I walked in my apartment door at half past four. Candace was nowhere to be found, which was shocking considering her date was in an hour. Candace spent far too much time getting ready eighty percent of the time. I may have been late last night, but she had also given me about a ten-minute warning. I set my bag down on the ground next to my bed and flopped face first on top of my mattress. I pressed my head into the pillow. I wasn't exactly tired, though. It was more of an overwhelmed feeling.
"Knock knock," Candace called, rapping on the door frame lightly. I rolled my eyes as she walked in. "I'm going out with Marcus again tonight. I hope you don't mind. How was your day?"
"It was all right. I'm a little overwhelmed with all the information I have to process."
"Oh?"
"Yeah, I have a project to figure out tonight. Or, well, I didn't exactly get a deadline."
"Homework already, fun." Candace's voice didn't hide her sarcasm. She enjoyed her jobs during the summer, and I suppose I enjoyed mine. "Do you have anything planned tonight?"
"Well, Caderyn invited me over for pizza."
She nearly squealed. "Oh really? Did your walk in the park go that well?"
"I mean. It's not like you and Marcus."
She wrinkled her nose and waved her hand. "Marcus and I have known each other longer than twenty-four hours, Elia. We've been talking since his orientation back in April. I'm not expecting it to be like that, silly. But it went okay, right?"
I couldn't just say that we were almost robbed in Central Park, that Caderyn survived six gun shots and that I was starting to lose my grip on reality. "Yeah, it went fine."
"Well, that's good. You guys can enjoy your pizza date, and maybe Caderyn won't be so quiet all the time."
"You've met him one time."
"Well, yeah, but Marcus talks about him and worries about him and how quiet he is. They don't hang out all the time or anything. Their moms know each other, and they hung out when they were little. His mom pressured him into rooming with Caderyn, and he feels bad that his only friend is someone he's known since he was born. They don't have much in common." Candace sat on the bed, crossing her legs and opening the compact mirror that she held in one hand. She began applying mascara with the other.
"Marcus is, well, in my opinion, he's fun. According to Marc, Caderyn very rarely gets his nose out of an old, dusty book or out of educational websites on the internet." She blinked at her reflection in the mirror. "He's a bit like you in that way. Quiet and always reading."
I kept quiet. It was harsh for Candace just to start blabbering on about Marcus and Caderyn's relationship as though it was nothing. Caderyn had spoken so fondly of Marcus and for her to just turn around and tell me that it was less like they were friends and more of just something that his mom pressured him to do. Way to make a stand, Marcus. Maybe he wasn't as charming as looks perceived.
"Reading isn't a bad thing, Candace. We're in college. It's our job to keep our minds open and active during the summer. Dusty books are the ones with character." She shrugged, putting her mascara down and grabbing lipstick instead.
"I know books aren't terrible. It's just sometimes you need more than just a book for entertainment." She shrugged. "I don't know what time it is, but I've got to go change and do my hair. You enjoy your pizza, and I'll see you when I get back if you nap or whenever." She stood and walked out of the door, shutting it behind her.
A nap didn't sound all that terrible. I rolled back onto my stomach, face in a pillow, eyes closed. My mind raced with all sorts of things: relationships both romantic and platonic, questions about the reality that I was living in and how exactly I was going to avoid the topic of Caderyn's lack of bullet wound at dinner.
It was surprising to me when I woke up to the vibrating of my cell phone under my chest. I didn't remember falling asleep, only trying to avoid it. I rolled my arm uncomfortably until I touched my phone and turned on my side to see who had woken me up.
Caderyn.
It was 5:40. Crap.
Candace mentioned you might be sleeping, are you still coming over?
Hi.
Sorry. She was right. I fell asleep.
Are pajamas okay?
No.
I wrinkled my nose at the phone, groaning as I sat up. If he expected me to wear something besides pajamas, I suppose I had to start getting ready. I groggily stood and concluded I was still, in my heels and panty hose from work. I hadn't realized that I hadn't changed. Maybe this would be 'formal' enough. My phone buzzed again, and I looked down.
I'm kidding. Wear whatever. I don't care.
Anyone ever told you you're a brat, Caderyn?
Pajamas it is. I'll be over in a couple of minutes.
Is pepperoni pizza okay? I'll order it now.
Pepperoni is perfect.
