Warnings and Portents
1074 Words
They made their way back from the clearing and went straight to their room. Adrian mumbled that he had Princely duties to attend to and quickly left the room. Esther sighed, she knew he was probably just going to go figure out the quickest and easiest way to kill Alpha Jake without causing an uproar in the wolf communities.
This particular fight is a little difficult to strategize for because the relationship between our species is strained to the brink of an all-out war. The problem is, the dragons believe the wolves were responsible for the attack that leveled the Southern Kingdom and killed its' Royal Family. The wolves, however, believe that it was an inside job, and that whoever did it, framed the wolves. This resulted in meetings, ripe with tension and arguing, that ended with no clear solutions on either side. The more transcripts Esther read from prior meetings, the more it became clear that there may be something more sinister at work. Everyone in these meetings seemed irrationally riled up, and none of them appeared to make any kind of logical sense. Frowning in concetration, she heard the office door open, but didn't look up right away. It wasn't until she heard the woman's voice that Esther gave her undivided attention to the intruder in the room.
Looking up from the file she was reading, Esther raised her eyebrows at the audacity of this woman standing before her. Looking her up and down Esther smirked,
"Before you speak woman, I don't care who you are, who you think you are, or what kind of relationship you THINK you have/had with the prince-he's mine. Our souls bonded, I know EVERYTHING about him...including his memories. I know who you are ALICE. Stay away from my mate or I'll end you b***h," she snarled.
Alice's smirk died on her lips, to be replaced with steaming hot rage. Smoke seemed to pour out of the woman before Esther, BUT that would be a silly notion, because this woman was NO DRAGON. Immediately on high alert, Esther quickly stood up and circled around her desk until she stood between the fake dragoness and her only exit. They were pretty high up in the tower, even a werewolf wouldn't survive the fall if she were to jump out the window instead. Unfortunately for Alice, she had no idea the extent of Esther's powers-which meant the magic Alice was using to cloak herself and keep herself aloft with all the other dragons, wasn't going to work. Alice froze in fear as the shadows in the room darkened and came alive. Her eyes nervously flitted back and forth between the window and Esther, a low whine escaped her throat as her wolf could no longer stay silent. Alice's eyes widened at the sound that left her involuntary lips and she paled as Esther stalked closer to her. The lamps in the office began to flicker as Esther turned up the voltage on her magic as she attempted to force the she-wolf to comply with her demands.
The door suddenly burst open just as Esther shrieked her demand at the she-wolf. The she-wolf crumped to the floor panting in submission. She looked up into the terrifying eyes of her Prince, former lover and soon-to-be enemy, and found nothing but black pits of endless void. His eyes blazed hate and an immense heat, and his nostrils flared as he took in the smell of PREY.
His scowl deepened as he tasted the air around her and he realized, this woman was no dragoness. He thought back to when she first showed up in his life and he paled as he realized the implications. His rage came on so quickly, if it weren't for Esther he would have incinerated the woman on contact.
"What do you know about the destruction of the Southern Kingdom?" he snarled.
He knew he was on the right track because as he threw the question at her, she paled and tried to shrink into the floor. He grabbed her by the scruff of her neck and shook her like the b***h she was.
"Maybe a few nights in my dungeon with my guards will loosen your tongue," he threatened.
Without any prompting, two guards suddenly appeared at his side and, no questions asked, dragged Alice to her feet and out of the room. Esther leaned her head on her love's shoulder as they stood there listening to the traitors wails as she proclaimed her innocence to anyone who would listen. She had turned the magic back on as soon as she was out of Esther's sight, so there were some dragons who weren't okay with what they saw and misinterpreted what had happened as nothing more than their new queen being jealous of her Prince's former lover.
Esther's mind filled up with palace chatter as the servants and some of the older dragon nobility began to gossip and speculate about what had just taken place. She sat down in a chair with her head in her hands feeling suddenly...heavy. She felt a warm hand on her shoulder, and without glancing up gently rested her hand over his.
"We are going to have quite a mess to explain to the courts tomorrow and it's going to end up being a massive headache...I can already tell," she said wearily.
He looked confused for a second, and when she hadn't gotten a response to her statement, she looked up and realized that he couldn't hear their thoughts like she could yet. Without much thought she blasted the details of the conversations she had heard straight to his brain, grinning when he winced at the volume with which most of his older subjects thought their thoughts. As he listened to the conversations, she saw his face go from perplexed, to annoyed and then settle on resigned,
"I suppose I should have seen this coming, but we won't have anything to worry about come tomorrow. She's going to be in the dungeons until she is sentenced. She won't be able to escape, and no one will be able to rescue her She will tell us what we need to know and then she will be tried and most likely executed for High Treason-treaty with the wolves be damned. It'll be done with," he reasoned.
Esther nodded, but in the back of her mind, she wondered if maybe this was just the start.
- Writer
