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Chapter 4 - Past Prologue

Location: Eastvale Village - Gia Continent - Terra

Freya woke up with a start, she peered into the darkness of her room, she had been sleeping peacefully until she had a terrible nightmare, the wind swept into her room while the curtains on the walls fluttered out in the wind. She took steps to control her breathing and climbed out the bed to shut the window of her small room.

Freya was a half-breed, between fox and wolf, she had long silver hair which came all the way down her back to her petite backside, her hair was smooth except her fox-like ears sticking out of her head. She had beautiful and unnaturally bright green eyes and a small body frame. She wore a beautiful silk dressing gown that was a slight shade of pink and white, she stood at the window trying to calm herself, letting her already sweaty hands wipe the sweat from her forehead.

Downstairs, she could hear feverish typing on a computer keyboard. She looked over at the clock, it was about three o'clock in the morning. She walked out of her room into a small corridor and down the stairs at the end of it. This was her home, a small cottage in the village of Eastvale.

The village of Eastvale was a small farming community of only about twenty houses, they were all stacked in a semi circle around a central plaza with a water fountain in the middle. There was a bridge that connected to the only road both in and out of that village, that road crossed over the Arria Plains and through a grand tunnel until it reached the massive desert city of Gia.

This area of Terra was very close to a pure desert however Eastvale was safety guarded by an extensive mountain range that separated the plains from the harsh desert. This area was much further south then Chentrilla and was subject to heavy rains and storms which the citizens of Eastvale had coped with for hundreds of years.

Freya stepped down her creaky stairs, she was careful not to fall down them, the house was always in a constant state of disrepair. She lived here with a friend that happened to be sat on the sofa in the living and looked up at her as she descended down the stairway.

Her friend, Eclypse was a species of rat that almost seemed unique to Terra. Freya had never seen anyone like it before. He was black, if it wasn't for a few freckles by his whiskers that protruded out of his face. He had very large, amber eyes that seemed to glow in the darkness with only the laptop scene illuminating his features. His tail was large and worm-like, something that ordinary Terrans had always feared him for.

"Clypsie? What are you doing up this late?" she said softly to him. The rat lifted his head and turned round to greet her.

"Oh nothing...." He said looking round and closing down the lid of the laptop quickly.

"You... should.... get some rest, yeah.... Go and have a nice sleep."

Freya laughed and switched the lounge lights on. "Elcypse! Tell me what you were up to... this instant" said Freya trying to play a dominant role and then bursting out laughing. "You were looking at dirty pictures on the WSN again?"

Elcypse looked up at Freya blushing slightly.... "No"

"Then why are you up so late?" she asked again, hoping to get a response. Eclypse just grunted and sat back into the sofa wondering what to say. Truth had been that he had been watching a form of pornography.

Freya sighed and returned to her room after a few seconds of silence. She crawled back into her small bed and pulled the woollen sheets over her body, encasing her in warmth.

She wondered what had been bothering Eclypse recently, he had been acting pretty strange from the last few years she had known him. Eclypse had been her friend and closest companion for so long that she knew him inside out. Freya had started out life as an orphan girl who lived off the trash on the streets of Gia, which was known as the breadbasket of Terra, providing most of the raw materials needed for construction and development. This highly industrialised city also had virtually no police force so crime was rampant and the government soon lost control of the city to anarchists. The following week, the local Terran authority ordered the military to enter the city and both of Freya's parents were shot dead in front of her inside the bar that her father owned.

Freya was lucky as she was spared by the cleansing squads who took pity on the lone child and hid underneath the floorboards while the solider who saved her, talked to his ruthless commander and convinced him that nobody was left alive inside the bar.

From that moment on, Freya had been alone in her universe, surviving on the streets of Gia until one day, when she turned fourteen, a strange injured rat walked into town and from that moment on, after she cared for him and nurtured him back to health he vowed to protect her.

Nobody knew what had happened or where that rat had come from. He seemed to appear with an explosion near one of the power plants in Gia. Freya was nearby and hid him from the military who had been immediately alerted to the explosion. She knew that military would blame him for the explosion and have him executed for treason. They were not too picky about who died in those days.

From that day on, the two of them had been together. Eclypse had an uncanny knack of being able to repair even the most damaged technology. Freya used this ability to start earning money in Gia, starting out with a small stall in the market to finally being able to move and set up a shop in the village of Eastvale. She no longer had to live in poverty.

