Finding Valhalla

​​​​​Finding Valhalla: Chapter 1

There weren’t always dragons in the Valley. It wasn’t until the Vikings disappeared that they began overtaking the land. No written or drawn out history depicting the Event has ever been found, only what the outside world speculates it to be. To the outside world, there aren’t dragons and the Vikings are still living peacefully. There is only one way to get to the Valley and no known way to escape. Any person willing and able to take the long journey, would travel to the end of the Earth and come to a crack between mountainous rocks. Once the crack is found, the traveler would have to take a dark, perilous fall through the riff. Any person with enough bravery to free fall into the unknown is surely worthy of landing in a world full of magic and wonder. A world where the Vikings roam freely with the magical creatures of the Valley’s realm. No human in the Earthly world has come across the riff, though many have tried. The promise of a peaceful land and it’s many unicorns, fairies and leprechauns is just one jump away. It was a utopia spoken of only in stories of magic told to children before bed. The story was changed from household to household but was always about the Vikings disappearing from Earth after finding the magical realm. The creatures that inhabit the Valley changed, but the constant was always that there were never dragons. Dragons have never been kind in children stories, the prince is always slaying one while it guards a princess waiting to be rescued. The fire breathing, villainous monsters are not usually creatures to soothe a child to sleep. One young girl was different, she would ask her father to tell her stories where the dragons were rescuing a damsel of a prince.

​Her name is Maeve O’Conner. Her mother wanted a strong-willed, warrior of a daughter so she was named after a great warrior in Irish mythology. Maeve lived up to her name, even as a young child. She would pretend to have sword fights with her imaginary friend and rescue her dolls as if they were princesses in distress. She would run wild through the playground when her parents would take her to the park just up the street from their large red brick house with a pastel yellow door and matching trim. The swings were made for jumping off like she was flying, the plastic rock wall was the side of a cliff and she would pretend to slip only to save herself before falling to her “death”. The other children found her odd, all but two, her best friends Kate and Amber. They would always gladly join her on her adventures, playing pretend pirates, cops and robbers, anything with battles really. The sand was always deep, freezing water or lava, land that shouldn’t be touched. The girls imagined their way through childhood, adolescents and now as adults as well. They played Dungeons & Dragons every weekend with a few other friends and have continued to play every Sunday as adults. They are all in their thirties now with respectable jobs. Kate and Amber are married with children, Maeve on the other hand could never be tied down with normal everyday things such as a husband or kids. Her job is a newspaper writer which allows her to work from basically anywhere. The park is still her favorite place, so she sets up her laptop at a park table and works from there four out of five days of her work week. Mondays are her in office days and she resents the beginning of the week for it. One Friday, she sets herself up at the park and begins working on an article about modern pirates and the effects they have on the economy.

​Maeve’s eyes begin to wonder to the playground where she once played pirates with her best friends. It seems like only yesterday when in fact it has been twenty plus years. Her mind wonders back to the magic of her childhood, the stories she was told and the one’s she made up. Her favorite was always the story about the Valley, a peaceful land full of magic and wonder. Snapping herself back to reality, Maeve rapidly flutters her eyelids as she realizes she hadn’t blinked the whole time. She looks to her left reflexively at a spot that still has etches of the three girls initials carved into a tree’s trunk. Something catches her eyes, it is shiny and half buried where the tree’s roots meet the grassy mud. It is a bottle with something in it. Maeve stands before taking a couple steps to the tree and begins to excavate. Once she unearthed the bottle and wiped the mud with her already dirty hands, she sees it, it’s a piece of brown leathery paper. A water fountain nearby was as good a place as any to clean her hands and the new found item. She continues to examine it while one by one she wipes her hands on her dark jeans, it surely could be a message in a bottle.

Maeve collects her things for her short walk home, she was too excited to wait and needed to open the bottle. Upon arriving to her one bedroom apartment, she drops her bag next to the couch and heads towards the kitchen to get her cork screw. After popping the cork she pours out the contents of the bottle to discover it was in fact a written note. It was written in what looked like very old Nordic runes which she knew she wanted to translate. Sitting on her couch she takes the computer out of her bag and opens it once more. Maeve decided to go down the rabbit hole known as the internet in an attempt to find anything about the story she didn’t already know and any ways of translating Nordic script. Three hours later she found it, ‘it’ being a map to the Valley. The problem with the map was how it abruptly ended. Earth is round so why did it just end? This question sent her down another internet spiral to uncover why. Twenty minutes later she finds a website that will help her translate. The original plan to work didn’t cross her mind again, this was her new work…her new passion.

