Chapter Text
Near Ironside, Yeld
Formerly NW Malheur County, Oregon
July 18, CY 26, 2024 AD
“Don't move, dammit.” Charles' voice had more edge in it than Jake had ever heard. “Not unless you want this to kill you faster.”
“Charles,” said Modest, “shut up and get the morphine. Now,” she continued, “where else does it hurt?”
Where didn't it hurt? It hurt to talk. It hurt to breathe. It hurt to just lay there on the ground motionless. Hell, even the vibrations of Charles' retreating footsteps hurt.
Jake squeezed his eyes shut for as long as he dared, long enough to mentally take the edge off, until streaks of white light shot like falling stars through the backs of his eyelids. He opened them again on the branches of a lone tree hanging above Modest's concerned face, her blue-tinged skin side-lit by a lowering sun, a sun about to set on the carnage he wanted to forget.
Just as much as he wanted to forget that warrior-mage and the way his eyes had expanded into black pools. Not black like a horse's or Modest's. More like how he'd always imagined a pair of black holes, but worse. So much worse.
“Everywhere,” he grunted.
“You said that last time, Dad.”
“Well, now it's truer.” He coughed and instantly regretted it.
“No, no,” said Modest. “Don't do that.”
He began to sit up and quickly regretted that even more. Modest placed a firm hand on his damp chest and pushed him back amid a wave of nausea.
“Don't do that either,” she said.
She'd removed her helm and her arming coif, leaving her hair to gaze at him, the flecks of amber in its mottled slate-periwinkle tessellations glittering in the sunlight.
One of them lowered its head and licked at the corner of Jake's mouth. Modest tapped it on its jaw with a knuckle. “Stop that,” she said absently.
“How's it look?” he asked.
Her lips tightened.
“That bad, huh?”
He felt her lift his gloved hand in her own bare one, pale patches of a swordswoman's calluses contrasting with the robins-egg blue of her otherwise smooth, youthful skin. “Charles said...” She bit off the rest with a visible effort.
“Damn,” he breathed. “You sure?”
“Not completely. Just...”
A flicker of movement drew his gaze. Beside the knee he couldn't feel stood Marah, clad in polished plate gleaming with what seemed to be its own prismatic light. She'd twisted her raven-black hair into twin braids that draped over her shoulders. She held an open-faced helm in the crook of one arm. In the other hand she half-leaned on a sturdy spear tipped with a broad head the length of her forearm.
“Marah?” he whispered. “Wha...?”
“What?” said Modest.
“Marah,” Jake repeated.
“Dad, Marah's...you were there.”
“She's here.”
“What?” Modest followed Jake's gaze. “Dad, there's no one. There's...”
“Ah, crap,” Jake breathed. He coughed again and cussed.
Modest's eyes widened. She groped for something out of sight. A few moments later, he felt an intimately-familiar oblong object against his palm.
“It's okay,” said Modest, the strain in her voice barely controlled.
Jake managed a thin smile. “Modest,” he said as loudly as he could, “thanks for not eating your kids.”
She managed a smile in return. “They were too cute.”
He nodded slightly. “Still are. I didn't deserve to be your dad.”
“I'm glad you volunteered.”
“Thanks. Take up the mantle, honey. Become the queen you were born to be.”
“I will,” she said and nodded, tears welling unfallen in her black eyes.
“I...lo....” His breath failed.
He closed his eyes. Something twinged deep within his chest. Everything—sound, touch, smell—faded into an echo.
All at once, images rolled through his mind, one on top of the next.
