“Hell is Empty and All the Devils are Here”
Svalbard is a frigid Norwegian archipelago located in the Arctic Ocean, some six hundred and fifty miles north of the European mainland and the same distance again south of the North Pole. The region was once more commonly known simply by the name of its main island, Spitsbergen; before that, back in the sixteenth century, it was referred to on maps as Het Niewe Land, the New Land, and four hundred years before that, it was Svalbaro - the Cold Shores, in the Norse tongue. Svalbaro, Svalbard. Things have come full circle, as they ever do.
Brunnhilde the Valkyrie has always known Svalbard by another name entirely. To her, it is simply heim. Home.
It's April, so it's cold and still at this remote Arctic latitude, all hard, frozen tundra slowly emerging from the true bitterness of deep winter. The lowland glacial ice lingers on in thick, glassy drifts - and it's always ice, not snow, nothing ever really like snow as most people understand it. We think of snow as soft and gentle, the delighted, snuffling excitement of young children at Christmas. Svalbard is not soft. It is rock and skull and salt, and all children are old, from the moment they're born.
The air here is thin and sharp enough to cut away at the back of your exposed, open throat like an escaped lunatic's knife, especially up on the whalebone hips of the Kongsfjorden glacier that dominates the bleak skyline. When the sun sets on the mountains it colours them purple and fuchsia and blue, and it is beautiful, but only when the clouds haven't already stolen in to suffocate the light with dirty pillows filled with stones. In the mornings, when dawn breaks, the rugged horizon is burnished gold, sometimes tinctured with the barest emerald remains of the previous night's aurora borealis. Unless, again, the mist is heavy, and all that loiters is the damp echo of dreams.
It's the dreams that Brunnhilde hates most of all. Dreams are memories you can't pretend never happened, or maybe happened to someone else. Not you, never you. And memories are everything.
As dawn spills up and splits like peach syrup on this particular morning, Brunnhilde is already standing out on the iceflow, out there in minus five degrees centigrade with added wind-chill. She stares south across the pearly white that, a mile or so from here, will eventually give way to bleached green scrub. She is barefoot, bare-legged, bare-shouldered, clad only in a scant wrap of gauzy blue cloth that trails down to her knees like a shawl. Sometimes she comes out here naked, but that just confuses the polar bears, so this morning she has attempted to maintain her modesty, even if the notion is ridiculous. Bears aside, she's the only resident here, in the shadow of this particular corner of glacier; the Russians and the Norwegians with their mines and outposts, they all congregate further east. And they wouldn't dare trespass upon her territory. Not after last time.
She is beautiful, and she is sad, and for her the two entwine like the fingers of lovers who are destined to part, never to see one another again. Her hair is long and carelessly unbraided, and is so blonde it's almost as white as the ice; her skin is porcelain and shines in the cold sun, despite the litany of scars she wears like badges of pride. She doesn't feel the prickle of frost on her exposed flesh, or the sting in her pale blue eyes. A human would die, out here like this, their earthly tissues as perishable as wheat - even a human born of Svalbard blood, the coldest blood of all. Brunnhilde is made of far sterner stuff, hewn of rock and starfall, immersed at birth in the black and frigid pools of the Asgardian wastes.
She is the Valkyrie. She is the Norse Angel of Death. And, thanks to four bottles of forty per cent proof Lysholm Linje Akvavit, she is currently drunk out of her Scandinavian gourd.
Brunnhilde shields her eyes against the sun and continues to stare southwards, out into the nothingness, her vision swimming and her head awhirl. Her mouth is parched, her tongue swollen. This place is a desert of sorts, after all. It isn't the most pleasant sensation, this crude Earthly inebriation - much like stuffing one's mouth with leaves and feathers until one's head rots softly and sweetly from the inside out - but it does its job. It stretches and rubs away at the dreams until there's very little left; it helps her forget. But it usually doesn't take four bottles, and even now the pictures she seeks to expel are already beginning to crawl back out of the darkened corners of her brain where she's banished them, singing her name and licking slimy trails along the corridors of her cerebellum even as she shrieks silently for them to keep their distance.
She scowls, her eyes narrowing. Fie upon it.
The dreams - the memories - are growing stronger. In recent days they've become unbearable. Her head is pounding. The ice is cracking beneath her feet and rising up between her toes, as if a physical weight is bearing down upon her. Her skin is burning, even in the cold. She feels sick, and lost.
"He's coming back," she tells herself, her voice little more than a whisper. The sound of it surprises her, being that it's the first time she's spoken aloud in months. Out here, the isolation is delicate and beautiful. She's been afraid to shatter the illusion and so has clung to silence, holding her breath just as she once hefted her sword, a solid weight of protection in her heart and lungs rather than her fist. But it's no use.
He's coming back.
Or, to be more precise: he is already here. That's what the dreams are trying tell her, of course, and no matter how much delicious, caraway-flavoured alcohol she consumes, she can't ignore it any longer.
