Silje Storstrand

> I don't want to have to choose who I can and can't help.
>
>

Silje by Marina Charalambides

**Silje Storstrand** is the deuteragonist of *The Prophecies of Ragnarok* trilogy. She works in a nursing home in Oslo, Norway and she winds up in Hotel Fen after a resident dies and she's left an all-expense paid vacation package in his will. She is the love interest of Victor Elysan.

## Appearance

Silje is "barely five feet tall," with amber eyes and brown skin. Her hair is brown and wavy, coming all the way to the middle of her back, but it is most of the time kept up in a high bun. She's petite but fit, and she has a kind and friendly demeanor, with Victor noting that she has a "warm laugh" and "bright smile."

## Personality

Silje is family-oriented, devoted and loyal. She's a born caregiver, and she takes her responsibilities very seriously. She always wants to help and do the right thing, even if at times she neglects her own needs in the process of caring for others. Indifference frustrates her, as does unkindness.

She's a romantic, and she likes the idea of soulmates, but not having to give up free will. She believes in seeing the good in others first and in granting second chances, though despite her good intentions things don't always end well.

She's tougher than she looks, proving herself to be a woman of grit, resourcefulness and great survival instincts.

## History

### Childhood

Silje is an only child. She's noted that her father loved to tell stories, especially during winter. Her favorite story was about a boy who was magically shrunk to the size of an ant and was swept away into an ant colony, where he became a worker and had to count the eggs one by one. The point of the story was to get her to sleep, with her father counting for as long as it took for her to.

### Hotel Fen

Silje's on the last day of her vacation when she meets Victor, who's just arrived and finished checking in. They share a very long elevator ride up to the eighth floor as their rooms are right next to each other. He accidentally opens the adjoining door between their rooms, catching her in a towel as she's just finished taking a shower, and he invites her to lunch to apologize. Though she's apprehensive, she can't bring herself to stay mad either, so she agrees. On the way down, the elevator suddenly lurches to a stop after she jokes that the hotel might really be named Hotel *Fenris*, but it starts back up again after the "apologizes."

After lunch they go up the hill to resume their 'wolf hunt,' where they wind up talking about destiny and free will. She says that likes the idea of soulmates, but that she also wouldn't want to be stuck in something preordained where she doesn't have the option to accept or refuse.

She's on her way to leave the hotel when the snowstorm rolls in and the hotel loses power. Victor comes out of his room and finds her waiting by the elevator when they hear a strange sound from one of the rooms. They check it out, but are spooked by the banging on the opposite side of the adjoining door, as well as the fact that the handle on the stairwell door next to the elevator has morphed into a wolf's head and would no longer budge. He decides to leave and head back to Oslo with her, so they go into his room to grab his things. While helping him pack his stuff, she comes across his journal, and in it he finds a name scribbled repeatedly like a madman's writing: *S-I-G-R-I-D-R*. Somehow she gets the feeling that it's her name, or something that she would've been named with.

The wolf's head in the bathroom transforms into a real wolf and comes after them. Abandoning most their things, they run to the nearest exit, but the wolf bursts out of the room and Victor pushes her away so she could escape. She watches as they wrestle and eventually fall into the stairwell and down the stairs, killing the wolf. Victor barricades the door with the dead wolf's body.

Just as they turn to leave, they hear a soft mewl, and they find a black Norwegian forest cat beneath the wolf's carcass. The cat doesn't seem to like Silje, but she gives the feline a look anyway and deduces that she's injured her hind leg. They eventually decide to keep her, instead of knocking on the doors to search for her owner. Victor names her Ada.

They move across and down the floors; the hotel seems to be forcing them to zigzag their way to the lobby, with the knobs of the stairwell doors magically transforming into wolf heads to prevent them from using them. Silje starts having flashes of a man with Victor's blue eyes, and she comes to the conclusion that she's seeing things from the perspective of a woman named Sigridr, the man's lover, though she doesn't know who she is and how it is even possible to be having these hallucinations.

On the sixth floor they see writings on the windows, though Victor sees runes while Silje sees *H-E-L-P*. They also start hearing ugly wails from within the rooms, before the doors start opening, forcing them to flee. He shoves her into the stairwell door for her safety and she's unable to open it from the opposite side, and when he finally comes through after fighting whatever had emerged from the doors, he refuses to talk about what happened.