Dialing now.
I undressed only to redress to much more comfortable clothes. My hair broke from its rubber band prison, and I brushed it. My hair is unnaturally and obnoxiously thick dirty blonde hair. I don't know which biological parent I inherited it from; my parents adopted me when I was a little over a year old.
I had no pictures of my biological parents, just unsure answers to my questions from my adoptive parents. I had always wondered why I was given up. Apparently, it had been a closed adoption and details were hidden to my parents. It was hard to wrap my mind around the idea of getting rid of a toddler, but in some ways, I was grateful for my bio parents' mistake. The most loving couple that could have possibly existed had raised me. Too bad I didn't get their hair.
The pajamas I chose were modest in every way. An old faded t-shirt that sported my high school mascot and some long sweat pants, nothing special but it worked to eat pizza and to talk. I slipped a pair of flip-flops on, grabbed my keys and locked the door behind me before taking the few steps down the hall and knocking.
The door swung open, and Caderyn looked just as casual as I did. His hair was less messy than the night before, but it still looked windswept. He wore a black tank top and sweatpants. He only half smiled at me, "Did you enjoy your nap?"
I made a face at him, and he moved to the side to let me in. "Yeah, I did. It was a long day."
"I hope it wasn't too bad."
"No it wasn't bad," I explained, "There are just things in that office that I just don't understand."
"Sit down and explain what you mean." He sat and patted the cushion next to him. I sat and thought over my words.
"Well, last night, for one, was weird all around." There was no avoiding it, I had decided. We needed to get it out in the open if we were going to pursue a friendship. There was no other way to make this work. The elephant in the room needed to be brought up.
"I don't know how you're going to explain yourself and as interested as I am in hearing the real explanation, I don't think I'm going to get it. But it was weird, Caderyn, start to finish." I ran my fingers through my hair and sighed. "You're not supposed to be--"
He stopped me mid sentence by grabbing my hands. "Eliana, stop. Listen for a minute." He held them gently, setting them on his lap and squeezing. "I can ease your thoughts some by explaining last night." He sighed and his lips pursed before he continued.
"I have never told anyone this, for one, not even Marcus knows, and if last night hadn't happened, you wouldn't know either. We wouldn't be doing this, sitting here about to eat pizza. There's a reason why I'm, to quote you, broody." He let go of my hands for a moment to gesture with his hands. "I've been different as long as I can remember, but my mom has explained it plainly. My dad was – is – something that you probably won't believe."
I closed my eyes for a moment, breathing in deeply and exhaling before reopening them. "Try me."
"Follow me if you want to know." He stood and started towards his bedroom. I followed him, hesitantly, and looked in his room. It was a similar layout to my own, but the thing that he was standing near was what caught my attention. On top of the bookcase that he stood next to was a great hammer with an incredibly short handle.
The first thing I thought of was Thor's hammer Mjolnir. It was the incredible details that were carved into the hammer as well as it's strange triangular point at its top that reminded me of pictures I had seen in Norse myth books and artwork. It was sitting on its side, looking quite strange next to all the books. I didn't know what to say, so I just brought my eyes away from the hammer and back to Caderyn.
"You know what this is," he reassured, reaching out and picking it up with ease twirling it in his hand naturally. "Your eyes lit up when you saw it."
I squinted at him. "Am I supposed to be impressed by your Mjolnir replica? I mean, yeah it's cool, but that doesn't--"
"It's not a replica of Mjolnir." The statement was so odd that I just stared at him. Of course, it was a replica; the Norse gods were just legends to humans, similar to the Greek and the Roman or any mythology. "It's complicated to explain to anyone if you haven't experienced it yourself. But you saw what happened, and I don't want you to think I'm some superhero. I'm not. If those bullets had contained pure iron everything would have turned out different." There was a soft clink of metal as he opened his hand and showed me the crushed bullets in his hand. Six metal — not rubber — bullets in his hand. Something like a hammer had hit them smashing them into tiny pieces, and my eyes looked at Caderyn's Mjolnir. "They weren't rubber, Eliana, they were regular bullets."
So it had been all been a lie. "I picked them up while you were at work. I knew we were going to have this conversation sooner or later."