She sets her jaw and sighs. Then she unwraps her robe, allowing it to flutter and dance in her outstretched hand like a silken blue will o' the wisp, a flash of colour upon the icy landscape. She raises her arms aloft, her scarred, naked flesh like ivory, decorated with the affectionate memories of battle. Her hair is as fine and pale as gaslight. She closes her eyes, and breathes, tasting one last kiss of caraway upon her tongue even as her killjoy of a healing system kicks in and every Asgardian cell she has attempted to drown in befuddlement rouses itself in groaning regeneration. In olden days - another life entirely - the warriors of the Valkyrior would commonly squander away night upon night in the golden halls of Asgard, seeking enlightenment in bottomless flagons of mead and carousing by flickering torchlight, only to reluctantly sober whenever called upon to fulfil their sacred duties, muttering and chuckling among themselves like errant children. Brunnhilde remembers the sisterhood fondly.
But she also remembers other comrades, other friends. Stephen. Patsy.
She has ignored them for too long. The dreams told her that as well. And they told her where she would find them.
"To me, then," she intones, wearily. "To me, cloak and glaive and leather and spur. To me, Dragonfang. To me, Pegasus. And then on, to face our foe..."
She stands there, arms raised, and suddenly there is a glow and then a flash, and the winds howls where there was only stillness before. There is a shriek and tang of metal, a rustle of cloth, a stitch of fur and goat-hide, a clash of buckle and belt. There is the subtle song of the sword, sheathed in scabbard. There is a whisper of a smile.
The scant blue fabric is gone from her hand, twisted and torn by some ancient magic. It whirls and spools, a dance of threads... and when it is done, Brunnhilde is revealed in true form, booted and armoured, a cloak of dark blue velvet about her shoulders and clasped with a golden pearl at the delicate curve of her throat, and her sword - beloved Dragonfang - is at hand. Her hair is braided. Her eyes shine.
Beyond her, an elegant white horse with angel's wings struts arrogantly, flicking its head with disdain for its surroundings. He was never one for colder climes.
"Well met, Pegasus," Valkyrie breathes. "On now, at the speed of heartbeats, to the battlefield revealed to me in dream. Onward... to Paris!"
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A storm of unnatural power continues to rage above the turreted rooftop of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, and endless rain runs in dark, twisting rivers along stone gullies and between precarious, narrow walkways. Stephen Strange and Patsy Walker - otherwise known as Doctor Strange and Hellcat - emerge from an arched wooden doorway and are immediately buffeted by the squall. It forces them to stagger and cower as if assaulted by black, leathery wings, and Hellcat squeals as her yellow umbrella is torn from her grasp before she can even take a breath. She watches it spiral away into a maelstrom of filthy rainclouds before being shredded to worthless scraps of fabric and wire, her expression mournful beneath the flapping hood of her cagoule.
"That was my favourite!" she sighs. "Still, it could be worse. I could be cartwheeling out there like the world's most stylish, red-headed Mary Poppins..."
Strange pays his whimsical companion no heed, his eyes narrowing as he instead concentrates on the storm. Struggling to remain upright, he thrusts out a hand, palm splayed and fingers crooked into a practised gesture that allows raw magic to spark in his heart and soul and then flow freely along the length of his arm like an electrical charge.
"By the Sacred Shield of the Seraphim!" he cries, his words resonant despite the wind - and, instantly, there is a crackle and a rush and a splitting in the air. In the moments that follow, Hellcat finds herself lurching briefly back and forth before stabilising her balance with feline instinct. Her ears pop and she winces... but that's the worst of it done. No longer assailed by wind and rain, she pulls back her hood and allows her ruby red hair to fall damply about her rosy cheeks.
"Forcefield?" she asks, sweetly. Strange nods, in rather distracted fashion.
"It'll protect us from the ferocity of the tempest, at least," he murmurs. "But it isn't the weather that's concerning me..."
The pair of them are cocooned in an invisible dome of magical energy, and the heavy rain now peppers its surface like a hail of bullets against a reinforced car windshield, rendering it difficult to see more than a few steps in any direction. Hellcat spies dark, jagged shapes looming on all sides, too irregular to be walls and walkways. She approaches one tentatively, and the mystic shield that's surrounding her flows like liquid with the barest of shimmers, always protecting her. It's like walking inside a soap bubble.
"Gargoyles," she says, softly, as she draws close enough to one of the misshapen forms to recognise it. There are dozens of these weathered stone beasts ringing the periphery of the rooftop; she knows that they're part of a wonderfully crafted system of gutter flows, designed to channel heavy rainfall away from the cathedral's ancient masonry and down, harmlessly, to the streets below. The architecture should be beautiful, but in the malevolent darkness of the storm they're rendered far more sinister, more threatening. Also, she feels a jarring sense of familiarity.
In her heart, she already suspects what's coming next.
She turns quickly to where she last saw Strange, a warning on her lips, but her cloaked companion is gone. In his place, some twenty feet away, a pair of barely discernible shapes are looming... and are approaching. Hellcat tenses, her green eyes narrowing to slits and her enhanced senses sharpening.
