A warrior's song

CHAPTER THREE

OPHELIA’S POV

I honestly don’t know how exactly I’m expected to convince the alpha of the silent moon pack. I know I’m going to pretend to be some weak, powerless human, but what next? Or was it normal to recruit weak humans into that pack? Will they just see me and randomly take pity on a stranger they didn’t even know?

These were the questions that stayed in my head as I met my mother's steel gaze head-on. They always told me that I looked just like her, but every time I looked at her, all I saw was a mother who had become so cold that she was willing to sacrifice her own daughter for her ambition.

“You will be leaving this coven today.” She said those words so smoothly, almost like she had been waiting to say them all her life. “You are not to be back here until you have fulfilled your mission and gathered significant information on the wolf packs. Every little information you may gather will be important. Be it how they walk, talk, sleep, and breathe, but the most important information I need is their weakness. A weakness, so great that it could crush an entire army of them faster than even the strongest spells.”

I had heard this a thousand times, but hearing it now felt… different. Maybe it was the whispers from the crowd gathered around that were getting to me, or the fact that I was actually leaving today, but… There was this feeling in my gut that I couldn’t shake off.

Maybe because I was realising that things were really going to change now, and they might never go back to the way they were, and I didn’t know how to feel about that. Is this what foreboding felt like?

A gut feeling told me that everything I had endured until now was just child's play, and soon I would be experiencing much worse things, and it bothered me because my life up until now wasn’t exactly any little girl's dream, but to think it was going to get worse?

Usually, I was a witch with little to fear. I could wake a soul from the dead if I chose to, as long as the body was still warm and all body parts were intact. So what could it be that caused this feeling?

I felt the same way that night I was chased by that wolf, when I went to scout their area. My thoughts were cut short when the crowd began to disperse.

I looked to see if mother was still on the podium, but she was not. Of course. I expected nothing less from the unfeeling witch. “Phee!” I looked in the direction the voice came from to find Edward pushing his way through the crowd to get to me, with Victoria not too far behind him.

Meeting them halfway, I was immediately engulfed in the warmth of my two favourite people, the only ones I was convinced cared about me. “You'd better write to me at every opportunity you get. Do you hear me?” I felt the corners of my lips draw up in a smile at her words.

“Only if you focus on training and visit me in my dreams as soon as possible,” I said, snuggling further into them. “Don’t worry, Phee, I'll train hard so that I'll be strong enough to protect you really soon, okay?” I looked into the most beautiful pair of green eyes I had ever seen, feeling my heart turn to mush in my chest.

“Okay, love, I'll be waiting for you then.”

As soon as those words left my lips, a loud thud sounded throughout the meeting grounds, followed by mother’s crisp voice. “Time is up. Goodbye, Ophelia Lockwood. I wish not to see you until you have made the Vancouer’s proud.” Of course, that’s all my life has ever been about.

Feeling the panic grip my chest, I turned around and gripped Victoria’s hand hard, “Please take care of him for me.” That was all I could say before the darkness surrounded me and I was transported out of the coven.

When I opened my eyes, I found myself in completely unfamiliar surroundings. This looked nothing like any of the five wolf packs I had been scouting for the past year.

I felt anger bubble up inside me as I realised that she sent me to unfamiliar grounds. Taking a deep breath, I tried calming myself down as I took in my surroundings.

There was nothing to take in. I was in the middle of the bloody woods! Closing my eyes, I tried listening for any movement or sign of activity that could lead me in the direction of civilisation. I had been listening for over 30 minutes before I heard it.

It was so faint that I would have thought I imagined it, but I could tell from the vibrations and shift of wind that the earth was being disturbed repeatedly, somewhere that seemed a bit faraway, but not impossible to get to.

Quickly masking my scent and presence, I began to walk in that direction, the weight of the future weighing heavily on me.

FIVE YEARS LATER……

My lungs were burning, and my thighs begged me to stop, but I couldn’t. It had been five years of roaming this terrible werewolf realm, and Mother had quickly become impatient, appearing in my dreams so often that I was too tired to even block her out. These days, I quickly came to realise that it was much better to just ignore her, but that was easier said than done, considering she was literally in my head.

She really couldn’t punish me when she was still behind the barrier, so I was safe… at least for now. Unable to take the strain anymore, I stopped under a tree and leaned against it to catch my breath.

I knew I couldn’t just walk up to any random pack and ask them to take me in. The mere fact that I was without a wolf alone was questionable, because not a lot of humans could get into these supernatural lands and still be living, breathing beings.

I had been acting like a lost human between these borders for these years, and so far, I haven’t been able to get any useful information from the packs that had taken me in.

The first pack that took me in had an alpha who was power-obsessed. Sometimes, I really did wonder if all that he did was worth it. He would intentionally pick fights with smaller packs close to his border and go to war with them, just so that he could conquer them and ‘teach them not to mess with him.’

It didn’t make any sense to me. I had once heard that werewolves were territorial and egoistic, but this was taking things to a completely different level. He never even listened to his mate. Apparently, their mate is their ‘other half’, the one person that just magically happened to be made for them, and they were supposed to spend the rest of their lives together loving and caring for each other. At least that was what the omegas I worked with told me.

The thought alone made me gag. Maybe it was the kind of environment I grew up in, but I hardly even believed in the entire concept of ‘love’, but to take it a step further and say that there were actually people who were destined for each other? I think everybody should know the difference between fairy tales and real life.