Modest hiding in his closet the day she'd first emerged from his toilet. The delight she'd taken in her first Chocodile. The look of horror and sorrow on her face following Marah's death. The evening he'd first acknowledged her as his daughter. Her awkward first day of school. The way she'd panicked during her first molt later that year. Her attempt at a Chocodile turkey her first Thanksgiving. Her first Christmas with her typical mish-mashing of the traditions. The first visits from Child Protective Services and ICE. The number of times she'd said, “Are we there yet” on the way to Hell's Canyon and the way her face lit up from the first s'more on that Spring Break campout when they'd all been stranded by the Change. Holding her that night while they both fretted over dozens of questions, some still unanswered. Her first fresh-caught trout dangling from her mouth. Modest returning triumphantly with a load of salvaged Chocodiles a month into the First Change Year. The blank looks on her blood-splattered face and hair after their first battle. Designing, fashioning, and fitting her first armor. Her coronation ceremony officially investing her as Princess of Yeld. Teaching her to dance after a fashion. The goofy expression on her face after her first date with Owen. The way her hair had insistently shrugged off her wedding veil. An exhausted Modest holding her first three wet and wriggling babies. More than twenty years' worth of memories flooded past in a matter of moments.
When he opened his eyes, he found himself standing and looking down on himself. He lay on trampled grass beneath the mid-afternoon sun. Modest cradled his head in her arms has he had done with her so many times when she'd been but a girl newly come into his life. Tears flowed down her cheeks, and from the eyes of her hair, glinting in the light.
Owen stood behind Modest, a gauntleted hand resting on her armored shoulder. A few paces behind them stood Asami and Korra, both battered and leaning heavily on one another, helms laying on the ground beside them. Charles stood a few paces behind, a bag of clear liquid and a coil of tubing in his hand. Between them, the three eldest of Modest's and Owen's children stood or knelt on feet or tail.
Blood leaked out of almost every place on his body it possibly could. A small rivulet of it trickled from one corner of his mouth, another from his nose. A nasty gash on his cheek had crusted over already. His hauberk glistened with it. Several broken arrow shafts remained where they'd found weak points in his armor. His left arm presumably lay on the field somewhere. His right gripped his sword where Modest had placed it.
“Damn,” he said, “I look like crap.”
“Well,” said Marah, “you did just win a particularly brutal fight with a High Seeker. And you're dead, so there's that.”
“Did we win?”
Marah nodded. “You did. And now it's time for your people...her people...to go home to lick their wounds.”
“But this isn't over, is it?”
“I doubt it. But your part in it is finished. Like you said, it's her turn to take up the mantle.”
“Somehow,” he said pensively, “I always thought that would suck a lot more. Dying, I mean.”
“If I had a Piece of Eight for every time I've heard that, I might be able to buy my way back to the land of the living. No, the actual dying part isn't so bad. It's what leads up to it that's less so.”
“You know,” he said, “they always say your life flashes before your eyes.” He shook his head.
“It was hers, wasn't it?” Marah said.
He nodded.
She smiled. “She's beautiful, you know.”
He nodded again. “Yeah. Yeah, she is. Smart, strong, stubborn. I didn't deserve to be her dad. Too bad you didn't get to see her grow up.”
“Who says I didn't?”
Jake looked sharply at his niece.
“I'm a Chooser of the Slain,” she said. “And I've been doing a lot of Choosing since the day of what you call the Change.”
“What happened to your horns?”
“I'm dead, too, remember?”
He winced. “How could I forget? That was an interesting solution, by the way.”
“I lacked the skill to defeat the Prince on his terms.”
“You looked like you were holding your own.”
She laughed ruefully. “Is that was you saw?”
“Well, yeah.”
She shook her head. “No, that was a little half-forgotten karate, some Nintendo, and a whole lot of luck. I had to come up with something else. It, uh, went a little sideways.”
“A little? Your mom never did forgive me.”
“Yeah, she did.”
Jake blinked. “She did?”
Marah nodded. “She's in Folkvang.”
“I...see.”
“Do you?”
“Not really.”
“I Chose her. We'll swing by for a visit on our way to Valhalla. And if you ask nicely, she might tell you how she died.”
“Do I want to know?”
“I don't know, do you?”
“You're just as obstinate as ever, Marah.”
“It runs in the family,” she said casually.