​The first day, she barely got anywhere with the story. She had three words translated by the time her stomach began to rumble in hunger, “In the beginning”. She left the library to go home to get some rest and eat dinner while pondering over the translation. She spent the first half of the night staring at the ceiling and the second half back on the computer translating more. She had the first full sentence done by the morning, “In the beginning there were the Vikings, the mightiest of warriors.” She was now positive this was the same story her father would tell her, but his began with the Valley, not the Vikings. In fact, every child who grew up with the fairytale always knew the story to start with the Valley, not the other way around.

​The second day of translating hindered Maeve’s real job. She had a one track mind and was not going to stop her search until it was fully translated. Her deadline for the newspaper article came and went, calls from her bosses went unanswered and within a week she was terminated from her position at the newspaper. Her savings had enough for six months of rent on her simple apartment and the building was conveniently located next to a corner market. Over the next month, Maeve poured over the runic transcriptions. It was nearly finished and she couldn’t resist reading what she already figured out. “In the beginning there were the Vikings, the mightiest of warriors. A young Viking child was playing near large rocks and was swallowed by a break in the earth. The child’s mother witnessed this from afar and ran to her child’s rescue while howling calls for help. The mother then landed the same fate as her child as she disappeared into the Earth. One by one the Vikings began to be swallowed whole by the rip in the world as they attempted to help their fallen friends. Upon the last of the Vikings to fall was their king, Gunnar. He jumped through the crack and landed on his feet upon a ground of sand. The water of the waves came crashing into his legs as he turned to see each one of his family and friends staring around in wonder. There were fairies flying through the sky, landing on flower petals to watch the humans who had fallen from seemingly nowhere. Mermaids appeared on rocks towards the ocean’s shore to stare in amazement at the large, two legged beings standing on the beach, where just minutes ago there was nobody. We, the Vikings, now live in this land for we have not found means of escape. The boats we made would sail for days, only to end up back on the same magical beach. We longed for dragons, for they surely could fly us out of this place. The paradise is the closest to Valhalla a living creature could find, but it wasn’t home.”

​Only three lines were left to transcribe but sleep seemed imperative for Maeve. Her eyes were fluttering themselves closed and her breath was slowly deepening. Trying to keep herself awake she put a pot of coffee on, took a cold shower and called Amber and Kate for their weekly three way call. She began to tell them about getting fired because of the project she has been working on.

​“How could you let yourself get fired over something so stupid?” asked Kate, the most sensible of the three. “Those are children’s stories, not for adults. That place isn’t real, Maeve. Sure, we play D&D but it is all pretend.” Part of Maeve knew how her friends would react, but she hoped it would have been different. Her life had become so mundane and average, she hopes whole-heartedly it is a real place. If there are any indications it could be real, she wants to be the one to find it.

​“What about you, Amber, do you believe I could be on to something?” askes Maeve.

​“I don’t know, it seems far fetched. Maybe you should try looking for a new job instead of an imaginary childhood fable land.” Amber was usually more open to thoughts of magical far away places so Maeve thought she would possibly believe her about the Valley. Amber was a wife, a mother to three lovely children and a teacher to twenty or so others, it makes sense she would want to stay. There was, however, a slight change in her voice as she said the words ‘fable land’ leading Maeve hoping she would come around to the idea and maybe even want to help.

​The three lifelong friends hung up the phone differently this call, there was no happy farewells. The goodbye’s to Maeve sounded worried and almost as if they were sad for her, especially Kate. The phone call didn’t detour her from her mission, it only made her want to work harder to prove them wrong. The rest of Maeve’s night was spent translating the last three lines before falling asleep.

She woke around noon and grabbed her laptop, still sitting open on the coffee table. Maeve began to read the last part of the written artifact and couldn’t believe what she was seeing. “I am writing this in hopes it finds someone who can help. We wished for dragons and now, one by one, we are becoming them in body and mind. Please find a way to break this curse and free our souls from damnation.”