Chapter 22
DION
I wanted to kill them all! I wanted to rip them to shreds! My fur was on fire and my rage was unquenching. The Lady Skol had tried to kill me so cowardly? Me!
Except her monstrous men were running away. The Singer was dead…
Then I heard it. A siren screeching like that of the Siren Singer, but it didn’t sound painful. In fact, it was soothing. My wounds began to heal, and the flames extinguished. I felt calm and safe as if I was in the comfiest chair at the Whiteclaw Keep.
The men-like creatures were running in every direction.
Some of them dying as they stood, others went crazy and ran frothing at the mouth, others disappeared into thin air.
All the while I felt peaceful. Feyra looked peaceful.
She stood like me, in awe of the beautiful music washing over us. Because it was music. A lovely melody.
A robed woman entered the temple, and suddenly it was just us. Even the bodies of the dead were gone.
She walked towards us with her head bowed, hands pressed together, and her hood pulled down low. She wore a gray gown, a regal wreath about her head was poking out the top. When she was in front of the altar, she stopped and pulled the hood away.
“My King and Queen,” she said happily. She raised her hands and the bonds tying Feyra to the stake disappeared. She waved them again and we were clothed, standing in front of her. When had I shifted back to my human form?
“Melania?” Feyra asked.
“I’m so glad that you came,” she replied, embracing her. “It has been too long, Diora.” Then she turned to me and held my cheek, like a mother does a child. “Elex.”
I was lost for words. What had been too long? We’d never been here, let alone met her? What was she on about? And Elex?
“How are you still alive?” Feyra asked. “You’ve been in my dreams, but those must be at least–”
“A few hundred years, yes,” she nodded sagely. “I have been alive in the same way you have been reborn, through the magic of the world. The simple truth that weaves itself among every living cell. I was kept alive because my work wasn’t finished. You were not avenged.”
She laughed and put a hand on Feyra’s shoulder. “My dear, I believe we’re scaring him. Maybe I should back up?”
“That would be more than nice,” I said. “How do you know her, Fey?”
Feyra too looked unsure how to answer. She was as confused as me in reality, her face said so. Yet… “In my dreams. I’ve been having odd dreams lately, more of them since coming closer to Jebra. Melania has been in them.”
This had to be foresight! She must have blended abilities. There was no other way to explain it.
“Come, sit,” Melania said.
Suddenly we were sitting in the temple as it had been hundreds of years earlier! The murals looked new, the carvings pristine, and the gold shone as if the sun was upon it.
“You two are the reborn King and Queen. You’ve been destined to overthrow Lady Skol because her long shadow of rule has ruined the balance of life. Her way of killing you was treacherous. And I am the worst of all because I allowed her in.” Her face was downcast, she avoided looking at us.
“But you weren’t to know,” Feyra said. “Lady Skol was a…a,” but Feyra didn’t know what to say.
“All the more I should have known,” Melania said.
“But the past is where it lies, let us not disturb the dust any longer.” She adjusted her cloak and straightened her sleeves.
“At the height of the Half-Moon Pack’s power, the city of Malwreith was a beautiful place full of wealth for all, equality for all, and safety for anyone.
We were a democratic place that placed no importance of one power over the other.
This was the decree of the King and Queen of each generation.
This was the belief of every citizen. The shifters were who they were as much as the singers and seers.
The men and women among us without powers were just as valuable also, for they possessed greater strength and will than any other.
Without power, they relied on their own ingenuity.
“But as you have been destined to overthrow Lady Skol, it had been prophesied that Malwreith would turn to cinder and ash. It would be destroyed and become known as Jebra. It was a prophecy that the King and Queen took seriously, but as time wore on, grew weary of. They hoped that it had passed, or never been. Not all prophecies come to fruition, but it was their hubris which ultimately caused their downfall. They believed that Malwreith was too strong to fall to pieces.”
The murals and paintings became more colorful as Melania spoke. It was as if the mural was moving. The flickering candlelight, which I’d not noticed before, made the people dance and sway. Horses galloped in the fields alongside the wolves, and the flames burned among the happy villagers.
“But the trouble hadn’t even started. The evening that the twin daughters of the King and Queen were born, a shooting star crashed out in the Wastelands.
” She watched her lap for a time. “Now it is known as Mograaw’s Keep, but then, it was the darkest pit known to man.
Its crash into the lands awoke something deep in the gorges of the Half-Moon.
Below the gardens. Much further down than the Royal Houses.
In the darkness unyielding, in the shadows long untouched by time and the sun, she came. ”
“Lady Skol,” Feyra uttered.
“You’ve seen the vision,” Melania said.
I was still staring at the two women as if they were completely insane. Who was this woman? How did Feyra know all this, even with dreams? My dreams were always uneventful. Always normal like everyone else.
“When a prophecy is spoken,” she said, turning to me now.
“It echoes across the ages, across the plains and through every cell living and dead. Those with foresight hear ripples of these, see visions through to the other side, and if taught, can enter it. Dreaming is one of the many gateways.” She smiled at Feyra.