The first figure is diminutive, and familiar: it's the girl in the dark green raincoat who Hellcat encountered in the cathedral foyer down below, the one who flourished what looked like a black, smouldering tarot card in her direction with painful consequences. The other figure is larger, much larger, but no less familiar. Hellcat's heart seizes in her chest. Yes. Yes, this is just what she was expecting, from the moment she saw the other gargoyles; life is simply full of tantalizing little synchronicities, after all.
"Ah, damn it," she breathes. "Isaac...?"
The creature beyond the girl in green bows its massive head in Hellcat's direction, and rain cascades about its shoulders in twin waterfalls. It is eight feet tall and broad across the shoulders with little neck to speak of. It is chiselled from living stone, tinctured with a deep, burnt orange hue rather than traditional grey, and its face is hideous, dominated by a savage beak of a mouth and rippled with scars and horns. A pair of stone wings extend from its powerful back, each perfectly carved feather rendered in orange flint. It is both living statue and demon. It is The Gargoyle. Once a team-mate, and a friend; but once, also, an enemy. Hellcat remembers him very well indeed. And yet... something is different.
"Not... Isaac..." the creature snarls, in an unholy voice that rumbles like rocks tossed in an empty barrel.
Hellcat gasps. She sees something now, now that the Gargoyle has drawn closer. It's his eyes. His eyes are blue, royal blue, as blue as the lady's dress in Renoir's La Parisienne...
"Goodness, you're him!" Hellcat cries. "The boy from the foyer. I know it's you. Those beautiful, innocent eyes. What happened...?"
"My name... is Adlene," the Gargoyle growls. "Chuh-chuh. Chuh. Changed now. Trapped now. Huh-huh. Huh. Hurting now..."
Hellcat's heart contracts with pity, hearing the poor boy's stutter uttered by another mouth entirely, and also understanding his words. Isaac Christians - once a friend, once an enemy - had been an old man whose mortal soul was imprisoned in the stone body of the Gargoyle; now that granite carcass is home to a new, younger spirit, and that spirit is in pain.
"I can help you, Adlene," Hellcat says, gently. She extends her hand, palm outwards in a show of friendship, even though every instinct is screaming at her to turn her little red cat tail and run. "Just trust me. Whatever's happened to you, I–"
"Don't listen to her, my love," the girl in green whispers, in French. She steps forward and leans close to the Gargoyle, her small hand coming to rest upon the beast's gigantic stone forearm. Her touch sparks with a curl of acrid black smoke, and it causes Gargoyle to flinch. Hellcat scowls.
"I think you have done quite enough, Missy," she snaps. The girl smirks.
"Au contraire. My plan's not quite finished yet."
"Adlene..." Hellcat warns, but it's too late. The creature is already becoming agitated, roused by both the witch's words and her malicious dark magic, and now those beautiful blue eyes swivel in Hellcat's direction once more, their murderous intent quite obvious.
"Do as the Cards have bidden, my pet," the girl in green hisses. "End this. End her!"
And, with a roar, the Gargoyle charges forwards, splintering the magical shield that has been protecting Hellcat from the storm and thus allowing the squall to recommence with a shrieking rush of wind and rain...
Marie-Ange Colbert, the girl in the green raincoat, allows herself a smile of triumph as she watches her new stone minion gather the helpless Hellcat in its arms and drag her off into the dark swirl of the rain. Her contentment doesn't last long, however; when she hears movement behind her, the barest hint of footsteps above the howl of the wind, she turns quickly, her eyes already blackening with malice. She delves into the satchel slung about her shoulder and retrieves another one of her magical cards. Smoke curls about her fingers. She feels the power surge, and her flickering smile threatens to return.
But there is no one standing before her, only the shapes of architectural motifs looming vaguely beyond the rain.
"You're meddling with ancient energies you couldn't possibly understand," a man's voice breathes in her hair. "And, worse still, you've brought those energies to bear against a friend of mine. That's not going to go well for you."
Marie-Ange whirls again, flourishing her black card between her fingers. Again, there is nothing there.
Then, suddenly, a man rises to her right. She baulks left, skidding in the puddles at her feet, a gasp in her throat. She sees Doctor Strange, a gaunt but nonetheless imposing figure in a flowing, regal cloak of midnight blue stitched with crimson and gold; she sees deep-set eyes beneath black, beetled eyebrows, and an angry, down-turned mouth. His hands are sheathed in golden gloves, now outstretched towards her. Marie-Ange hisses and ducks, evading him like an emerald-hued sewer rat, wheeling away...
...only to find the same figure, Strange again, rearing before her on her opposite flank. She stumbles and ducks a second time, barely retaining her balance in the relentless downpour. She slithers along a narrow walkway, perilously close to the ornate guttering at the edge of the rooftop and the surely lethal drop beyond.
"Enough!" the voice at her ear thunders. She feels a firm grip upon her shoulder, pulling her away from the precipice. She whirls again, one final time, her card raised.
