Game of Alphas Batlle for Vengence

The dream always began the same way. Fire first. Then screaming. Then silence so complete it was worse than the fire. James bolted upright in his cot, chest heaving, fingers clawing at the rough blanket beneath him as though the ground itself might give way. The small hut was dark except for the dying embers in the hearth, and for a few terrible seconds he did not know where he was. The shadows on the wall looked like bodies falling. The smell of smoke from the fire smelled like something else entirely. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes and breathed. Slow. In. Out. He was twenty-two years old and he had been having this dream since he was old enough to remember having dreams at all. The wizard had told him once, almost gently, that it was simply the mind processing fear. That young wolves often had violent dreams. That it meant nothing. James had believed him for years. He did not believe him anymore. He found the wizard at the edge of the tree line as the sun broke over the hills, bent over a bowl of something dark and quietly muttering to it. Odell was not a tall man. He was thin in the way that very old men become thin, as though time had been slowly taking back what it lent him. His white hair caught the morning light. His hands, even now, were steady. James had always found those hands reassuring. He found them less reassuring lately. "The dream came again," James said. Odell did not look up from his bowl. "You should sleep longer. A warrior who does not sleep is only half a warrior." "I slept fine until the screaming started." That made the old man pause. He set down the bowl, wiped his hands on a cloth tucked at his belt, and turned. His eyes were the color of deep water, and they settled on James with the particular weight of a man who was deciding how much to say. "The same dream." "The same dream. People dying. Blood on the ground. A gate." James stepped closer. "Odell. I need to know what it means." "Dreams do not always mean..." "Do not." James’s voice was quiet, but there was something in it that made the wizard go still. "Do not tell me it means nothing. I have had it for fourteen years. The same fire. The same screaming. The same gate swinging open in the dark." He stopped. "Someone opens that gate from the inside. Every time. I see it every time and I never know who it is." Odell was quiet for a long moment. The birds in the tree line continued their morning noise. The wind moved through the grass. Somewhere far off, a wolf called to no one. "Sit down, James." "I do not want to sit down." "Sit down anyway." * * * He told the story the way a man tells a story he has held too long in pieces, with long silences between them, each word placed carefully as though the wrong one might break something. The Silverfang Clan. James’s parents. The Alpha and the Luna, whose names Aldric and Mara... Odell spoke like a prayer, or like an apology. The Bloodthorn attack. The night everything ended. James sat on a flat stone at the edge of the clearing and listened without moving. His face was very still. Anyone watching might have thought he was calm. They would have been wrong. "They came in the night," Odell said. "The Bloodthorn warriors. Dozens of them. Your parents fought." He stopped. "They fought the way great wolves fight when they know they are going to lose. They fought to buy time." "Time for what?" "For me to get you out." James looked at him. "You were two years old. You were asleep in the back room of the great hall when the first walls came down. Your father found me. He put you in my arms." Odell’s voice was flat and carefully controlled. "He said: take him. Hide him. Tell him nothing until the time is right." A pause. "And then he went back." "He went back into the fight." "Yes." James stood up. He could not sit still anymore. He walked three paces to the left and stopped and stood facing the tree line, his back to the wizard, and for a while he did not say anything at all. He felt the rage building somewhere deep in his chest like a fire being lit — slow, deliberate, unstoppable. "Selena," he said finally. "My sister." "Taken. They did not kill her." Odell’s voice was careful. "They took her." "Why." "There is a prophecy, James. There has always been a prophecy. A Deliverer who would unite the clans. The Bloodthorn Alpha was afraid of it. Killing Selena risked her being reborn to fulfill it. So instead, they kept her. They raised her as their own. They erased who she was." James turned around. "Erased." "Dark magic. A potion, every few months. She does not remember you. She does not remember your parents. She does not remember the Silverfang name." Odell looked at him steadily. "As far as Selena knows, she is a Bloodthorn princess and always has been." The silence that followed was not like the others. It had weight. It had temperature. James’s hands were shaking. He looked down at them the way a man looks at something he does not recognize, and then he pressed them together and looked back up. "How long," he said, "have you known all of this." And there it was. There was the question Odell had been dreading for twenty years. "Since the beginning," the wizard said quietly. James nodded slowly. He looked away. He looked at the tree line and the hills beyond and the pale morning sky, and his face was the face of a man rearranging everything he knew about his life into a new shape, one that fit this information, one that made this make sense. It took a while. "Tell me about the Bloodthorn stronghold," he said at last. "Tell me everything." He almost walked straight out of the camp that morning. Almost. Odell’s hand on his arm, quiet and firm: “If you go to them as yourself, you will be dead before sundown. And everything your father bought with his life — your life — will be wasted.” James had stood in the doorway of the hut for a long moment, breathing. Then he came back inside. "Tell me the plan," he said. "Whatever plan you have been sitting on while I slept and had nightmares for twenty years. Tell me." Odell reached under the old wooden table and brought out a cloth-wrapped bundle. He unwrapped it slowly, and James stared at what lay inside: a severed head, preserved by magic, perfectly intact, eyes closed, expression neutral. The face of a man James did not recognize but who was clearly a warrior, strong jaw, old scar across the cheekbone, the particular look of a man accustomed to power. "His name was Garrick," Odell said. "One of Draven Bloodthorn’s most trusted men. Spy. Enforcer. Loyal to no one but himself and his Alpha." He paused. "I killed him six months ago and kept the head for the magic." "That is disturbing." "That is strategy." The transformation took three hours and felt like being unmade and rebuilt from scratch. When it was done, James stood in front of the cracked mirror Odell kept behind the door and looked at a face that was not his. Heavier jaw. Broader nose. The old scar across the cheekbone. Garrick’s eyes staring back at him, flat and dangerous and entirely wrong. He reached up and touched his own cheek. The reflection copied the gesture perfectly. Garrick’s hand. Garrick’s fingers. "This is going to be a problem," James said. His voice came out with a slight roughness that was not his either. "You will adjust." "Odell." He turned. "There is something else I need to know. The gate in my dream. The one that opens from the inside." He watched the old man’s face. "Someone let the Bloodthorns in that night. A Silverfang." Odell’s expression did not change. It was the very stillness of it that told James what he needed to know. "We will speak of that another time," the wizard said. "No. We will speak of it now." "James..." "Who opened the gate." Another long silence. Then: "I don’t know yet," Odell said. "But I intend to find out." It was not quite a lie. James had been around the old man long enough to know the difference. It was not quite the truth either.