She rose from her bed again, leaving the room and walking back down the stairs to see Eclypse laying on the sofa, trying to get some rest.

Eclypse looked up at her. "I thought you was sleeping?" he said in a rather low gruff voice for a rat.

Freya finished her walk down the stairs and sat down on the sofa before Eclypse. She looked over at him, he only just realised that she seemed a little paler then usual, even through her fur.

"I had.... a nightmare" she said looking over at Eclypse who got up and poured her a drink, setting it down on the table beside her.

Eclypse stared at Freya with a curious intent, he sat down next to her and put his long tail around onto his lap. He looked at her, she was so very beautiful, he had been in love with her since they first met but had never told her because he felt unworthy to her beauty. "I guess...." He said quietly, trying hard to keep his thoughts on what she was saying and not her. "Nightmares are terrible things... what was it about?"

"I don't know.... That's just it.... I appeared to be on a different planet but it was like Terra. I saw Eastvale, Gia, Chentrilla, Locarno, Molrann and all the other cities but they were all in ruins and all I could hear was this girls voice, she sounded young and she.... She was singing....?" Freya took her drink and looked confused, as what often happened with dreams was now happening with her, she could not remember details. "I was.... so... so... real."

She gazed into the liquid in the cup and smiled. "I know it's just a silly.... but it felt so real, so vivid and now it is all just slipping away again.... But I know I have seen that girl before!"

Eclypse put his arms around her and held her close to him in a friendly hug. "Don't worry.... It was only a dream."

* * *

Location: UTS Valkyrie - Terran System

Approximately 300 Years Ago

The console behind her exploded, killing one of the crew behind her. Pieces of debris fell from the ceiling as people covered their heads. The Valkyrie was taking a heavy beating from the attack in space. Terra looked magnificent, a blue-green orb floating amongst an endless sea of stars however space was anything but tranquil right now.

Bright blue beams cut across the sky as the battle ahead unfolded, the Valkyrie constantly tilting and turning to avoid them however it was slow and sluggish being a heavy cruiser. There was a war going on outside and the Valkyrie was caught smack bang in the middle of it.

"Attack wings 32, 33 and 34 have been destroyed!" shouted an officer, a fox dressed in a black uniform as he stood at a console on the bridge. The bridge was a large circular room with a chair in the middle for the captain and computer stations along all the back walls and two the sides with two doors either side for access. However the bridge had been heavily damaged, it was dimly lit with exploded console and debris everywhere.

Kestra Valentine looked up from her command position on the bridge, she was a distinctive emerald green echidna that wore that same military uniform as the other officers on the bridge. She was the captain of this huge vessel, the flagship of the Terran fleet and over the years, the Valkyrie had seen a lot of action.

"Adjust secondary batteries forty-two degrees..." she commanded, as the ship rocked hard from multiple beam impacts. She looked at the window in front of her, the battle was going exceptionally badly for the Terran Federation. Their adversary was one huge vessel that appeared almost like a ghost in space, translucent against that stars, almost as if it was not there. "We need to keep those missiles away from the cruisers!"

This vessel belonged to the Asgard.

The Asgard were a race of trans-dimensional beings that existed outside the normal space-time continuum. They claimed to be "gods", doing the work to keep the universe tree, Yggdrasil safe from harm and in their arrogance they had sensed a threat by the advancement of the Terran Federation who had began to learn about the true nature of the universe.

They were going to put the lesser beings back in their place. Having that sort of information could have been dangerous in the wrong hands.

The Asgard vessel fired another barrage of missiles and fighters that appeared to swarm towards the fleet of Terran vessels that stood in defence of their home-world. However the Terran ships were incapable of hitting the Asgard vessel. They were out of phase of their space-time continuum, making them immune to enemy fire. It had been the same story for the whole war, the only hope was destroy their missiles and fighters however that was easier said then done.

An explosion shot Kestra forward, out of her chair with her red hair falling out of the tight bun and falling in front of her. She rose to her feet to look around at the rest of her crew that were battle-scarred and demoralised.

"Report!" she shouted looking up at an officer who was still standing on the far side of the room. He seemed far to young to be caught up in this terrible war that had claimed the lives of so many young men and woman. Kestra, being a little older and as the captain of the vessel had to go see the families of the people that had died and tell them why their son or daughter was special.

How could she do that if she could not actually remember half of them?

What right did she have to sit in front of a grieving mother and tell her how sorry she was when she had commanded the ship that lead that person to their death? Did it affect her emotionally?

