Servant of the Moon #1 - unedited draft
prophecy of the wolf and the doe

Winterwolf, a Medieval Ballad by BrunuhVille

Two packs, two skills, one destiny... The prophecy...

BENJMIN is a ravenous wolf,

in the morning he devours his prey,

in the evening, he divides the plunder,

he serves the Goddess with honor,

as he lives by fang and by claw...

NAPHTAL is a lovely doe

set free she bears beautiful fawns,

she speaks lovely words and terrible truths,

as she is blessed by the Goddess,

taking possession of the sacred waters...

THEY shall lie in the fallow forest together,

predator and prey, protector and protected...

Long ago the descendants of the two smallest packs of the Jacobian Remnant united. One to protect and fight, one to guide and comfort. The Benjmin warriors and the Naphtal oracles shared a destiny. The Benjmin were warrior wolves known to be fierce predators cursed by centuries of foolish, conquering Alphas who caused many conflicts which had greatly divided their numbers until they were scattered among the rest of the Remnant. That was before the prophesy came.

The Naphtal were beautiful, dark haired, doe-eyed wolves, free spirited and gifted with the power to heal souls and see beyond this world. Their elders dreamed dreams and their children had visions, but warriors they were not, Many times the envious tried to destroy or subjugate them until the prophesy came. Since that time, the Naphtal Oracles live under the protection of the fierce warrior wolves of Benjmin in an alliance that had lasted for centuries and would last until the end of their days. Each generation brought a new oracle to counsel the traditional warriors, and each generation brought a new set of problems in their ever changing world.

Benjmin-Nephtal was a very small pack in the modern times, but they were wealthy from the tribute they received from the protection and training work of their warriors. The visions of their oracles also brought a boon. The doe-eyed Oracles of the Nephtal never asked for payment, but it was customary to give a fair tribute if their visions brought good fortune and as a result, the small pack had as much or more wealth than many much larger packs.