Before her, there is nothing. More rain. Always rain.
And then he looms behind her, his gloved fingers already weaving their magic, this brief dance of feint and charade finally played out. "Ruby Rings of Cyttorak, I summon thee," Strange murmurs... and in the next instant, shimmering rings of fiery red sorcery ripple into existence, curling about Marie-Ange's small, struggling form like the constrictive shiver of claret-hued pythons. She cries out, hands flailing, but to no avail. The ruby rings quiver only final time, knot, and then are still.
Doctor Strange steps forward, his expression furious. He eyes the black, smoking card in his enemy's hand. Marie-Ange glances up, her eyes wide and bright in the shadow of her hood... and then, unexpectedly, her mouth curls into a wicked smile.
"The Moon," she says in her lilting French accent, flourishing her card. "The false light in the darkness. A moth to the flame. Deception."
And then she wriggles her shoulders, and shimmers, and she is gone, fading away to mist in the rain, right before Strange's eyes. He is momentarily aghast, witnessing the ruby rings wither and fall and realising that he's been tricked, but there's no time to counter.
"You think you're the only one who can conjure illusions, Doctor?" an accented voice whispers in his ear. "So egotistical, so proud. You look at me and see a girl, a slip of a thing, playing with fire like a curious child with no true idea of how things might burn. But you're wrong. I am the Tarot; the cards and I are one. And it is you, arrogant fool, who doesn't understand..."
Strange attempts to slip free, frantically worming this way and that with every word that the girl, Tarot, delivers so triumphantly, but he is already snared in the illusory trap that she's so carefully laid. He finds himself shrouded in a darkness more unnatural than even the storm raging above, and when he looks left or right, or straight ahead, or behind, he sees only the same thing: the approach of mysterious, androgynous figures clad in night-blue hoods and robes, their skin - where exposed - shining with an indigo sheen and adorned with spiralling tattoos so intricate that no human mind can study them without being driven irreparably insane.
He knows these creatures; he thoughtlessly called upon them mere minutes ago, through mystic incantation, never suspecting that there would be a price to pay. There's nowhere to run, in this plane of existence or any other. Not now.
They are the Seraphim, the Angels of True Night. The walk the pathways between worlds where no light shines.
"And they're coming for you, mon ami," Tarot breathes. "Farewell, Doctor Strange..."
Across the cathedral rooftop, Hellcat is screaming as enormous stone arms crush her in a terrible bear-hug. She writhes and spits, scratching uselessly with bare fingers that could be claws if only she was in costume, and she kicks backwards with bruised, stockinged feet, having lost her high heeled shoes. She fights. She was made a fighter, by all that she's been through in her tumultuous life. But it's in vain. The Gargoyle is born of living hellstone, all but invulnerable; it cannot be harmed, and it will not be denied.
Tarot, the girl in green, has demanded this red-haired woman's death. Gargoyle must deliver.
But, deep inside, the young man named Adlene Sahnoun feels such terrible shame, such remorse. He is shy, and kind. He is good. He is innocent, the very quality Hellcat was drawn to, which she finds so beautiful. Innocence isn't that common in the modern world. It's exactly what the Gargoyle - the demonic side of the equation - hungered for so ravenously after his escape from Hell.
"Please," Hellcat croaks, through splintered breath and blood-speckled lips. "Please, Adlene. Don't do this. Please don't kill me..."
She knows what it's like to be cast from this mortal coil; she knows what comes afterwards. She can't bear to go through that again. But she simply can't get free.
The Gargoyle tightens its grip one terrible notch further, with a creak of knotting stone. Hellcat's scream rises to a final, awful pitch, accompanied by the stark and unmistakable splintering of bones...
...and that's when Brunnhilde the Valkyrie arrives, sweeping down from the clouds and the thunder and the rain like some avenging angel astride the back of her white winged horse, her magical sword Dragonfang held aloft in readiness of the fray. The Pegasus is magnificent, and his rider more glorious still. But there's no telling if they've arrived in time.
Valkyrie swings her weapon with all her might, his mouth wrenched wide in curdling battle cry, and as she flies low so her blade cleaves through the Gargoyle's shoulders and wings, littering the rain-washed air with a sudden avalanche of scorched orange shrapnel. Gargoyle roars and spins, one wing outstretched but the other hanging broken and useless; and, as he turns, he releases Hellcat from his grip. Her body falls heavily to the floor, in torturous slow motion, her head lolling on her unnatural twisted neck and her eyes wide behind a curtain of red hair. A puppet with cut strings, limbs splayed.
Valkyrie sees her friend tumble, and lay unmoving. She shrieks, her heart lodged in her throat. Too late, too late, too late...
She hauls herself from Pegasus' back in mid-air and leaps, her eyes wild and her sword raised once more. Before her, injured but undefeated, the Gargoyle rises to face her, the lifeless body of Hellcat at his feet. Valkyrie lands, her blue velvet cloak flapping in the squall. There is murder in her heart.
