Editing Eternity (Warhammer High) (section)

=== Olev's Training ===


Thangir lay back in his bed in the home they had built on Terra, musing over a slate.  Freya was changing in the bathroom for sleep.  The young Prince read over his slate for the fourth time.  He couldn’t focus; his mind was elsewhere.  The family was returning to Fenris in mere hours.  Olev was starting his training in the camps at Kerrvik.

His wife emerged from the bathroom, freshened.  She slid out of her robe and lay down beside him on the bed as Thangir forced himself to read the document on the slate.

“How was your day?” Freya asked him.

“Distracting,” Thangir replied.  “The cleanup after Olev’s party was…significant.  I didn’t know he even knew that many locals his age.”

“He’s his father’s son,” Freya observed.  “You knew that many locals your age back when you were as he is now.  He’s good at making friends.”

“He has good instincts,” Thangir came back.  “Strong ones.  And he has a better grasp of his abilities than I ever did.”

He glanced over the top of the slate to where he had stacked the birthday cards Olev had received for his fifteenth birthday.  His son was old enough.  It was time for the trials.  And yet…

Freya looked over at him.  “What are you reading?”

Thangir set down the slate with a grunt of annoyance.  “Some tripe about how the casualty rate in the camps isn’t decreasing even though they’ve got some new policies.  Pisses me off.”

“Oh?”

He glanced down at where she was snuggled against his side.  “Either he’s facing the true test of the Vlka, or he isn’t.  Either he’s going to make it through on his own merits, or he isn’t.  Do we want administrative nonsense disrupting his training, or not?”

“I don’t want him to go through the camps at all,” Freya reminded him.  “He’ll never receive gene-seed, so why bother?  We can train him ourselves.”

“But if he doesn’t at least attempt it, what sense of belonging will he have to the pack?” Thangir asked testily.

Freya’s eyes narrowed.  “I never went through it, Thangir.  Do I not belong to the pack?”

He scoffed.  “It was never for women anyway.”

Freya slowly uncurled from his side and sat up.  Thangir hastily corrected himself.  “I mean women can’t be gene-seeded, not that you lack the strength,” he said, starting to sit up too.

She placed a hand on his chest and pushed him back down with a pressure he couldn’t have resisted if he’d been in Power Armor.  His pulse picked up by about half at her utterly dismissive use of strength.  “Thangir,” she said softly.  His eyes darted up her arm to her face.  She was smiling tightly, her teeth were pressing against her lips.  “I knew what you meant.  Both your words, and your thought.”

“Freya, trust me,” Thangir said, gripping her wrist where she had him pinned.  “I don’t think you lack strength.  Physical or mental.”  He tensed up again as she shifted her legs to straddle him.  Her warm skin pressed against the thick fabric of his sleeping shorts.

She raised her free hand to switch the lights off.  Freya held the pose an instant longer before releasing the pressure on his chest.  Immediately, Thangir’s hands whipped up to her elbow and knocked her hands aside.  The pressure on his waist vanished as she rolled aside.  Thangir swiped a hand where she had been, but she was gone.

His lips pulled back in an anticipatory snarl.  Somehow, despite the complete reversal of his situation, from annoyance to life-threatening peril, he felt more at ease than he had for days.  He stretched his senses out for his wife, and caught a whisper of air as she disturbed some paper on the desk at the edge of the room.

Had he only received his new senses moments ago, he might have lurched towards them like a blinded dog.  Instead, he listened with all his might for the next sound, and a second later, he heard her move past the chair beside the desk.  He slid off the bed and placed himself between the chair and the way into the main, open space of the room.

The lights flicked on.  Freya was sitting on the edge of the bed behind him, arms crossed over her chest and an insolent smile on her face.  Thangir stared at her, before slowly letting his arms slump to his side.  “How?  Just…how do you do it?” he asked.

Freya smiled mysteriously.  “If I told you, where’s the fun in finding out firsthand?”

He sighed.  “Seems I haven’t quite mastered my instincts,” he noted.

“You’ve mastered them as well as you’ve ever needed to,” Freya encouraged him.  He shrugged uncomfortably and moved back towards her.

As he approached, she scooted backwards up the bed.  “Let me ask you.  Did you feel even the least bit threatened by what just happened?”

He shook his head.  “I suppose not.”

“If you weren’t at home with your abilities,” she asked coyly, “would having been plunged into darkness with an irritated post-human who can see and hear better than you frightened you?”

“It would,” he admitted.

“Then shut up,” she said, catching his hands as he moved to lie beside her.  “Olev will blow the roofs off the place, no matter how many reservations I have, or you have.  Sure, he’s going to be singled out for unfair pressure no matter what I say, and sure, the trials aren’t the same as when you took them.  He’s still our son.  And whatever reservations you have about your abilities,” she said, squeezing his hands, “remember that he was born with them.  They’re as much a part of him as they are a part of me.”

He nodded, accepting her wisdom.  “Yes.”

She smiled up at him.  “Here.  Lie down.” she said, guiding him back to the mattress.  He lay facedown on the sheets and sighed as his wife’s hands worked over his neck.  “You’re worried about him, in more ways than one,” she stated.

He sighed into the pillow.  “Of course I am, Freya.”

“You’re afraid like me, like he’ll break or get hurt because he’ll be held to an unfair standard by the training Sergeant,” she guessed.

Thangir stayed silent for a moment.  “Not…break, but feel less for himself,” he said.