I didn't have a large realm of useless knowledge, but I had spent a fair portion of the first 21 years of my life reading about the more well-known mythologies and the folklore that followed suit. While most of my knowledge was extremely limited to some common details and some fiction novels, I immediately picked up what he was trying to say. "You're a faery?"
He blinked and then outright chuckled in response. "I'm half fae, I think. I mean I've never met my Father, but I've done some research involving the fae and their everyday presence throughout the world. I'm pretty sure that I'm half fae and that," he gestured towards Mjolnir, "is, in fact, Mjolnir, the thunder god's weapon."
He must have expected my bewilderment, so he continued. "I don't know about the other mythologies I'm sure it's possible for this to be true for them as well... However, the Norse gods like Odin, Thor, Loki, etcetera were very powerful faery people. They were immortal for a very long time even interacting with humans as late as the 18th century, but something happened, and they disappeared. Their descendants are called the warrior fae from everything that I can tell, I don't have any actual – uh – written proof that this is the truth, but Mjolnir was supposed to have been passed down through Thor's bloodline. I don't know if that just means I'm his great to infinity grandson or not but I have it." He moved his hands as his explained, but he looked nervous and uncertain. It was understandable, what he was saying was nuts.
"Uh – So my dad — Thor but not the original Thor, just a descendant of Thor named Thor — left my mom before I was born. My mom doesn't exactly know what happened, he just came home one day and said, 'I have to leave. I don't know when or if I'll be back. Give this to our son when he's worthy of it.' She kept on to it – hid it naturally – until I was fourteen." He sat Mjolnir down on the bookcase and looked at me with eyes that had desperation in them.
"There's a reason why I'm quiet, Eliana. I – this thing happened when I was young, and I got sent away to a school, private, and it was the greatest school you could imagine for weird kids. Marcus never cared to ask why all of a sudden we moved from Arizona to the Midwest. He doesn't know anything about this; he'd probably look at me crazier than you are. I—" He went silent for just a moment. "I'm trying to explain this in the best way that I can. I don't want to lie to you, about what happened—"
I laughed, "No, Caderyn, of course, you don't want to lie." I didn't realize how disgusted I sounded until the words left my mouth. "I just wasn't aware I was living in a faery tale," I looked at him up and down, "Literally." I put my hands up, shaking my head and starting to back up. "I don't know what happened last night, and I've been driving myself insane thinking about it. But I can't accept this as the answer." I turned my heel to bolt out of his bedroom, out of his apartment so I could go back to my own and pinch myself repeatedly until I woke up from whatever messed up dream this was. My neck hairs standing on edge made me stop in the doorway.
In less than a minute there was the roar of thunder that shook the entire apartment, and after that the sound of rain was unsurprising. But my heart told me that there weren't any thunderstorms in the forecast, and my head retorted that the projections could change. I had expected the rain to stop when I turned back towards Caderyn. He was holding Mjolnir, with his eyes shut and lips mouthing words, but with no sound leaving them.
For the second time in two days, my throat tightened, and my lungs struggled to fill with air. I backed out of the room again, this time forcing myself not to look back and get out of the apartment. I needed to think, and I couldn't do it in the same room as someone who was summoning a storm. When I got to the doorway though, and my hand was hovering over the doorknob, I had to force myself to breathe, and with that breath, I opened the door and walked.
Going to my apartment would've been too easy. It was just a few long strides down to my door, and Caderyn could be banging on my door in seconds. No, I didn't want to consider that as a possibility.
I walked the opposite direction of my apartment and took the stairs rather than the elevator to the roof terrace that our apartment building had. There was a squeal of a group of young women who came racing in the door as I exited.
The terrace was nice enough, I suppose, with a small garden and a sitting area that allowed you to see most everything in the city. I had been up here once in my year of living here and had been turned off by a couple making out sloppily. Now, I sat with my knees to my chest and stared into the distance lights.
A fae. What the hell was a fae? A fae with Mjolnir, the mythological hammer of Thor. Caderyn would've had better luck telling me he was a demigod than a Faery. I knew that my dating luck was bad, even if the prior night hadn't been a real date, but this was on a whole other scale than 'boys suck.' Because he didn't suck, he was nice, strong and tended not to know how strong he was, but he seemed to be crazy too. Then again, sitting in pajamas in a thunderstorm seemed pretty insane too.
As the rain drops smacked me in my head, I wondered how much was odd coincidence and how much was real.