"Beast!" she cries. "Foulness of Hell! I have killed you once, and I shall kill you again. I shall kill you a thousand, thousand times! For where I was once charged with escorting the souls of the noble fallen to Valhalla, this is now my one true calling in life, forever and anon...
"So swears the Valkyrie!"
To Be Continued...
Brunnhilde the Valkyrie has always known Svalbard by another name entirely. To her, it is simply heim. Home.
It's April, so it's cold and still at this remote Arctic latitude, all hard, frozen tundra slowly emerging from the true bitterness of deep winter. The lowland glacial ice lingers on in thick, glassy drifts - and it's always ice, not snow, nothing ever really like snow as most people understand it. We think of snow as soft and gentle, the delighted, snuffling excitement of young children at Christmas. Svalbard is not soft. It is rock and skull and salt, and all children are old, from the moment they're born.
The air here is thin and sharp enough to cut away at the back of your exposed, open throat like an escaped lunatic's knife, especially up on the whalebone hips of the Kongsfjorden glacier that dominates the bleak skyline. When the sun sets on the mountains it colours them purple and fuchsia and blue, and it is beautiful, but only when the clouds haven't already stolen in to suffocate the light with dirty pillows filled with stones. In the mornings, when dawn breaks, the rugged horizon is burnished gold, sometimes tinctured with the barest emerald remains of the previous night's aurora borealis. Unless, again, the mist is heavy, and all that loiters is the damp echo of dreams.
It's the dreams that Brunnhilde hates most of all. Dreams are memories you can't pretend never happened, or maybe happened to someone else. Not you, never you. And memories are everything.
As dawn spills up and splits like peach syrup on this particular morning, Brunnhilde is already standing out on the iceflow, out there in minus five degrees centigrade with added wind-chill. She stares south across the pearly white that, a mile or so from here, will eventually give way to bleached green scrub. She is barefoot, bare-legged, bare-shouldered, clad only in a scant wrap of gauzy blue cloth that trails down to her knees like a shawl. Sometimes she comes out here naked, but that just confuses the polar bears, so this morning she has attempted to maintain her modesty, even if the notion is ridiculous. Bears aside, she's the only resident here, in the shadow of this particular corner of glacier; the Russians and the Norwegians with their mines and outposts, they all congregate further east. And they wouldn't dare trespass upon her territory. Not after last time.
She is beautiful, and she is sad, and for her the two entwine like the fingers of lovers who are destined to part, never to see one another again. Her hair is long and carelessly unbraided, and is so blonde it's almost as white as the ice; her skin is porcelain and shines in the cold sun, despite the litany of scars she wears like badges of pride. She doesn't feel the prickle of frost on her exposed flesh, or the sting in her pale blue eyes. A human would die, out here like this, their earthly tissues as perishable as wheat - even a human born of Svalbard blood, the coldest blood of all. Brunnhilde is made of far sterner stuff, hewn of rock and starfall, immersed at birth in the black and frigid pools of the Asgardian wastes.
She is the Valkyrie. She is the Norse Angel of Death. And, thanks to four bottles of forty per cent proof Lysholm Linje Akvavit, she is currently drunk out of her Scandinavian gourd.
Brunnhilde shields her eyes against the sun and continues to stare southwards, out into the nothingness, her vision swimming and her head awhirl. Her mouth is parched, her tongue swollen. This place is a desert of sorts, after all. It isn't the most pleasant sensation, this crude Earthly inebriation - much like stuffing one's mouth with leaves and feathers until one's head rots softly and sweetly from the inside out - but it does its job. It stretches and rubs away at the dreams until there's very little left; it helps her forget. But it usually doesn't take four bottles, and even now the pictures she seeks to expel are already beginning to crawl back out of the darkened corners of her brain where she's banished them, singing her name and licking slimy trails along the corridors of her cerebellum even as she shrieks silently for them to keep their distance.
She scowls, her eyes narrowing. Fie upon it.
The dreams - the memories - are growing stronger. In recent days they've become unbearable. Her head is pounding. The ice is cracking beneath her feet and rising up between her toes, as if a physical weight is bearing down upon her. Her skin is burning, even in the cold. She feels sick, and lost.
"He's coming back," she tells herself, her voice little more than a whisper. The sound of it surprises her, being that it's the first time she's spoken aloud in months. Out here, the isolation is delicate and beautiful. She's been afraid to shatter the illusion and so has clung to silence, holding her breath just as she once hefted her sword, a solid weight of protection in her heart and lungs rather than her fist. But it's no use.
He's coming back.
Or, to be more precise: he is already here. That's what the dreams are trying tell her, of course, and no matter how much delicious, caraway-flavoured alcohol she consumes, she can't ignore it any longer.