They also had influence, 6 of the last 10 Delphi or High Oracles had been Naphtal she-wolves. Together the packs’ had a symbiotic relationship, in spite of the fact that their numbers had dwindled greatly because sometimes the Oracles did not understand what they were seeing, and sometimes the Benjmin Alphas did not heed their warnings. The day of the latest Delphi’s birth was one such time.

~~~~~~~

Fifteen years ago... (almost 3 years before the births of Comhnyall and Moire of New Wemyss)

A heavily pregnant, dark-haired female thrashed and moaned in the throes of a vision. The water in her silver bowl vibrated with the force of the Moon’s tides beyond it.

Two pups floating in a basket in the center of the Moon’s reflection. The tides around them stilled, on the shore everything was burning, everything was in ruin. A wind came, ashes and embers moved across the surface of the water, swirling and dancing like autumn leaves. The basket tipped three times. Twice the babes held hands and remained together. But the third time, one of the babes fell into the water and sunk toward the light and the wolves waiting below the surface. The water turning red as blood, as the moon changed from white to crimson.

The Oracle cried out and her hand lashed out, trying to save the child. It struck the enameled lip of the silver bowl, splashing its contents and dousing the candle next to it. Struggling to breath, the Oracle slumped forward as her acolytes rushed to aid her. Tears streamed down her face, she sobbed from the horror of her vision. She touched one of her students, whispering.

“Tell the Alpha to come to me.”

Second Beta Jude Ayala had left his pregnant mate at the pack house nursery, even though she was near term, she was helping out with the pups again. Tamaza was the pack’s oracle, she and her acolytes were enjoying a rare day off. No wolves had come seeking visions from the Goddess. She would spend the day with the babies she loved and get some much needed rest, The Lunas, young and old, would see to that.

Jude would have no such luck. There was a border dispute with their southeastern neighbors again. The Des Rues pack insisted once more that they be allowed to annex the small pack of less than 200, for their own protection. But in truth the exiled royal wolves wanted to control the influence and wealth accumulated by the protectors of the Naphtal oracles.

Tamaza’s grandmother, the Elder Oracle Naomi was at the Temple of the Oracles interviewing candidates to be the next Delphi, or Highest Oracle. A position she had held for 3 decades. Followed by her granddaughter, Tamaza, who served for 15 years before handing it off to another oracle. That Oracle had barely made it 5 years before she was forced to step down from being the Goddess’ Servant and voice, and the werewolves’ teacher, seer, and counselor.

There were rumors that she was using her influence to help home pack, the Des Rues, and that her alpha had bribed or threatened several packs to get the backing of their elder oracles. The oracle had been sent home under threat of being stripped of her rank for corruption, leaving the temple without it’s highest office. A half dozen candidates were vying for the position, but only the Goddess Herself would decided.

Jude thought about Tam and how excited she was. Next week she would be giving him something almost unheard of in the wolf world, twins. Bearing and raising one pup at a time was difficult enough for a she-wolf, but twins would require him to step down from his position for a year to help her. A choice he would not hesitate to make. But he was worried about the choice she would make after the twins were weaned, would she return to being the Delphi? Or would they raise their family at their home?

Double the number of warriors patrolled the border between the Benjmin-Nephtal and Des Rues, but oddly the Alphas of Des Rues were not here today. Jude looked over the lines of wolves facing each other. He knew their warriors could easily take down those they faced. Old packs tended to rely on numbers and not the skill of their warriors. The Benjmin wolves took no such shortcuts. Each and every wolf in the pack, including the oracles and every juvenile over the age of 7 could fight, at least enough to defend themselves. Those without the ability to shift into their wolves always carried silver.

A howl went up along the Des Rues line and the wolves charged across the line.

Alpha Abram shifted, howling, and his sons, Jacob and Isaac, snarled beside him. Together they charged the approaching line. Jude and his brother Simenon were a step behind. The snarls and warhowls filled the battlefield as the grass was painted red in the blood of the attacking wolves. Slashing and biting, Jude found himself standing side by side with the Alpha’s youngest son. Isaac and Jude had been born the same year. They had trained together since they were seven year old pups. Moving as one the young Alpha and his father’s second Beta cut a swath through the enemy.

Gasping, Isaac collapse, wheezing and clutching his chest. He shifting into his skin.

‘Issac, get up!’Jude shouted through the pack link at him.

’My... my mate...is... is dead.′ Issac’s wolf howled is grief.

Jude hauled him to his feet and threw him over his warform’s shoulder, fleeing to the rear of the battle. Decapitating the wolf that tried to intercept them. Tamaza was with Becca at the nursery. He could feel Isaac fighting to stay with them here in this world.

Suddenly, Luna Sari shouted through the pack link, ‘Brown furs attacking the pack house!’

The attack had been a diversion, wolves were at the heart of the territory and the she-wolves were fighting them.

Alpha Abram charged back toward the pack house. Jude, still carrying Isaac, bolted after him. Smoke hung thick in the air as houses burned. Screaming and growling, sounded from where the Alphas of Des Rues and several of their brown furred warforms were surrounding the females and children who were fighting back with claw and silver. Alpha Isaac leaped over a half dozen wolves to bury his fangs and claws into his uncle, Alpha Cordon Des Rues as his father and best friend fought those around them. Isaac reared back and drove his claws into the chest of the elder alpha of their now enemy and tore his heart and lungs our.

He turned on the younger Alpha Charles in front of the burning pack house, snarling, “Yyyyyyeeeeeiiillllld, Charrrrrrlesssss!”

But Charles charged him and in a swift twisting motion, Isaac had him on the ground, teeth at his throat and claws in his shoulders.

“Yeeiild or dddiiiiiieeee, Dessss RRRrrrrruesssss,” Isaac growled, shaking Charles until he shifted to his skin. The wolves of Des Rues ceased their attack and backed away.

“Isaac, the Pups are still in the basement nursery!” His wounded mother shouted at him.

