The Five of Olympus

Chapter 2-- Valkyrie

Chapter 2:

Valkyrie sat at her desk in her room, spinning a pen between her fingers and muttering to herself. A huge notebook lay open on the immaculate white desk and there were crumpled paper balls all over the floor. After several long seconds of thinking, she began scribbling down more ideas for the upcoming party. Of course, she would make a trip down to the costume shop later to pick up her pre-ordered SAW Billy the puppet outfit, and probably get a chainsaw to go with it as well. With this happy thought in mind, Valkyrie began randomly sketching a guy being chopped up by a machete on a page of her notebook. The whole book was filled with drawings made by her, all drawn unconciously, ranging from black flames to people being tortured in shackles. She had no idea where she got these ideas, but simply they were imprinted in her brain and she was often impulsed to draw them out, because it seemed to relax her more. Her friends have long since accepted her unnerving liking for sketching horrible images, but even so Valkyrie liked to keep her sketches private, in case her parents found out and sent her to a therapist or something. 

After using a red color pencil to trace the lining of blood on the edge of the machete blade, Valkyrie stopped to admire her artwork. Suddenly, she heard whispers, eerie whispers coming from somewhere behind her. The voices were soft and haunting, speaking in languages that she didn't understand at first, but listening closely, the words seemed to translate themselves: Hay…. hay…. Valkyrie froze. Hay? Was she hallucinating about horses again? She listened more intently, straining her ears. Hades…. Hades…. Valkyrie spun her black leather chair around,the wheels rolling away from her desk, and she tried to locate the source of the voices. Hades… She assumed the teacher had mentioned that name once or twice during those boring Greek mythology lessons, but she wasn't sure. After all, Valkyrie was never the one to pay any attention at school at all. Just as she was trying to remember what Hades was, she saw something moving out of the corner of her eye. She turned her head so fast she cricked her neck, but before she had the time to register the pain or wince, she saw something that made her tumble out of her chair and collapse onto the marble floor. A greying skeleton stood before her, clothed in dark grey robes that were tattered, frayed and on fire, but the fire didn't seem to burn anything, and was only confined to the robes. Valkyrie lay sprawled on the cold marble, paralyzed with fear, unable to speak. The skeleton's head, she realized, was not connected to the body, but hovering bizzarely, engulfed in bright flames. A bony hand reached out slowly to her from under the sleeves of the robes, and Valkyrie could see flames licking the skeleton's fingers. It bared its razor-sharp teeth at her, making horrible rasping noises, then quite suddenly it faded and vanished into a cloud of black smoke. Coming to her senses, Valkyrie realized what had just happened and scrambled up from the floor. She raced out of her room as fast as she could, yelling. 

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"I swear, it was right there, then it pointed at me, then there was like loads of smoke, then it was gone!" Valkyrie shouted into her phone, her hands were trembling. She was perched on her sofa in her living room.

"Dude, do you seriously expect me to believe that a skeleton that was on fire attacked you in your room?" Erika asked, and even through the phone, Valkyrie could tell she was smirking.

"It didn't attack me, it just pointed---" Valkyrie began.

"The point is," Erika pressed on loudly, "You're clearly having highly realistic daydreams, and you should probably stop drawing those freakish pictures of people being stabbed."

"It was a guy being chopped by a machete, I told you," Valkyrie said exasperatedly, clearly frustrated that Erika couldn't tell the difference between someone being chopped up and stabbed.