She sets her jaw and sighs. Then she unwraps her robe, allowing it to flutter and dance in her outstretched hand like a silken blue will o' the wisp, a flash of colour upon the icy landscape. She raises her arms aloft, her scarred, naked flesh like ivory, decorated with the affectionate memories of battle. Her hair is as fine and pale as gaslight. She closes her eyes, and breathes, tasting one last kiss of caraway upon her tongue even as her killjoy of a healing system kicks in and every Asgardian cell she has attempted to drown in befuddlement rouses itself in groaning regeneration. In olden days - another life entirely - the warriors of the Valkyrior would commonly squander away night upon night in the golden halls of Asgard, seeking enlightenment in bottomless flagons of mead and carousing by flickering torchlight, only to reluctantly sober whenever called upon to fulfil their sacred duties, muttering and chuckling among themselves like errant children. Brunnhilde remembers the sisterhood fondly.
But she also remembers other comrades, other friends. Stephen. Patsy.
She has ignored them for too long. The dreams told her that as well. And they told her where she would find them.
"To me, then," she intones, wearily. "To me, cloak and glaive and leather and spur. To me, Dragonfang. To me, Pegasus. And then on, to face our foe..."
She stands there, arms raised, and suddenly there is a glow and then a flash, and the winds howls where there was only stillness before. There is a shriek and tang of metal, a rustle of cloth, a stitch of fur and goat-hide, a clash of buckle and belt. There is the subtle song of the sword, sheathed in scabbard. There is a whisper of a smile.
The scant blue fabric is gone from her hand, twisted and torn by some ancient magic. It whirls and spools, a dance of threads... and when it is done, Brunnhilde is revealed in true form, booted and armoured, a cloak of dark blue velvet about her shoulders and clasped with a golden pearl at the delicate curve of her throat, and her sword - beloved Dragonfang - is at hand. Her hair is braided. Her eyes shine.
Beyond her, an elegant white horse with angel's wings struts arrogantly, flicking its head with disdain for its surroundings. He was never one for colder climes.
"Well met, Pegasus," Valkyrie breathes. "On now, at the speed of heartbeats, to the battlefield revealed to me in dream. Onward... to Paris!"
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A storm of unnatural power continues to rage above the turreted rooftop of the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, and endless rain runs in dark, twisting rivers along stone gullies and between precarious, narrow walkways. Stephen Strange and Patsy Walker - otherwise known as Doctor Strange and Hellcat - emerge from an arched wooden doorway and are immediately buffeted by the squall. It forces them to stagger and cower as if assaulted by black, leathery wings, and Hellcat squeals as her yellow umbrella is torn from her grasp before she can even take a breath. She watches it spiral away into a maelstrom of filthy rainclouds before being shredded to worthless scraps of fabric and wire, her expression mournful beneath the flapping hood of her cagoule.
"That was my favourite!" she sighs. "Still, it could be worse. I could be cartwheeling out there like the world's most stylish, red-headed Mary Poppins..."
Strange pays his whimsical companion no heed, his eyes narrowing as he instead concentrates on the storm. Struggling to remain upright, he thrusts out a hand, palm splayed and fingers crooked into a practised gesture that allows raw magic to spark in his heart and soul and then flow freely along the length of his arm like an electrical charge.
"By the Sacred Shield of the Seraphim!" he cries, his words resonant despite the wind - and, instantly, there is a crackle and a rush and a splitting in the air. In the moments that follow, Hellcat finds herself lurching briefly back and forth before stabilising her balance with feline instinct. Her ears pop and she winces... but that's the worst of it done. No longer assailed by wind and rain, she pulls back her hood and allows her ruby red hair to fall damply about her rosy cheeks.
"Forcefield?" she asks, sweetly. Strange nods, in rather distracted fashion.
"It'll protect us from the ferocity of the tempest, at least," he murmurs. "But it isn't the weather that's concerning me..."
The pair of them are cocooned in an invisible dome of magical energy, and the heavy rain now peppers its surface like a hail of bullets against a reinforced car windshield, rendering it difficult to see more than a few steps in any direction. Hellcat spies dark, jagged shapes looming on all sides, too irregular to be walls and walkways. She approaches one tentatively, and the mystic shield that's surrounding her flows like liquid with the barest of shimmers, always protecting her. It's like walking inside a soap bubble.
"Gargoyles," she says, softly, as she draws close enough to one of the misshapen forms to recognise it. There are dozens of these weathered stone beasts ringing the periphery of the rooftop; she knows that they're part of a wonderfully crafted system of gutter flows, designed to channel heavy rainfall away from the cathedral's ancient masonry and down, harmlessly, to the streets below. The architecture should be beautiful, but in the malevolent darkness of the storm they're rendered far more sinister, more threatening. Also, she feels a jarring sense of familiarity.
In her heart, she already suspects what's coming next.
She turns quickly to where she last saw Strange, a warning on her lips, but her cloaked companion is gone. In his place, some twenty feet away, a pair of barely discernible shapes are looming... and are approaching. Hellcat tenses, her green eyes narrowing to slits and her enhanced senses sharpening.