A failing mechanical whirling both startled me and made me sit upright. The sound of metal scraping on metal caused me to cringe, and the yelling of the armored figure that rolled into my view made me stand.
"Ouch." The figure murmured, laying on his back in defeat. He moved to pull off his helmet, but I cleared my throat. He jerked to a sitting position, a soft, embarrassed sounding noise emitting from his helmet. "Hi."
If it weren't for how young he sounded, I wouldn't have guessed he was human, to be honest. The suit was still tight fitting as his previous costume, but the material was not spandex, but it looked rather like the chest piece that Elijah Monet had cut open in his office earlier that day. The erratic flashing lights made me think that if it were not the very same material, it was disturbingly similar. There was something about his voice that made me feel like I should have recognized it, but I couldn't lay a finger on it.
"Hi?" He repeated himself, this time it sounded slightly less embarrassed. "What're you doing?" He pushed himself to his feet and tilted his helmeted head at me as though I was the odd one.
"I was meditating," I lied. "You would think after a year of being a superhero you'd learn how to fly that thing," I gestured towards the glider, it was also pulsating with lights. It flashed twice and whirled a sound that almost sounded sad.
"That was on purpose," Amori said, shrugging his shoulders. He was small framed, very unimpressive for a superhero. "I — uh — wanted to get your attention. Gracie just helped."
"Gracie?" My eyebrows rose.
"It's — uh — complicated to explain. A civilian such as yourself wouldn't understand."
"Right..."
"So do you regularly meditate in a storm like this? In your pajamas? You could get sick. You should probably go inside." His movements were stiff and awkward as he spoke. The fact I couldn't see his mouth move was giving me the heebie jeebies, and there was this underlying feeling of anger building up in my stomach. Why now? Why now of all times? Why when I'm trying to convince myself that I'm sane does the stupid city's superhero have to show up?
"I'm fine, thanks. Who are you to just come crashing down on someone's rooftop and tell them what they should and shouldn't do?" I felt my teeth grit and my hands tighten into fists. "You're some superhero you know, my — my friend and I were walking through Central Park — a park I've walked through hundreds of times day and night — and were robbed at gunpoint. You know what happened? He was shot five times last night! I barely slept last night because of the nightmares I was having, and I started a new internship today. Where were you?"
If he had eyes to widen, I expected they would have. There was another sad whirl from Gracie the Glider and Amori raised his hands up in what could only be a sign of surrendering. "I'm sorry for not being there. Is your friend okay?"
I wanted to kick something. "He's dandy. Apparently, he's bulletproof because he's a fae."
"What?"
"A faery... thing. Something about being the son of Thor. He has Mjolnir. He summoned the storm. I feel like I'm going crazy and you just show up and make everything seem more insane." He tilted his head at me if I could see his face he may have been grimacing. He dropped his hands from the air and awkwardly waved them in the air.
"I mean if it helps—"
"It probably won't," I said sharply, wiping the rain drops off my face, "But say whatever you need to."
He audibly sighed, a sound filled with frustration, before crossing his arms over his wildly flashing suit. "The world is weird. I'm sorry I wasn't there to save you from being held up. I can't be everywhere all the time." There was a sound of defeat to his voice as he spoke, and my stomach tightened as I looked at him. He was a kid, or barely an adult — like myself — struggling through his days just like I was. He just wore a costume, a helmet, and the weight of others' lives on his shoulders. "But if it helps," he repeated, "he's not lying to you. Fae are people that live in the city just like you and I do."
"How do you know this?" My voice didn't want to leave my throat; my words came out as a choking sound.
He moved his hands up to gesture to the rain. "It wasn't supposed to rain today." I heard myself laugh and a small smile crossed my lips. I felt ridiculous, sitting in the rain in my pajamas, staring at this 'superhero.' What world was I living in that I honestly considered that he was going to tell me that he was a fae too? His voice gave it away more than anything. He knew more than he was saying.
The awkward silence hung in the air only for a moment before the figure in front of me was moving again. Amori's glider hummed when he stepped on it. It roared as it began to rise off of the ground. "I've — uh — need to get back. I hope you and your friend talk." With that, he faded off into the distance, between the towering buildings of Esmarina. His suit flared in colors, the thin lines disappearing far after his black suit.
