CHAPTER TWO
1366 Words
The hall was very cold, much more than usual even with the presence of fire everywhere.
Kael entered the big doors of the Alpha lodge, dripping with blood and sweat out of the shift. The stone echoed when he kicked off his boots, but, when he went inside, his father was there, already sitting on the high-backed chair, carved with the emblem of the Moonfire wolf.
Alpha Thorne did not turn round at once. Then he twirled something dark in a glass, I guess aged wolfbane wine and then spoke.
You did very well tonight, you did the right thing.”
Kael bit his lips and his hands closed on his sides. His wolf was at grips with him.
I didn’t do it because of you.
Then the Alpha glanced up, with incarnate eyes of ice and steel. No, he said. This was your own doing because you knew what was at stake.
Kael remained mute.
He could still sense her, Aria, the phantom tugging at the bond that was still in his chest like a knife half-driven in. He had shredded them to pieces before the relationship had had a chance of settling deeply, but the memory of it… it bothered him.
She is a menace, the Alpha voiced on. That girl is not like us, Not fully. Did you see the light around her? how the trees had stirred as she moved out?”
Kael glared at the fire, and refused to reveal emotion. What happens when the threat is not her but us, what we have done to her?
His father arose slowly, with glass in his hand.
Weakness is made to deceive by sympathy. You were born as a leader, not to be a victim to a curse woven in silver blood.”
Kael whirled, then. “You knew.”
A pause.
Alpha Thorne smiled under his moustaches. We have been aware of that since ages. The momnt that the seer inscribed her name on the ashes. She is a remnant of the house of Selene. We allowed her live because she hasn’t undergo the transformation and she was always in solitude but now, she has.”
“And now?” Coldly Kael asked.
Now we allow her to run. Let a fear break her. If she should come back…” The tone of his voice was quiet. “we put an end to it.”
Kael did not move and the blood was roaring in his ears.
He spoke not a word. Not even when his father, came past him and went out into the cold gloomy night.
However, in her heart Kael knew she was broken. He had been a law abiding citizen. He had done as the prophecy bids.
But still it seemed that he had committed the greatest of mistakes.
"Rinna’’
Rinna sucked her lips shut and looked round at the growing throng. Time is gone. You must go away. Now.”
“What?”
Rinna said in a decisive tone: “Listen.” the bond broke before the entire pack. Older people are already speaking. Some already saw the silver fire. They will declare you dangerous or even worse a threat to the prophecy.”
I did not do anything wrong!”
Aria, they do not care. When Kael rejected you, he gave them permission to turn on you.”
The pulses of Aria felt as if they were beating in her ears. Where would I go, I say?
Her aunt put something in her palm. A tiny purse made of leather. Inside was dried herbs, a pinchful of moonstone powder, and a compass whose needle swiveled and clinked till it settled permanently one way north.
And use instructions by compass. Do not look back.
Aria froze. “The Wildwood?”
It is the only place they will not follow you to.
But you said I should not go there.
I had been telling you what the old folk wanted me to say to you, Rinna said. And I told you also to follow your instincts. And just now they are calling you to run.
Enforcers were coming. She could see them through the smear of her tears were black uniforms, red stripes on their arms. They did not come there to offer comfort.
They were in place to oppress her.
“Aunt Rinna…”
The voice of her aunt chipped. I love you Aria. You must get through this. You will never get another opportunity. Run.”
She ran.
As the edge of the village. Beyond the Moonfire fields of training. Across the mist-vale which meant the boundary between the wildernesses of the pack and the forbidden wood.
Her lungs became inflamed. She had bleeding feet.
Still, she did not stop.
She did not turn round.
No, when she felt the cold wind blow after her.
Not when in the distant distances she heard one wolf howl.
not a call, it is a warning.
Not even when the pain that lingered deep down her soul, trying its best to burst through the back of her eyes, clouded her vision.
She crosses into the Wildwood.
The forest was alive.
Literally and not in a metaphorical sense. Trees crouched a little as she came. Leaves whispered. Branches moved aside, and there was space in between the roots so that she might place her foot there. The wind ceased its howling, now it hummed low and reverberant, like a heartbeat.
She slowed.
Her wolf, still wounded, whimpered in the back of her mind, but the pain was gradually being exchanged with something new.
Calm.
Acceptance.
The Wildwood made no rebuff to her.
It was a home to her.
There was the broken silence of a growl.
Aria froze.
In the darkness before him two yellow eyes winked open. Then another. And another.
A rogue.
No, it’s a feral. She had heard tales of wolves thrown out so long because they had lost their sense of reasoning them all reason gone. They went mad. Their odour was bad. Their eyes grew insane. They turned into scavenges and predators that hunted anything that had blood.
The ruffian appeared upon his feet.
Bones were stuck together with flesh, that was the way his skin and bones became one. Splashes of fur were gone. he snarled, showing red stained jagged teeth.
Aria stepped back.
She rattled to move. Clawed fingers appeared halfway and died out. Her wolf whined again too exhausted too desolate to get wholly up.
The renegade went charging.
She had prepared herself because she knew that she could not fight like this.
Yet she was not killed.
It was because something more quick than himself struck at the rogue just as he was in the act of leaping full length off the ground, and hurled him bodily sideways into a tree with splash.
A motion blur. This is cloak and claw. One creature, bouncing with incredible ballet, kicked the throat of the feral, and with a blast of violet light tossed him back over its shoulder.
Aria trod stumbling half-blind.
Magic.
Physical, primeval, undisguised.
At the fade of the light the rogue had disappeared. The only sign that he had ever passed through was a burned mark of the forest floor.
The character slowly turned around.
and high, and battle-scarred, in black and red. They were hidden by a hood, and yet their presence was unquestionable.
Power, curbed and cured like a knife in the silence.
The figure came and said to aria. "you are bleeding.
Aria blinked. Who… are you?
a person who does not like to clean up dead pups, dryly said the figure.
“You shouldn’t be in this forest’’
She whispered, I did not choose to be here.
Your choices are never out.
Aria fell on her knees. A power broke within her, and all there was left was nothing but questions.
The character gave a sigh and knelt. The gloves touched her hair away.
They said, whisperingly, you have the scent of the moon.
And then in louder tones: Come, somebody is waiting on you.”
Then she caught another voice in the forest, before she could faint.
She is the one who came back.
- Writer