The first figure is diminutive, and familiar: it's the girl in the dark green raincoat who Hellcat encountered in the cathedral foyer down below, the one who flourished what looked like a black, smouldering tarot card in her direction with painful consequences. The other figure is larger, much larger, but no less familiar. Hellcat's heart seizes in her chest. Yes. Yes, this is just what she was expecting, from the moment she saw the other gargoyles; life is simply full of tantalizing little synchronicities, after all.
"Ah, damn it," she breathes. "Isaac...?"
The creature beyond the girl in green bows its massive head in Hellcat's direction, and rain cascades about its shoulders in twin waterfalls. It is eight feet tall and broad across the shoulders with little neck to speak of. It is chiselled from living stone, tinctured with a deep, burnt orange hue rather than traditional grey, and its face is hideous, dominated by a savage beak of a mouth and rippled with scars and horns. A pair of stone wings extend from its powerful back, each perfectly carved feather rendered in orange flint. It is both living statue and demon. It is The Gargoyle. Once a team-mate, and a friend; but once, also, an enemy. Hellcat remembers him very well indeed. And yet... something is different.
"Not... Isaac..." the creature snarls, in an unholy voice that rumbles like rocks tossed in an empty barrel.
Hellcat gasps. She sees something now, now that the Gargoyle has drawn closer. It's his eyes. His eyes are blue, royal blue, as blue as the lady's dress in Renoir's La Parisienne...
"Goodness, you're him!" Hellcat cries. "The boy from the foyer. I know it's you. Those beautiful, innocent eyes. What happened...?"
"My name... is Adlene," the Gargoyle growls. "Chuh-chuh. Chuh. Changed now. Trapped now. Huh-huh. Huh. Hurting now..."
Hellcat's heart contracts with pity, hearing the poor boy's stutter uttered by another mouth entirely, and also understanding his words. Isaac Christians - once a friend, once an enemy - had been an old man whose mortal soul was imprisoned in the stone body of the Gargoyle; now that granite carcass is home to a new, younger spirit, and that spirit is in pain.
"I can help you, Adlene," Hellcat says, gently. She extends her hand, palm outwards in a show of friendship, even though every instinct is screaming at her to turn her little red cat tail and run. "Just trust me. Whatever's happened to you, I–"
"Don't listen to her, my love," the girl in green whispers, in French. She steps forward and leans close to the Gargoyle, her small hand coming to rest upon the beast's gigantic stone forearm. Her touch sparks with a curl of acrid black smoke, and it causes Gargoyle to flinch. Hellcat scowls.
"I think you have done quite enough, Missy," she snaps. The girl smirks.
"Au contraire. My plan's not quite finished yet."
"Adlene..." Hellcat warns, but it's too late. The creature is already becoming agitated, roused by both the witch's words and her malicious dark magic, and now those beautiful blue eyes swivel in Hellcat's direction once more, their murderous intent quite obvious.
"Do as the Cards have bidden, my pet," the girl in green hisses. "End this. End her!"
And, with a roar, the Gargoyle charges forwards, splintering the magical shield that has been protecting Hellcat from the storm and thus allowing the squall to recommence with a shrieking rush of wind and rain...
Marie-Ange Colbert, the girl in the green raincoat, allows herself a smile of triumph as she watches her new stone minion gather the helpless Hellcat in its arms and drag her off into the dark swirl of the rain. Her contentment doesn't last long, however; when she hears movement behind her, the barest hint of footsteps above the howl of the wind, she turns quickly, her eyes already blackening with malice. She delves into the satchel slung about her shoulder and retrieves another one of her magical cards. Smoke curls about her fingers. She feels the power surge, and her flickering smile threatens to return.
But there is no one standing before her, only the shapes of architectural motifs looming vaguely beyond the rain.
"You're meddling with ancient energies you couldn't possibly understand," a man's voice breathes in her hair. "And, worse still, you've brought those energies to bear against a friend of mine. That's not going to go well for you."
Marie-Ange whirls again, flourishing her black card between her fingers. Again, there is nothing there.
Then, suddenly, a man rises to her right. She baulks left, skidding in the puddles at her feet, a gasp in her throat. She sees Doctor Strange, a gaunt but nonetheless imposing figure in a flowing, regal cloak of midnight blue stitched with crimson and gold; she sees deep-set eyes beneath black, beetled eyebrows, and an angry, down-turned mouth. His hands are sheathed in golden gloves, now outstretched towards her. Marie-Ange hisses and ducks, evading him like an emerald-hued sewer rat, wheeling away...
...only to find the same figure, Strange again, rearing before her on her opposite flank. She stumbles and ducks a second time, barely retaining her balance in the relentless downpour. She slithers along a narrow walkway, perilously close to the ornate guttering at the edge of the rooftop and the surely lethal drop beyond.
"Enough!" the voice at her ear thunders. She feels a firm grip upon her shoulder, pulling her away from the precipice. She whirls again, one final time, her card raised.
Before her, there is nothing. More rain. Always rain.