Through the pack link came the horrifying sensation of young wolves choking and burning and dying. Alpha Abram ran into the fire followed by Alpha Jacob. Jude’s father by mating, Eliazar, started to follow. Tamaza’s father was a Servant of the Moon, his tattoos glistened oily black in the smoke filtered light.

Suddenly, a charred figure stumbled out of the fire with a burning bundle. the wolf fell onto the ground and two pups fell out of the flaming blanket. Eliazar immediately turned to the pups as the burning wolf thrashed, while he was shouting for the healers. It was a she-wolf, a very pregnant she-wolf. It was Tamaza.

Jude seized her shoulders to hold her still but her flesh was slipping and pulling off in his grip. Her sapphire eyes blistered and weeping, saw nothing. Her ebony hair gone. Naked, her flesh charred like burned meat with boiling blood oozing from the cracking crimson lines like some grotesque marble. Her mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water, seeking air she was too burned to inhale. Her back arched and Jude howled in pain as she left him for the Moon. His body locked in agony’s grip, wouldn’t move. Eliazar was shouting something as Jude’s wolf fought to follow their mate.

Jude heard her voice one last time, pleading, ‘Stay for our daughters, my warrior.’

Luna Sari cut Tamaza’s stomach open and stuck her hand into the cut. She pulled out a foot, legs, and then the bum and back of a babe, a head full of black silk came next. The pup’s right arm was extended, holding to something as the Luna slowly guided her out of her mother’s corpse. The pup’s hand was clasping another hand, she refused to leave her mother’s embrace without her sister. Eliazar reached down to help guide out the other pup out. They did not let go of each other or make a sound until the cords tying them to their dead mother were cut. The first pup screamed challengingly into the smoky air as Luna Sari pressed her into Jude’s chest.

“Do not leave us, Beta! Your pups need you.”

Jude’s wolf looked down into the crying face with tears leaking from her mother’s eyes. He threw back his head and howled farewell to his mate. Eliazar cradled the other she-pup. Her cries were almost silent as she whimpered, and looked up at him with her mother’s eyes, his late daughter’s eyes. His heart broke and reformed in a moment. The twins were identical in every way. A boon in this most terrible of moments.

There was a shuttering in the ground and the pack house collapsed. Luna Sari stared at the inferno of rubble sinking upon itself into the basement cavity.

“NO! NO! Noooooooo!”

Someone was screaming, Sari did not realize it was her until Isaac wrapped his arms around her. He too was sobbing as their loved ones left them. Her soul hemorrhaged as the bond to her mate twisted and burned. He was gone, her mate, her true, her silver haired wolf had gone to the Moon without her. Her eldest son had followed his father into the fields. The crying of the twin pups became the anchor that held her to this world.

Snarling, Alpha Isaac rose and stalked toward the younger Des Rues Alpha, shouting as he shook him like a ragdoll. “Was it worth it, Charles? My father, your father, our brothers. Over three hundred of your warriors and a hundred of mine died this day to murder she-wolves and pups! WAS IT WORTH IT!?!”

Isaac cuffed his cousin and sent him crashing onto the grass, painting it crimson with royal blood.

“The Moon will punish you and your pack, Charles, but that doesn’t matter at this moment because your father will face the Moon’s hounds with the murders of 21 innocent pups burned on his soul!” Isaac howled out his rage.

The warriors of Des Rues drew back from the warriors and she-wolves of Benjmin-Naphtal who were all howling their loss. They knew they would pay for the shame of this day and for the betrayal they had participated in.

Luna Sari seized the maimed Charles from her youngest son’s feet. “Get. Your. Dogs. Off our lands, nephews,” she spat as she shoved him at his elder brother, Lothaire, whose face was slashed from hairline to shoulder.

“Tell your mother, she is dead to our pack, dead to me! I have no sister. If I see her again, I will kill her myself. The Goddess curse your mates barren, you are unworthy to be Alphas or fathers. You will bear a share in your father’s burden of innocent blood. The Moon shall reap many times what you have sown!”

Lothaire kept his face blank as he held up his younger brother. He could feel the power in his mother’s half-sister’s words as she pronounced a curse upon his pack. He could see her grandsons laying the grass, with healers tending their badly burned bodies. He did not know if the pups would survive, so many had not. Suddenly, he was terrified for his pregnant mate and pup at home.

His father and brothers’ plans had been to capture the pregnant Naphtal Oracle and her acolytes and hold them to force the merger of the packs. The plan had more than failed. It had all gone so disastrously wrong. The alphas of both packs and more than half their warriors were now dead. His middle brother was gone to the moon as was his father. Never again would there be an alliance between these packs. He did not know how the fire had started, but the result of it was the worst possible outcome.

He felt eyes on him, a wolf who knew his mother. A Wanderer, a Servant of the Moon, his glossy black tattoos seemed to shift and move, or it could be a trick of the flickering light and smoky air. He held a child in his arms, a pup cut from the body of the one who had stumbled from the fire. That she-wolf had been so horribly disfigured that he knew not who she was. The Wanderer handed the pup to the wolf still kneeling next to the burned she-wolf, his back to the Des Rues wolves.

The Servant walked steadily toward the milling Des Rues wolves.

“You know what I am, whelp?” The wanderer’s voice was the coldest sound Lothaire had ever heard, he could only nod. Charles was slumped, unconscious against him.

“Good... For the deaths by burning of 21 pups, 4 juvenile she-wolves, and 3 pregnant she-wolves, you will be punished. No Des Rues oracle will be allowed access to the Temples or the Delphi, and the Oracles will not answer any question from any Des Rues wolf as long as this generation lives. So say the Servants of the Moon.”

The surviving Benjmin-Naphtal wolves repeated as one, “So say the Servants of the Moon.”

Alpha Isaac’s eyes glowed with the need for vengeance, but his son and nephew needed him to stay alive to raise them, if they survived. He needed to be the Alpha his father was training his brother to be. He watched his mother kneeling next to her grandsons in front of the ruined packhouse that had become the funeral pyre of so many. He took several deep breaths, trying to fill the emptiness with air, then turned to his half-cousins.

Lothaire opened his mouth as if to speak, but Issac cut him off.

“Get off our land by evening, cousin Lothaire, or we will stain our teeth with more Des Rues blood and put the hearts of all who remain in jars as payment for our murdered pups, and mates, and brothers.”