He knelt down and laid his right hand alongside Modest's face. She looked up abruptly, gazing at and through him.
“He's here,” she said softly. Her mouth twitched into a brief slight smile. “He's going to be okay. I love you, Dad,” she said.
“I love you, too, honey,” he said, drawing another smile from her.
After a moment, he stood up. “Do you think she heard me?” he asked, still looking at his daughter.
“Not as such,” said Marah, “but she felt it.”
He nodded. “She'll be okay. Won't she?”
“As such things go, sure. It's fitting that you should go before her. No parent should have to bury their own child.”
“I just wish I'd had a few more years.”
“So does everyone. Yours was a fitting death, for one who has done good work. One you and she can be proud of. One you can boast at the feast tables of Valhalla.”
He looked back at Modest. “I'm going to miss her.”
“Oh, she'll be along,” said Marah, “eventually.”
Jake looked sharply at his niece. “You know this?”
“She's a fighter. Always has been. Well, you've seen her in battle. She's magnificent! If she doesn't die with her sword in her hand, I'll eat Loki's...never mind.” She twitched slightly. “Do you want to stick around for your funeral?”
He looked back at his body and his daughter holding it carefully. Beyond, the dead and dying littered pasture land turned into a battlefield. A few stone statues poked up where an enemy or his mount had come too close to Modest's hair. A few warriors of Yeld worked their way through the grass, occasionally stooping briefly, the motion immediately followed by a blur of something dark accompanied by an eerie scream, or the arrival of another figure in armor like Marah's. Beyond that rose low hills clad in dusty sagebrush and peppered with junipers.
After a few moments, he said, “Nah, I've seen too many funerals. I know how it'll go anyway. Besides, it'll make me feel like Scrooge with the Ghost of Christmas Present.” He gazed away toward the west, over the rolling grassy hills, past the sagebrush-and-juniper-peppered foothills, to the fir-clad Blue and Strawberry Mountains in the far distance nearly a day's hard ride away, and sighed. “I really wanted to see home again, though.” He looked back at Marah. “Valhalla, you say?”
She slid her helm onto her head and held out a gauntleted hand. “Nick's waiting for you anyway.”
Jake took another look at his lingering family, and placed his bare hand into Marah's.
Modest choked back another sob. “He...he's gone!” She tipped her head back and let out a keening wail and cradling Jake's body. She let the wave of grief blow itself out before trying to regain whatever remained of her composure.
She met the eye of Captain Crais, standing with three other men-at-arms a respectful two-dozen paces away, and nodded.
“The King is dead!” he declared, and slapped his still-bloody sword against his battered and half-shattered shield. “Long live the Queen!”
A dozen other voices lifted up thrice the cry. “Long live the Queen!”
Modest squeezed her eyes shut briefly. Queen, she thought. But I still have tasks that need doing, Queen or not.
“I...I'm sorry, honey,” said Owen. “I should have been closer. I should have...” Modest silenced him with a glance.
“Ariathnam,” she said.
“Honey...”
“He died with a sword in his hand,” she insisted. “Tonight he feasts in the halls of Ariathnam.”
He cleared his throat. “If you want, I can...”
“No.” She shook her head. “No, it's my duty. My responsibility. Just...bring me a pail of water and some shop rags.”
“Sure.”
“And dearest? I...will probably need help loading him into a wagon.” She briefly lost it. “The rest of you, help those who need it. I...am going to be here a little while.”
She barely heard the hushed voices and the retreating footfalls, barely felt Charles and a few others give her a squeeze or a thump across her still-armored shoulders.
“On second thought,” she added, “kids, you should help. Your grandpa would have appreciated it.”
She lost herself in her task. Her tears and the tears of her children mingled with the water and thinning blood running off her dad's body and onto the ground beneath it. When she'd finally finished, several broken bodkin arrows lay on the ground beside a pile of blood-soaked clothing, and her dad lay swaddled in fresh salvaged muslin on a wagon, arms crossed across his chest and clasping his sheathed sword.