After all this time, not really?

"Captain, our core sustained a direct hit..." shouted the ensign, the lowest ranking officer on the bridge. Both Kestra's Executive Officer and Second Officer had been killed in the opening exchange of fire between the Asgard ship and the Terran Fleet. Kestra stood back, trying to centre herself, she thought she was a trained professional but she felt ready to just give into fear, the fear of death was a powerful thing to behold. She remembered that famous Terran phrase spoken once by a famed general to his troops;

"If a man is convinced that he's going to die, he will probably find a way to make it happen."

She awaited for the Ensign to finish his report with baited breath as she attempted to climb back to her comfortable leather chair.

"...emergency backups are failing and we are loosing life-support. The power grid has been destroyed..."

Her worst fears were confirmed. There was nothing that she could do to prevent this, she was about to lose the most precious thing in the world to her. Her ship.

She remembered when the Valkyrie was first commissioned, the only cruiser of her kind, unmatched in technology and the jewel of the Terran Federation. She remembered the huge speeches and wonderful parties that she attended, one in particular saw the Valkyrie outside in the dock, with two vast windows looking out to her from the party area.

She had never conceived that within a year she would be in command of that colossal vessel. She had been originally assigned as Communication Officer however during an incident where the entire bridge crew was killed during a battle with the Viro-Leese, an alien race that lived just outside the galaxy, she took command of the vessel, leading it to victory and earning her the most prestigious prize ever.

Now she just could not let her go, not now that she had been through so much with her. Almost ten years of faithful service and this ship was about to be wiped from existence?

No... The Valkyrie's legacy was not ready to end here... it would go out with a bang.

In a split second she made up her mind of what she was going to do. She reached her chair, climbing back into it as explosions continued to rock, the already battered ship. Her bridge was in pieces with only a few officers actually left alive, most had been killed with different explosions but had been left there during the battle.

"Activate Emergency Core shut---" Kestra never got the chance to finish that order.

Outside an Asgard fighter, chased by a Terran fighter in a deadly dogfight attempted to fly under the Valkyrie as a way of loosing his opponent. However the fighter miscalculated as another Terran fighter attacked from underneath and in a blaze of green energy shot the fighter into a spin as it crashed into the underside of the Valkyrie.

It may not have had a significant look outside in the coldness of space but inside the ship, the fighter collision had a massive effect on the already weakened starship. There were massive internal explosions as the fighter had ignited the Valkyrie's fuel lines which had caused a massive fireball to blow out almost all the hull plating on the underside of the ship.

Kestra was again thrown forward but managed to retain control and stay in her chair as the Valkyrie burned in space with the fires consuming the oxygen rich atmosphere within the ship. The massive hull breaches exposing the super-structure of the starship, almost as if a person's arm had been ripped open exposing just the bare bones.

The captain, immediately thinking like a captain, pressed a button on the arm of her chair to signal evacuation. She looked around, she had been too engrossed in protecting herself to notice that every officer that had been alive a moment ago had been killed in the explosions and was no lying dead at her fleet.

She stared the myriad of different species that lay before her, foxes, wolves, dragons... all were now dead, their bodies scattered along the floor of the bridge with a number of different injuries.

The Valkyrie was now dropping down as it suffered from the fires ripping through her like a plague. It seemed to be of no interest to any other Asgard weaponry as there was a break in the fire. Obviously they had been listed as a lost cause.

Kestra watched all the pods jettison from a display in the corner of the room. Two pods... each with ten people in... that could not be right...!?

The Valkyrie was manned by almost two thousand souls, they were all gone except for twenty people!? She cursed the Asgard but she would morn in her own time later. Right now it seemed that saving her ship was more paramount... she would not allow the Valkyrie to be destroyed.

Rushing to the only console that pointed towards the frontal window, she attempted to access the helm, she was going to steer the ship away from the battle and down into the planet. She knew that the ship was too weak to survive re-entry at this altitude so she would have reroute all her power to stop the ship from falling apart as she attempted to land it in one of Terra's oceans.

She dropped the ship down using the last engine available to her, dropping the Valkyrie away from the fleet and attempted to move further down into Terra's atmosphere. However something caught her, the Asgard ship had some sort of holding beam that was locked firmly onto the Valkyrie, making sure that she did not try to escape before the easily laid waste to the Terran fleet without taking any damage at all.

Why was she still alive?