And then he looms behind her, his gloved fingers already weaving their magic, this brief dance of feint and charade finally played out. "Ruby Rings of Cyttorak, I summon thee," Strange murmurs... and in the next instant, shimmering rings of fiery red sorcery ripple into existence, curling about Marie-Ange's small, struggling form like the constrictive shiver of claret-hued pythons. She cries out, hands flailing, but to no avail. The ruby rings quiver only final time, knot, and then are still.
Doctor Strange steps forward, his expression furious. He eyes the black, smoking card in his enemy's hand. Marie-Ange glances up, her eyes wide and bright in the shadow of her hood... and then, unexpectedly, her mouth curls into a wicked smile.
"The Moon," she says in her lilting French accent, flourishing her card. "The false light in the darkness. A moth to the flame. Deception."
And then she wriggles her shoulders, and shimmers, and she is gone, fading away to mist in the rain, right before Strange's eyes. He is momentarily aghast, witnessing the ruby rings wither and fall and realising that he's been tricked, but there's no time to counter.
"You think you're the only one who can conjure illusions, Doctor?" an accented voice whispers in his ear. "So egotistical, so proud. You look at me and see a girl, a slip of a thing, playing with fire like a curious child with no true idea of how things might burn. But you're wrong. I am the Tarot; the cards and I are one. And it is you, arrogant fool, who doesn't understand..."
Strange attempts to slip free, frantically worming this way and that with every word that the girl, Tarot, delivers so triumphantly, but he is already snared in the illusory trap that she's so carefully laid. He finds himself shrouded in a darkness more unnatural than even the storm raging above, and when he looks left or right, or straight ahead, or behind, he sees only the same thing: the approach of mysterious, androgynous figures clad in night-blue hoods and robes, their skin - where exposed - shining with an indigo sheen and adorned with spiralling tattoos so intricate that no human mind can study them without being driven irreparably insane.
He knows these creatures; he thoughtlessly called upon them mere minutes ago, through mystic incantation, never suspecting that there would be a price to pay. There's nowhere to run, in this plane of existence or any other. Not now.
They are the Seraphim, the Angels of True Night. The walk the pathways between worlds where no light shines.
"And they're coming for you, mon ami," Tarot breathes. "Farewell, Doctor Strange..."
Across the cathedral rooftop, Hellcat is screaming as enormous stone arms crush her in a terrible bear-hug. She writhes and spits, scratching uselessly with bare fingers that could be claws if only she was in costume, and she kicks backwards with bruised, stockinged feet, having lost her high heeled shoes. She fights. She was made a fighter, by all that she's been through in her tumultuous life. But it's in vain. The Gargoyle is born of living hellstone, all but invulnerable; it cannot be harmed, and it will not be denied.
Tarot, the girl in green, has demanded this red-haired woman's death. Gargoyle must deliver.
But, deep inside, the young man named Adlene Sahnoun feels such terrible shame, such remorse. He is shy, and kind. He is good. He is innocent, the very quality Hellcat was drawn to, which she finds so beautiful. Innocence isn't that common in the modern world. It's exactly what the Gargoyle - the demonic side of the equation - hungered for so ravenously after his escape from Hell.
"Please," Hellcat croaks, through splintered breath and blood-speckled lips. "Please, Adlene. Don't do this. Please don't kill me..."
She knows what it's like to be cast from this mortal coil; she knows what comes afterwards. She can't bear to go through that again. But she simply can't get free.
The Gargoyle tightens its grip one terrible notch further, with a creak of knotting stone. Hellcat's scream rises to a final, awful pitch, accompanied by the stark and unmistakable splintering of bones...
...and that's when Brunnhilde the Valkyrie arrives, sweeping down from the clouds and the thunder and the rain like some avenging angel astride the back of her white winged horse, her magical sword Dragonfang held aloft in readiness of the fray. The Pegasus is magnificent, and his rider more glorious still. But there's no telling if they've arrived in time.
Valkyrie swings her weapon with all her might, his mouth wrenched wide in curdling battle cry, and as she flies low so her blade cleaves through the Gargoyle's shoulders and wings, littering the rain-washed air with a sudden avalanche of scorched orange shrapnel. Gargoyle roars and spins, one wing outstretched but the other hanging broken and useless; and, as he turns, he releases Hellcat from his grip. Her body falls heavily to the floor, in torturous slow motion, her head lolling on her unnatural twisted neck and her eyes wide behind a curtain of red hair. A puppet with cut strings, limbs splayed.
Valkyrie sees her friend tumble, and lay unmoving. She shrieks, her heart lodged in her throat. Too late, too late, too late...
She hauls herself from Pegasus' back in mid-air and leaps, her eyes wild and her sword raised once more. Before her, injured but undefeated, the Gargoyle rises to face her, the lifeless body of Hellcat at his feet. Valkyrie lands, her blue velvet cloak flapping in the squall. There is murder in her heart.
"Beast!" she cries. "Foulness of Hell! I have killed you once, and I shall kill you again. I shall kill you a thousand, thousand times! For where I was once charged with escorting the souls of the noble fallen to Valhalla, this is now my one true calling in life, forever and anon...
"So swears the Valkyrie!"
To Be Continued...