They meet Erik by the door leading to the fifth floor, another guest of the hotel and one that Silje knows. She's relieved to see him, but Victor and Ada are both wary. They continue traveling down while tension builds between Victor and Erik, and it intensifies when they reach the third floor and catch Victor talking to the shadows in a language they don't understand.

Reaching the second floor, they are attacked by two large wolves, but Victor fights them and eventually orders them to leave. Freaked out by Victor's apparent control of the wolves and accusing him of the weird things that have been happening to them, Erik turns on Victor and tries to shoot him. Ada, however, comes to the rescue, and a fight ensues between the two men. Silje intervenes and tries to break up the fight, but when she grabs the knife that Erik fought Victor with, she gets a vision of the blue-eyed man drowning Sigridr on the beach.

Confused by what she's seen and everything that's happened, she doesn't realize until it's too late that Erik has grabbed her hand with the knife and stabbed Victor in the stomach with it. Erik then tries to strangle her, but Victor gets up and fights him with Ada's help, forcing Erik to retreat.

She tends to Victor's wound, horrified by the realization that she had nearly killed him. It also sinks into her that *she* is Sigridr and *he* is Vidar, reincarnated. Ada finds her the key to a medicine cabinet, and when she's fairly sure she had the bleeding under control she heads out to collect medicine and supplies, and even spare clothes and pillows and beddings from the janitor's closet. Victor regains consciousness sometime later, and after talking about what they remember, they reconcile.

They get some sleep. A few hours pass but the storm still rages on, and she and Ada get up to raid the vending machine for breakfast. Ada leads her into discovering that there is a secret passageway behind the vending machine, and after they eat they proceed to explore it, hoping that it's a way out. Instead they wind up in Ivaldi's workshop and meet their cat's dwarf friend, who knows her and Victor's past incarnations and gifts them with their old possessions and some weapons and armor. They speculate about Loki and what he might want of them, and how Sigyn, his wife in the myths, might have actually been Sigridr, only there had been some sort of translation error.

A large shadow creature then breaks into the workshop and tries to abduct Silje, but Victor, Ivaldi and Ada fight it off. They then follow the tunnel carved up by the creature. Along the way they are met by a ghost that bears a resemblance to Vidar, who tells them that he and many others have been trapped. Silje wonders if there was a way to free them; the ghost calls her "Valkyrie" and says that she knows how. Realizing she *does* know how, though she doesn't understand how she knows, she wills herself to Dream.

She first meets Jormungandr, one of Loki's children, who confirms that Sigridr had been a Valkyrie, and reveals that it's not Loki but her brother Fenris who's lured them into the hotel. Loki appears next. He accuses Odin of warmongering in order to prevent his preordained fall at Ragnarok and tries to convince Silje to cut ties with the Aesir, but she declares that he's lying and that she will always choose Vidar over him. Loki breaks away from the dream in a fit of rage.

She wakes up to find the tunnel littered with lights, which she recognizes as souls. She releases them to the afterlife with Victor's help.

They eventually arrive in the crystal cavern at the end of the tunnel, where Erik (who they now know is Fenris) is waiting. The entire party battles him but Silje is wounded in the process, as he catches her on the side with his jaws. Victor ultimately defeats him, ripping his jaw while he's in wolf form — ironically fulfilling what had been foretold in the prophecy.

Victor carries her out and promises to give her a unicorn house. Ada brings him a sewing kit, which at first confuses him until Silje tells him he has to sew up her wound. She loses consciousness while he does so, and when she wakes they're already in the car Ivaldi had commandeered. When she asks where they're going, Victor simply answers, "Home."

## Trivia

* She is confirmed by the authors to be half-Filipino. Her full name is Maria Silje Untalan Storstrand. Her mother is a nurse from Batangas, Philippines who immigrated to Norway. She doesn't use Maria, except when she has to fill out official or government forms.
* Her name is pronounced as *sil-ya* and she tells Victor it sounds like Cecilia.
* She can speak English, Norwegian and a little Tagalog. She later begins to understand and eventually speak Old Norse.
* She loves unicorns.
* Victor's team of endearment for her, *kosepus*, means 'little cat' in Norwegian.