The Shadow Wolf Chronicles: Book One

Origins

“Ravena Minerva Danes I know you don’t want to do this anymore. I know it hurts, but you have to push one more time. Your little girl is in there wanting to come out and you have to bring her into this world.” One of her mother’s handmaidens spoke to Ravena, patting her head with a damn cloth while she laid there on her birthing bed still. After hours of labour and pushing she just couldn’t take anymore. The many men she had drained trying to bring her child  into the world and now laid amidst them practically lifeless. Ravena shook her head, tears running down her face as she denied that urge to push when it came again. 

“Mildred, her heart beat is dropping, if she doesn’t push we will have to cut her out and we only have seconds to do that or she dies.” The assisting midwife spoke up and a hand placed on her mother’s stomach still between her legs to catch the child. She looked up in worry and everyone in the room was panicked, afraid both baby and mother would parish. “My queen you have to push!”

“I can’t! She’s so powerful I don’t have any energy left. Please don’t make me do this.” Ravena cried out to her ladies, nearly bawling not even caring how she looked right now. She wasn’t a queen right now, she was just another woman having a baby. 

“Ravena, you are strong. You have carried her against everyone’s recommendation to terminate, you knew she was strong. Now show her how strong her mother is or I will tear that child from your belly. Now Ravena, push!” Mildred lashed out at her queen, she would take the repercussions later. There was a small monument of pause while a maid grabbed a knife ready to hand it to the midwife, but by miracle Ravena sat up on her elbows and took a deep breath. With the exhale she started to push harder then before with determination. “That’s in! Okay take a deep breath and again!”

“I got a head! Keep going! One more big push my queen!” The midwife between Ravena’s legs called out holding onto her head and helped ease her out as her mother pushed once more. She used a silver dagger cutting the cord and tying it off before handing the babe over to the maids for cleaning. Jade’s mother smiled hearing her cry for the first time, barely hearing Mildred order more slaves from the cellar to feed her.  Her infant and first three years were the best and only good childhood memories she enjoyed. Her mother was kind then, treated her like a child should have been, but as her powers grew and she started to threaten her control of her kingdom. Once Jade became a threat that was enough, all threats ended two ways with Ravena, dead or slumber. 

Jade’s story starts when Ravena took over the angelic kingdom of Augustus by marrying the very immortal but human king August Augustus. Upon the marriage she became a mother to a young teen girl named Luna who wasn’t all she seemed to be. Luna showed promise of being a fine young queen with a good heart and that frightened Jade’s mother. Luna could steal her crown and her power was a threat, but the love in her heart for the girl was too much for Ravena to kill her. Instead she killed her father and put Luna into an eternal slumber where she herself was frozen in slumber, but her body would age until maturity and she would live a life in her mind. Ravena married again, but only for the land of an Incubus King named Amorous. After a few months she slaughtered him in his sleep and nine months later gave birth to his spawn, Alric. When the boy hit his teens and swore he would kill her because of his father's death, Ravena locked him away in a slumber as well, unable to kill her own child. 

Ravena married and killed for centuries, building a new kingdom and turning the Kingdom of Angels into the Kingdom of Darkness naming it Myanmar and with the darkness of the land came the darkness of her heart. Already deranged and driven mad over jealousy, the darkness that was in her grew until one day she met a man who’s darkness was far greater than her own. Their only light, the only thing that tinted the hate in their hearts was one another and they fell in love. She only knew his name, Elijah but nothing more. Her love for him came from him understanding her and her ways. He was just as dark if not darker then Ravena, but his true intentions were never revealed to his lover and when she told him she would bear him a child he vanished. When Ravena fell pregnant with another child, she thought maybe she could love this one because of her love for the father even if he left her alone. When he didn’t return she discovered her only purpose was to bear him this child and nothing more. She was left with his child, broken hearted and filled with rage for her neive ways. Still Ravena kept the babe as a way to hold onto him and the love she held for her lover. A child she named Jade and kept under lock and key most of her life.

You would think with how much she wanted Jade at first that her life was filled with joy and laughter, but as a she grew and reminded my mother more and more of my father, the more her hatred for her grew. She was just the one thing reminding her of what she couldn’t have and what had left her broken. The first time Jade was placed in a slumber, was because she was his daughter and nothing more at age five. Unlike her siblings she was woken up a few years later, now about what humans call eight years of age. For her mother and herself, it was a few hundred years of solitude. Her body aged slower in slumber, keeping her from missing too much in life, but it gave Ravena the relife she needed before Jade’s “training” actually began. At eight she was forced into lessons about being a proper princess, how to rule a kingdom and to be a lady, by ten she was learning things her mother wanted her to know. Don’t trust men, kill them all and rule with an iron fist, but seeing how it affected her mother and destroyed the kingdom with a darkened heart she didn’t want to be queen of anything. That landed her in her second slumber, disagreeing with her mother on how she governed the people and declaring when she became queen how she would change things really affected her. 

A few hundred years later Jade was awoken again now around fourteen and thrown back into her studies with the added lessons about how to control her powers or more contain them and hold back certain ones she wasn’t allowed to us. Ones for which only seemed to keep growing. Her mother watched her closely for days and when it came to surface Jade was what her mother feared, she locked her in the castle for good hiding who she truly was. Jade was never allowed to leave the inside and no one was to know what she could do or what she was. She found out later in the years that it was because she had a destiny to rule a kingdom that was not in her mother’s. She was, and still is, the legitimate heir to the throne her mother so desperately desires, Danes. Jade found a book in the library that helped her learn about what she was and where she learned that she was a shadow wolf. That was as far as the discovery took her before she didn’t want to deal with it anymore. She discovered she was only the second shadow wolf in existence and that it came with many prices. Not only did she  have immense powers that could be limitless, she  had no way of controlling the beast inside her. One was she could never have children or if she did she could risk her own death due to being cursed. This also landed her in her third slumber, only this time her mother didn’t have any intentions of waking her up, so she woke herself up. 

Now sixteen years old and around eight hundred earth years, she decided she didn’t want to be queen of anything. She would no longer be a princess or the long lost queen of a dying kingdom. After seeing what being a queen did to her mother and how she ruled the once glorious lands, she wanted nothing to do with anything that involved a title. She didn't want to be a shadow wolf, a queen, a princess or anything that made her have to govern others. She wanted out and with the help of her great grandmother  and her great, great grandmother she created a rift between worlds she traveled to wherever they guided her. Her small crack between worlds landed her in a place called earth in a small norse village. That was where her earth story began. That is where she had met her real family and lost them all at the same time. That was where Jade really became Jade and she would never go back to her old life or give into her nature.