“But Roman had taught himself quite a bit when he found me.”
My jaw dropped. She smiled then and clicked her fingers. Beside her suddenly was an enormous wolf with burning eyes and smoldering fur. It was Roman! He panted with his tongue out.
“Roman!” I jumped to my feet in excitement. But then I realized that this was in fact a dream. The truth trickled through, Feyra was still tied to the stake and I was asleep on the ground as a wolf. We were alone in the temple. And yet–
“The ghost of Jebra,” Melania said. “Is me.”
“How?” was all I could ask.
She smiled. “As I’ve been saying. Dreams are powerful things.
Prophecies are powerful things. But misheard?
Or misused? Very dangerous. And Lady Skol with her own pride has made that mistake time and time again.
She is a predator of the deep. A monster of this world but long forgotten.
She is of the old magic, the purest form of magic.
Sheer power but no control. Her only ambition is to keep her power.
“And all those years ago, when the prophecies echoed down into the dark recesses where she’d dwelt, she’d been awoken to the fact that she was mortal.
Ever since, she has done all she could to retain her position.
But she is foolish because she misheard the prophecies.
And in her mishearing has damned herself with every wrong mistake she’s made–”
“She killed me here, didn’t she?” Feyra said.
Melania nodded. “To my utmost horror. In the Temple of Life she committed the greatest sin, but it was her first mistake. She killed the wrong person. Her greatest enemy, which she’d perceived as Diora the Queen, had only just been born.
You see, Lady Skol’s greatest enemy as told in the prophecy, would be the long descendant of the King Elex.
The forgotten son of Malwreith has been lost to time.
And I have spent years destroying and covering up his existence.
For it was the forgotten son’s decedent, who would father the Alpha that would rise up against her.
He who would guide the Reborn Queen across the Warlands to her ultimate truth.
He who would be a leader but could never lead.
And it was he, who would be the blind man to die in the Temple of Dhrum. ”
I stared at her for a long time. I was unable to breath. I couldn’t get a breath in. Every time I tried, I just couldn’t make my lungs work. The blind man to die in the Temple of Dhrum…
“Dion?” Feyra asked. “Dion, are you okay?”
“He is in shock, dear,” Melania said.
Sweat broke out on my forehead, I felt clammy and claustrophobic. “How do you know this?” I stammered. My heart was seizing in my chest, trying to break free. I looked at the great wolf beside her, it shifted on its haunches.
Words rebounded around my head, her haunting words never ending. Die in the Temple of Dhrum…Guide the Reborn Queen…Father the Alpha…
“Roman was–” but I couldn’t say it.
“Yes,” she said. “Roman was your true father.”
The wolf howled a long piercing note that shattered all realms and souls. It dove deeply into my heart and then left my body as a howl of my own. The wolf howled once more, and began fading into the wind.
“Your father was burdened with many things, chiefly the hardest, that he could never acknowledge his position as your father. Just as he couldn’t lead, he couldn’t be anything more than a guide.
His destiny had always been with the Half-Moon pack, not the Whiteclaws.
But to hide his, and your, bloodline, he had to let his brother take control. ”
I still couldn’t breathe. And now I saw myself, my wolf in the ruined temple, shaking and seizing. I was having an attack. I was having a nightmare. I was–
“Your father has hidden you from these dreams for a long time, Dion. You believe you have never dreamed, that you have never had anything more than an ordinary night’s sleep. But you have always been watched over. It’s time for you to wake up. To your true self–”
I snapped awake, my jaws gnashing at the air! I would kill them all, kill all of the–
I was alone in the temple. Feyra was still tied to the stake, but her eyes were rolling in the back of her head. Her whites were showing. She was convulsing.
Feyra!
She blinked, awakening and stepping forward. The ropes were gone! The bounds and sores. The searing burns of the flame…there was no sign that we’d been burned alive at all!
But the dream…Melania… we still wore her clothes.
“Melania,” Feyra began.
“You dreamed it too?” I asked.
“We didn’t dream it,” she replied, nodding with her head.
I turned; hovering in front of us was the ghostly form of Melania. She looked exactly the same, and looking through her ghost, the temple was as beautiful as it had been.
“The end of my time has come,” she said. “I have fulfilled my redemption for the prophecies I cast. For dabbling in the magic women are forbidden to touch.”
“But what do you–” My mouth snapped shut.
“I have recorrected the course.” She paused, looking at us both. “How wise you were, Diora. If only I’d listened to you quicker.”
“I’m not ready to leave you,” Feyra said.
“Dreams are always a gateway.”
“But how is your seeing different to Roman’s—my, my father’s?” I yelled.
Melania began to fade away. The temple through her began to dull. She smiled one last time as her body disappeared. “One only sees truthfully when one doesn’t see at all! What is there, is there!”
A heartbeat later we were alone in the temple. There was no Melania, no Ghost of Jebra, just us. Feyra and myself. She reached out and took my hand.
And our wolves howled inside.