~~~~~

The first night home, Lothaire only cared about tending those wounded survivors like his brother. He had never seen warriors fight with such skill and strength as the Benjmin-Nephtal, and he had only ever heard about one other old world pack who could fight with such competent killing ability. His mother had been in shock from the death of his father and brother, but his mate just happy he was alive, so many did not return. Chantelliese didn’t even care about the jagged scars that now ran down one side of his face and neck until he had told what happened.

He told his mate and his recovering mother the story of the battle, and how he had followed Alpha Abram from the battle to see the pack house fully engulfed. How he then discovered that only the two alpha pups had been saved, carried out by a burned shewolf, who died. He told his mother that her half-sister had declared her dead to the pack of her birth and cursed them. He also revealed the pronouncement of the Servant of the Moon. His mother had wept.

Chantelliese however had stared at Lothaire with wide horrified eyes, “We burned children to death, 21 pups! AND juveniles and pregnant shewolves! The Moon will curse this pack for certain.”

When he tried to embrace and comfort her, she had slapped him, screaming at him not to touch her with his cursed flesh.

A week after returning home, Lothaire heard for certain that the Naphtal Oracle Tamaza Ayala had been one of the she-wolves to die in the fire and the chance to seize her and her influence was gone. More disturbing was that several Des Rues she-wolves who had lost mates in the battle, also began losing their pups before they grieved themselves to death. Then other she-wolves miscarried too. His aunt’s curse was coming to pass, and adding to the sins and suffering caused by his father’s and younger brother’s arrogance.

Charles was awake but changed. He cursed profusely about the death of the oracle, but waved off the deaths of the pups. Lothaire was shocked to discover Charles was more angry about their father’s plans for him to be mated to the oracle was thwarted when the females who fought back. Charles laughed about the curse and punishment declared against their pack, claiming they were strong enough to afford losing a few lesser wolves. It was like he did not care his own brother and father were among the dead or that his pack was paying for their arrogance.

An hour ago, Lothaire felt a sharp pain and had rushed home from the pack hospital to a silent home. His pregnant mate lay on the floor of his office, dying.

“It is your fault, ” she whispered with her last breath. She had a note crumpled in her hand.

"I am mated into a family of monsters, who wear the blood of innocent pups,

and mock the Moon’s Servants. My pup, whom I love, has succumbed.

I will not stay in this cursed place. May the Goddess have mercy upon us all.

Chantelliese Chartres-Des Rues ”

His true had left him, and followed their pup to the Moon. She blamed him. He howled and cursed the Goddess, and his cousin’s pack.

His heart died within him that night and when he recovered from losing Chantelliese, he became crueler and more vicious than his father and brothers had ever been, but Charles had beat him for the Alphaship, so Lothaire became his Beta. Together they forged a more malevolent path for their pack.