefi says. She clicks her tongue and her Valkyrie pass stewardship of her brother’s body to Sevro. Mustang glances my way. Sefi’s generosity strikes me as a promising sign. If she were a covetous creature, she would have kept his body in her lands and given him an Obsidian funeral pyre before burying his ashes in the ice. Instead, she told me she knows where his true home lies: with those who fought beside him, who helped him come back to his people.
Mustang moves closer beside me as the Howlers drape Ragnar’s cloak over his body and carry him through the crowd. The Sons part for them. Hands reach to touch Ragnar. “Look,” Mustang says, nodding to the thin black ribbons that the Sons have tied into their beards and hair. Her hand finds my smallest finger. A small squeeze sends me back to the woods where she saved me. Making me feel warm even as we watch Sevro leave the hangar with Ragnar’s body. “Go.” She nudges me his direction. “Dancer and I have a conference scheduled with Quicksilver and Victra.”
“She needs a guard,” I tell Dancer. “Sons you trust.”
“I’ll be fine,” Mustang says, rolling her eyes. “I survived the Obsidians.”
“She’ll have the Pitvipers,” Dancer says, examining Mustang without the kindness I’m used to seeing in his eyes. Ragnar’s death has taken the spirit out of him today. He seems older as he waves Narol over and nods to the shuttle. “The Bellona on board?”
“Holiday’s got him in the passenger cabin. His neck’s still torn up so he’ll need Virany to take a look at him. Be discreet about it. Give him a private room.”
“Private? Place is crammed, Darrow. Captains don’t even get private rooms.”
“He’s got intel. You want him shot before he can give it to us?” I ask.
“Is that why you kept him alive?” Dancer looks at Mustang skeptically, as if she’s already compromising my decisions. Little does he know she’d have let Cassius die more readily than I ever would. Dancer sighs when I don’t relent. “He’ll be safe. On my word.”
“Find me later,” Mustang says as I depart.
—
I find Sevro slumped over Ragnar in Mickey’s laboratory. It’s a thing to hear of a friend’s death, it’s another to see the shadow of what they’ve left behind. I hated the sight of my father’s old workgloves after he died. Mother was too practical to throw them away. Said we couldn’t afford to. So I did it myself one day and she boxed my ears and made me bring them back.
The scent of death is growing stronger from Ragnar.
The cold preserved him in his native land, but Tinos has been suffering power outages and refrigeration units play second zither to the water purifiers and air reclamation systems in the city beneath. Soon Mickey will embalm him and make preparations for the burial Ragnar asked for.
I sit in silence for half an hour, waiting for Sevro to speak. I don’t want to be here. Don’t want to see Ragnar dead. Don’t want to linger in the sadness. Yet I stay for Sevro.
My armpits stink. I’m tired. The scanty tray of food Dio brought me is untouched except the biscuit I chew numbly and think how ridiculous Ragnar looks on the table. He’s too big for it, feet hanging off the edge.
Despite the smell, Ragnar is peaceful in death. Ribbons red as winter berries nestled in the white of his beard. Two razors rest in his hands, which are folded across his bare ches
I wish he were here.
The people need him more than ever.
Sevro’s eyes are glassy as his fingers glide over the tattoos on Ragnar’s white face. “He wanted to go to Venus, you know,” he murmurs, voice soft as a child’s. Softer than I’ve ever heard it before. “I showed him one of the holoVids of a catamaran there. Second he put the goggles on I’d never seen anyone smile like that. Like he’d found heaven and realized he didn’t have to die to go there. He’d sneak in and borrow my holo gear in the middle of the night till one day I just gave him the damn thing. Things are four hundred credits, max. Know what he did to repay me?” I don’t. Sevro holds up his right hand to show me his skull tattoo. “He made me his brother.” He gives Ragnar a slow, affectionate punch to the jaw. “But the big fat idiot had to run at Aja instead of away from her.”
The Valkyrie still scour the wastes in vain for signs of the Olympic Knight. Her trail goes deeper into the crevasse before it is covered by the frozen black blood of some creature. I hope something found her and took her to its cave in the ice to finish her slowly. But I doubt it. A woman like that doesn’t just fade. Whatever Aja’s fate, if she’s alive she’ll find a way to contact the Sovereign or the Jackal.
“It was my fault,” I say. “My shit plan to take Aja out.”
“She killed Quinn. Helped kill my father,” Sevro mutters. “Killed dozens of us when you were locked up. Wasn’t your bad. You’d have lost me too if I were there. Even Rags couldn’t have kept me from having a go at her.” Sevro rolls his knuckles along the edge of the table, leaving little white creases in the skin. “Always trying to protect us.”