“And you’re afraid that all he’ll be interested in after he gets out is joining the military…when the entire point of spending two years on Terra was to show him he can do whatever he’s smart and ambitious enough to do,” Freya continued.  Her hands slid down to his scarred shoulders, and she gently massaged the bunched muscle there.

He gripped the sheets in one hand.  “…Not as much, but…”

“And more than anything else…you’re afraid of what will happen if what happened to you happens to him, and he mistakes his abilities for invincibility,” Freya concluded.  After Thangir had received his upgrades, his first act after healing had been to challenge one of his most despised rivals in the Huskaerls to a fight.  He had won so easily that he had swept the man’s friends into the battle as well, and had been pummeled so badly he had nearly wound up back in the hospital.

“Naturally,” Thangir sighed.  “I was a bloody idiot, Freya,” he admitted.  “What if…”

“Did we raise an idiot?” Freya asked.

“No.”

“Then he’ll get his ass beat once and never again,” Freya informed him.  “When it comes to life in the Rout, the only way to learn to do something right is to do it wrong once and take it on the chin.  You think I never abused my strength when I was an athlete at Imperator?”  Her hands slid over his shoulders and she lay back down atop him, pressing her lips against the nape of his neck.  “Our son will be fine.  He’s ready.”

Thangir closed his eyes and listened to the steady pace of her breath, felt her even pulse.  She was as confident as she could be.  “…Yes.  He will.”  He reached aside and gripped her hands on either side of him.  “We’re both worried, though, are we not?”

“Naturally, we’re parents.”  Freya kissed the back of his neck again, then scooted back to let him roll over.  As she did, she let one gene-hanced arm drape across his collarbone and keep him still, just long enough for him to feel it.  He accepted her gentle display of dominance with grace, holding one arm out for her lay beside as she moved away.

“Why we you do that?” he asked as she settled down.  “Do you ever ask?”

“Hmm?”

“The…” words escaped him.  He waved his hand at the room.  “I don’t know that I would have felt all that comfortable with you pushing down on me like that before, either.”

“I dunno.”  She shrugged.  “Does it feel bad?”

“No.”

“Then what’s the problem?”

Thangir blinked.  “I…guess there isn’t one.”

“All right then,” Freya giggled.  “Good night.”

On the roof, Olev stood at the very edge of the structure, one foot on the lip of the gutters.  He crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the rows of houses and mansions across the street, eyes narrowed.  His heart was pounding.  He was going home.  Away from this nonsense planet of cities and uncivil warfare, away from the vapid socialite girls and leering, swaggering boys.  He was done with the Arbites and their lack of pride as much as he was done with the nobles and their parasitic lifestyles.

The wind was dank with the smell of burned fuel and cut grass, two things he wouldn’t smell back home much.  It never snowed here, that was going to change too.

He let go the grin he had been hiding for nearly half an hour.  “I’m going home!” he whispered.  His fists clenched in triumph.  “It’s about time!”

Footsteps on the roof turned his head.  One of the neighbor kids, a girl maybe seven years younger than him, was scrambling on the surface.  Olev waved her over.  “Valerie, what are you doing up this late?” he called.

The young girl was huffing from the effort of climbing the ladder from the deck to the roof.  “I saw you up here and I wanted to make sure you were okay,” she said breathlessly.  She and other neighborhood kids would sometimes hang out up there where they imagined parents wouldn’t find them, and Olev had been happy to oblige them.  It was nice to have a private place to go.  “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong!” Olev declared happily.  “I’m going back to Fenris!”

Valerie’s eyes went wide.  “Are you going to be okay?”

Olev flashed his fangs in a confident smile.  “I’ll be fine, trust me.  I’m a native son, and all the time I’ve spent in this gilded cage didn’t soften me any!”

“Wow.”  Valerie looked at his attire.  He had already donned a Fenrisian sailor’s outfit; all leathers and pelts and rough fabric.  “What are you wearing?”

“Just something Mom brought here from our last trip home,” Olev said, admiring his appearance.  He flexed one arm and ran his other hand over the dagger at his belt.  “This does feel good.  No offense, Valerie, but this world’s not for me.”

“I know,” she said.  She sighed unhappily at the prospect of losing a friend.  “Well…you be safe out there, okay?” she asked sadly.

Olev started to toss her comment aside when he smelled her mood turn morose.  He immediately stopped his braggadocio and stepped up beside her to rest a hand on her back.  “I’ll be safe as I can be,” he promised.

She looked up at him.  “When will you be back?”

He hesitated.  “It will be years.”

“Years?  Really?  What are you doing?” she asked.

“Training for my role in life,” he said solemnly.  “Don’t you fear.  I’ll come back eventually.”

“Okay,” she said.  “Can I have your address, so I can send you letters and stuff?”

“Fenris doesn’t exactly have a postal system,” Olev chuckled.  He patted her on the back.  “Just send messages on the ships to Fenris, and I’ll get them.”

She squinted at him in the darkness.  “Promise?”

“I do,” Olev confirmed.

“Okay.”  She wrapped her arms around his waist, and Olev returned the hug.  “’Bye.”

“Farewell,” Olev said.  She turned and climbed down the ladder.  A few seconds later, her frock of blonde hair appeared on the lawn below as she made her way back to her own home.

Olev watched her until she vanished back into her house, then looked up.  The sky was a dead, grey mass here.  In his mind, he could already see the constellations of Fenris.

He smiled wistfully as he thought of the friends he would be leaving behind.  Valerie wasn’t the only Terran he liked.  Now, at least, he’d be among brothers.