The raindrops seemed to multiply in size when I stood and walked towards the door. The roar of Amori's glider still rang clearly in my ears, and my stomach tightened. I turned the door knob stepping out of the summer humidity and into cool air conditioning. It made me feel no better.
Magic had always been a favorite topic of mine to read about in books but knowing it was real and I imagined all of it? Goosebumps rose on my neck, and the 'magic' rain fell over my pajama blouse. It was genuine, and my thoughts jumbled with the most irrelevant things. If rain was magic in origin did the magical properties transfer to other things like flowers and trees? Could I, in a month or two, buy produce that based sweeter or caused me to have prophetic dreams? Or was this rain just a concentration of whatever water particles were in the air? Could you even have prophetic dreams? Was that a reality of this world too? Prophets? I forced my eyes shut, inhaled and exhaled sharply before reopening my eyes and starting towards Caderyn's apartment.
When I arrived, I lightly knocked on the door, and it swung open immediately. "You're soaked." Caderyn's face had no expression, but his eyes said it all.
"Yeah, rain does that."
"You came back."
"I wanted to talk."
"So you don't think I'm crazy?"
I shrugged, "No more than I am for coming back." A smile, a true one at that, spread across his face. "Just don't do that rain thing often, okay? It weirds me out."
A laugh echoed in the room as he took a step towards me, but he abruptly stopped, halted and sheepishly rubbed the back of his neck instead. "The pizza came." My nostrils flared when I breathed in the smell of fresh, deliciously greasy pizza. My eyebrows rose in curiosity when my eyes landed on the shut, untouched pizza on the table. "I didn't want it to get cold in case you came back."
"That's appreciated," I said softly. He had stronger self-discipline than I did. If the roles reversed and he had walked out on me after I summoned magic rain, I would've probably gorged myself on pizza until I was sick. I had experience with similar situations, minus the magic anyway.
"You came back though, Eliana." He tone shifted from casual to stunned. "I didn't think you'd come back." We both stood there for a moment in silence. "Do you believe me?"
My throat tightened. I didn't answer but instead turned and closed his apartment door. It was an asinine assumption, but I felt the moment I shut that door I was shutting everything that I had ever perceived as 'normal' out and welcoming (perhaps forcibly) in whatever reality was true. The gripping feeling in my stomach reassured me that I was only welcoming in more unknowns.
I hate unknowns.
"I don't know what I believe," after a long moment I decided those were the words I wanted. I looked at Caderyn, and the pink had faded from his cheeks, and he was resting against the wall. "Are you okay?"
"Magic exhausts me. I'm not very good at saving energy when casting a spell. If it weren't for Mjolnir, I wouldn't be able to do it at all." He raised his eyes to look at me. "Food helps, though."
I nodded my head and looked towards the pizza that was on the table. He could've eaten it before now, but he had waited. "Sit and eat. I don't want you fainting on me. Just tell me where everything else and I'll get it." He smiled at me, and that was enough for me to know he was thankful.
"Cups left to the sink, plates are to the right, and napkins are behind the cookie jar." I hummed an affirmative and began to grab everything. I stacked the plates first with the napkins on top, plopped the cups down on the counter and opened his fridge. "What do you want to drink?"
"Anything will help. Water works best." Well, that was easy enough, I thought to myself, grabbing him a bottle of water and setting it on top of the plates. I poured myself some sprite from a two-liter and successfully balance the plates on the one hand with my drink in the other as I walked back into the living area. I set the plates down next to the pizza, gave Caderyn his water and sat down next to him.
"Besides pizza, what did you have planned?" He opened his water bottle and drank almost half of it before answering.
"I figured we would watch something," he said as he set the water bottle down. Some color had returned to his face. "But if you have questions, we can also talk about that."
I shook my head. "No offense, Caderyn, but my mind is in an overload right now. I would like just to watch something."
He smiled, "That's fine with me. We can talk about that if you ever have any questions when you're ready."
Author's Note:
Sheesh! This took me forever to rewrite. A couple weeks, actually! I hope you guys are enjoying the revised opening chapters of Valhalla. More to come as I update.
Also don't forget to check out my ko-fi. https://ko-fi.com/valhalla
Enjoy this picture of Amori too! The art is by Taratjah on tumblr but I did the animation.
