The Valkyries

At a glance

The order, reconstructed

The order

Who they were

Not a race. A title. Drawn from every kind of Fae, usually recruited from birth or early childhood, trained in another territory into a clan of female warriors that out-fought even the Illyrians — and we love that for them. The signature was never the individual. It was the unit: fearless lone fighters whose real power came from moving as one drilled, harmonized body. Shields wielded offensively, not just for cover. None of it was ever written down in a surviving corpus — it was all oral, which is why nothing remains but secondhand fragments scavenged by passing historians, philosophers, and traders, and why Gwyn has to reconstruct the order instead of just reading it.

The fall

Annihilation and chosen oblivion

Destroyed in the War, roughly five hundred years before any of this. Per Gwyn, legend says the few who survived deliberately made themselves cease to exist — choosing erasure over living with the shame of losing. Even that's framed as a story, not record, which fits an order whose whole history travelled mouth to mouth. Their ending survives the same way their training did: as something someone told someone else.

The path

Novice, Blade, Valkyrie

Three stages, climbing: Novice, then Blade, then Valkyrie. Reaching Valkyrie was the highest honor in the land — the apex, not a job description. Nesta, Gwyn, and Emerie climb every tier in training, wooden swords toward the final rite. And Gwyn doesn't restore it pure — she proposes fusing recovered Valkyrie technique with Illyrian method to make something NEW. The whole thematic heart of the arc in one move: the new can be as strong and unbreakable as the old. We felt that one personally.

The discipline

Mind-Stilling and the rock against the surf

Mind-Stilling. The discipline Gwyn rediscovers in the library and teaches Nesta — sit, quiet the mind, deep breathing, body awareness, then let go, over and over. The anchor is the mantra: 'I am the rock against which the surf crashes. Your thoughts are the surf. Let them crash over you.' The self is immovable stone; the grief and the rage are waves that break and recede without moving you. It becomes the tool Nesta uses to govern her fury — and later, paired with 'Nothing can break me' / 'Nothing can break us,' a battle-prayer. We've tried it on a Tuesday. Results pending.

The rite

Cutting the ribbon

Training counted as complete only when you could slice a hanging ribbon clean in half with a sword. Gwyn reconstructs it as the qualifying rite, and it is brutal — for a long time only Cassian can do it. All three women fail and fail, then succeed one by one, Gwyn cutting hers first, each declaring the mantra as she passes. Cut the ribbon, you're an official Valkyrie. Cassian, watching, feels it land as a hinge of history — 'Right then and there. That was when it all changed.' Yeah. Us too.

The proof

Winning the Blood Rite

Then theory became fact on the mountain. Cassian and Azriel had built a qualifier course beatable only by a team of three — Valkyrie doctrine made into stone. In retaliation for the women clearing it, Devlon's Illyrians abducted Nesta, Gwyn, and Emerie and dropped them, drugged, weaponless, and forbidden magic, into the real Blood Rite. Nesta's accidental enchantment on their matching friendship bracelets — wished into being by her unrefined Made power — let the three find each other across the mountain despite the ban. They chose the hardest route, the Breaking, through the Pass of Enalius. Healing suspended, Gwyn wounded, Nesta held the pass alone as rearguard while Emerie carried Gwyn to the summit. Both hands on the onyx monolith — they won the Rite, the first females ever to do it, Emerie the first female Carynthian. The order wasn't reborn in legend. It was reborn in fact. We will never recover.

The order, reborn

Who carries it

From the page

Verbatim canon