A familiar smell.
Amelia bolted upright, and the animals awoke, as the sphere coalesced and grew larger. She threw the covers off and jumped off the bed and stood in front of the forming figure of swirling blue spirals.
The figure of her mother.
Fang started barking in excitement, leaping right up, and went straight through it, hairs upright. His barks increased tenfold as his mother joined the baying, making enough sound to raise the dead from the other end of the mansion.
"I'm sorry Amelia for leaving you. Again. If you are seeing this, I've got this verdammt thing to work but not sure for how long."
Ella's arm reached outward, palm upward. Amelia moved to touch it, and her hand crackled the closer she got. She kept her hand the merest fraction above her mother's blue limb, static electricity crackling as the tears flowed down her face and she heard the words I love you. I'm coming for you when the Valkjur re —
Ella disappeared in a single momentary flash. Marietta burst into the room with her armed guard and Volfango and Skippy behind and found the child wiping away tears. Smiling, eyes bright.
"Every thing's going to be OK, Marietta. Everything will be OK." And hugged her.
<<<>>>
AUTHOR’S NOTE & INFO
Hello! If you liked my story, then please check out the next in my series, Odin's Warriors: Königstiger!
To receive an exclusive novella, which explains some of the back story in Hellsbaene, please join my mailing list below:
www.aerynleigh.combookclub
Because it's easier to beg forgiveness than ask for permission, reviews matter a lot for Indie writers, especially new authors. Could you please? Thank you!
The Real Author's Note
Hi! Immediately after I finished Hellsbaene, before I even sent it off to my editor, I was already thinking about the next book. What happens next? Our band of heroes just helped win the Battle of Harmony Day, yet the Inquisition lay waiting, casting a great shadow of the very future of Republic.
So here’s the thing about ideas, great ideas that explode like a supernova in our creative souls — the morning after. The hangover. The reality of what happened last night, is now history, unchangeable. So what happens next? I had all the ideas, grand epic over-arching themes, floating around in my head writing Hellsbaene, enough to fill five, six, ten books, but like when you wake from a dream, the harder you try to remember them, the more the slip from your grasp.
So one of the benefits of old age (I can’t believe I just typed that) and experience, is the hopefully leaned ability to learn from them. I didn’t pursue, I let them float around, making them come to me. You want to be in my universe little awesome idea? Well form an orderly bloody queue!
Painkiller was born, in those ethereal moments between sleep and full consciousness, about a week after I sent Hellsbaene off. The whole book came to me in a single coherent flash, ten minutes later, I got up and wrote it down.
Where Eagles Dare meets Starship Troopers, two of my favourite movies (and books), mixed in with all the ideas already germinating from the Odin’s Warriors universe.
Plus, I utterly adore Judas Priest’s Painkiller, especially on a big stereo. Wow that drumming! And so, it all came together.
Painkiller. And riffing off that, some of the themes I alluded to in Hellsbaene, sowing those seeds, could at last blossom. But of course, nothing ever goes to plan.
No one wakes up in the morning, and decides for themselves they’re going to become a drug addict (unless you’re born to one), or die at their desk on a Monday morning being a incurable workaholic. Like everything involved in being human, it proceeds in stages, telling lies to yourself, that you’ve got it under control, you can stop any moment you want.
I bet no human ever on their death bed, in their final moments, wished they’d spent more time at the office.
Ella may have been transported to another world, her daughter safe at last, her main obstacles gone (or so she tells herself), yet the underlying problems remained. Laurie and the others from Earth, being blokes, turn to alcohol to cope, and find the Black Dog of depression is never far away.
As Pink Floyd sung, you can run and run from the sun, trying to catch up with it, but it's sinking, racing around to come up behind you again. But now you're older, shorter of breath and one day closer to death. You can’t outrun your own fear. The only thing you can do, that any of us can do, is turn around, plant our feet amongst the man-killing spears, and face our enemy, our fears, and turn the brightest light we have upon them, even as our stomachs fall into the abyss, as our brain screams for us to flee.
When Ella is in the tunnel, lost, on the verge of insanity, she had her own reckoning, where her life only rotates on a single coin, culminating in being stuck inside the power armour, she reaches that point, where the pain to remain in the shell, is more painful that stepping forth into the unknown.
The one thing I’ve learnt, as always, the hard way — is there any other way? — is that courage is not the absence of fear, but being so damned fucking shit scared, you do it anyway, despite it, a great big Fuck You to the pain, and the terror.
And even if you win, you get to do it all again tomorrow.
I am an optimist, I swear.
Again, thanks for reading my second book! I really hope you enjoyed it! If you have any questions, feedback, or things you’d like to see, send me an email? I’ll reply to each one.
Oh, and never give up, because you are awesome. If I can do it, you certainly can.
x Aeryn Leigh
MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA
EARTH, SOL SYSTEM
MILKY WAY, BACKWATER OF THE UNIVERSE.
www.aerynleigh.com
aeryn@aerynleigh.com
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Table of Contents
1. Promises
2. Ham And Green Eggs
3. Going Fishing
4. The Emperor's What?
5. The Rusty Axe
6. Where To Begin
7. Problems
8. Jade Falcon
9. The Jetty
10. Conventions
11. Don’t Think. Act
12. Firing Range
13. Astronomy And Asimov
14. And So It Begins
15. A High-Speed Flyby
16. Not Alone
17. Unpleasant Surprises
18. Theseus's Ship
19. A Long Way, Baby
20. The Only Logical Conclusion
21. Where’s The RAF?
22. Test Flight
23. No Turning Back
24. Lost In Translation
25. A Change In Tactics
26. Vikings And Nursery Rhymes
27. Odin Save Us
28. Troubled Sleep
29. The Republic Air Force
30. Odinsgate
31. Dogfight
32. Calloused Hands
33. Liquid Wake-Up
35. The Hammer Drops
36. The Exuberance Of Youth
37. Bertha
38. Survive
39. Here I Am
40. Freedom
41. Let There Be Light
42. Burial Mound
43. Thirteen Warriors
44. Row, Eat, Sleep, Repeat
45. Verdammt Sollst Du Sein
46. The Razor’s Edge
47. Showtime
48. The Curtain Goes Up
49. A Shitload Of Arduous Work
50. A Prayer To The Gods Of Flight
51. Commit To It
52. Catching Sleep
53. Wing Dancer
54. Good Hunting
55. Of All The Luck
56. A Great Day To Be A Viking King
57. Carve A Path
58. Anthill
59. Indeed
60. Tiled Roofs
61. To The Gate
62. That’s My G
irl
63. The Evil Within
64. Killer Drop Bears
65. Target Fixation
66. Nothing Else Matters
67. Garden Beds
68. Thrice-Wrought Steel
69. Shoe Polish
70. Open Ground
72. Low Friction Coefficients
73. Spitfires And Hurricanes
74. One Last Meeting
75. Drafted
76. How Unfortunate
77. A Vast, Deep Pit
78. Vale The First And Proud
79. It All Ends Now
80. So Be It
81. Metal Eyes
82. Runes
83. Mess Hall
84. Painkiller
85. Dismissed
86. One Army Under God
87. The Art Of War
88. Their Harvest Of Hate
89. A Phalanx Of Joints
90. The Missing Battalion
91. Valkjur
92. Masters Of Their Fate
93. Fuck Yes
94. Ride Of The Valkyries
95. Original Norse
96. Odin’s Warriors
97. The Long Way
98. The Voice Of Command
99. Keep Working
100. Through The Looking Glass
101. A Familiar Visitor
Author’s Note & Info