Valkyrie’s Debt

The old cathedral breathed like something half-asleep. Saint James had survived earthquakes, arson, and apathy. What brought it low in the end was silence. The kind that seeps into the stone after the last believer leaves.

My boots echoed on cracked tiles. Moss lined the walls where devotion used to live. The stained glass above the nave flickered with dying AR—holy icons overlaid with static and half-corrupted scripture. The digital saints stuttered in place, caught mid-blessing.

I followed the spiral staircase beneath the altar, where incense used to hang in the air like prayer. Now it was copper and ozone. Code and candlewax.

The crypt was lit with votives—real wax, not filament bulbs. A makeshift shrine buzzed with jury-rigged servers and a projector stitched into the eye socket of a stone cherub. Cables coiled across the floor like veins.

Echo sat at the center, wrapped in a monk's robe stained with rust. Her throat was a lattice of scar tissue and dermal grafts; the voice modulator in her collar hummed before each word.

"You came," she said.

Her voice was warm and hollow. A bell rung in a locked room.

I hadn’t seen her in years. Not since the night I became what I am. She still looked at me like she could see the person I buried. Once, Echo traced my runes with her fingertips and whispered my name like it was the only word that mattered. That was before Selvetarm. Before the weapon.

"I saw the astral breach," Echo said. "Half the wardlines in Redmond warped like wet vellum. Something's hunting you."

"Not just me," I said. "It’s riding the ghosts of everyone I’ve ever been."

She tilted her head. "Isilme."

That name in this place felt heavier. I sat on the pew across from her, the wood groaning like it remembered my weight.

"You were the only one who ever used it like it was holy," I murmured.

"It was," Echo said. "Until you bled it into something else."

I didn’t argue. I didn’t flinch. But something inside me shifted. I’d told myself she forgot me. That she moved on. But I could still see the hurt beneath the modulation, wrapped in ritual stillness like it would suffocate if it stirred.

She tapped the projector. A grainy image flared to life on the far wall. It was a memory recording, a simsense from my perspective on the night of the Iron Snakes. Only the voice in the footage wasn't mine anymore. It had been filtered, warped, echoed through something synthetic. But the eyes, the panic, the moment of surrender? That was me.

I stood up fast. My breath left me like a punch to the chest.

"Turn it off."

Echo paused the feed, but didn’t look away.

"They’re using BTLs, Valkyrie."

Better-Than-Life chips. Neural sim recordings that let you experience someone else’s memory—sight, sound, sensation, emotion. It is a high more addictive than anything chemical. People would pay to die in someone else's skin. And here it was—me. My pain, my failure, turned into entertainment. Or worse: liturgy.

"Where did you get this?"

"A dead fence in the Verge was trying to sell the fragment. He called it 'The Fall of the Silver Witch.' Said it made people weep."

I sat back down, slower this time. My heart was still hammering, but the rage had cooled into something heavier. Shame. Grief. And somewhere in the pit of my stomach, fear.

"Someone’s been using archived BTLs," Echo said again. "Fragments, mostly. Commercial black-market ripoffs from when you were under Selvetarm. Someone bought the memory of your fall."

"Why?" I whispered.

"Because it’s code with teeth. Because it teaches the Dullahan what it means to wear a soul. It doesn’t need to be headless, Valkyrie. It’s wearing your face."

I clenched my jaw until my teeth ached. I had been running so hard for so long, I forgot what it felt like to look in a mirror and not recognize what stared back.

"You archived me."

"No," Echo said. "They did. You became a marketable tragedy. An exorcism tourists could rent. But this thing—it’s using the raw data. It’s not pretending to be you. It’s building on your echo."

I moved to the altar, where half-burned candles flickered next to old data chips.

I saw myself in the flicker of the flame—my outline, my shape. The reflection of someone I had tried to kill and bury. And failed.

"You always saw more than the rest. Even when I couldn’t."

"You were never blind, Isilme," she said, standing slowly. "Just afraid of looking at what your light cast behind you."

My fingers brushed the edge of a broken icon. The saint's face had been chipped away. A void in marble. A perfect match for a helm.

"He’s wearing my soul like armor."

Echo stepped closer. "And he’s not finished. There’s more footage. More fragments. And someone’s feeding it."

"A summoner?"

"No. A sculptor. This isn't an invocation. It’s a resurrection."

The words hollowed something inside me.

"So what do I do?"

Echo looked up, and for once, the voice modulator didn’t blur the sadness in her tone.

"You find out whether the weapon you became can still choose who it aims at."

I nodded once. No vows. No theatrics. Just the brittle silence of purpose re-found.

I turned to go. At the top of the stairs, her voice followed me like incense smoke.

"You never stopped being her. You just changed the way you bled."

And maybe, I thought, that was the problem.