Wills-Hills 1675
The forest tore at her skin as she stumbled forward, breathless.
Snow crunched beneath her bare feet, roots clawing up from the frozen earth. Every step was agony. Every heartbeat echoed like war drums.
Behind her, howls. Horses. Shouts in the language of hunters.
Marian pressed both hands against her swollen belly as she whispered. Hold on, little one. Just hold on.
The shadows shifted. Gold eyes glimmered between the trees. Wolves, closing in.
She ran harder, but the ground betrayed her, stones slicing her soles, branches whipping across her face. She fell once, twice, blood seeping into the snow. Still she forced herself up, because stopping meant death.
The night sky tore open with a scarlet glow, the blood moon rising high. Her cry caught in her throat.
She knew what it meant. She had always known. She was carrying a child that had been foretold by the prophecy, a child of the devil that would bring chaos and the world's end. A fetus that had festered in her womb for two unnatural years. With the suspicious stares and prying noses of the village elders on her, she knew what awaited her. Her burden meant death, and she was racing against time, desperate to find sanctuary.
When the trees opened into a clearing, her knees buckled. Waiting in the circle of moonlight stood seven cloaked figures, their silhouettes sharp and still as statues.
The Elders.
Her heart stopped. There was no escape now.
The second in command stepped forward, his voice heavy as iron. "You cannot run from prophecy."
Tears burned down her face as she shielded her stomach. "This child is innocent."
"Innocent?" His laughter was cold. He loomed over her, a giant figure casting a long shadow over her frail body. "That is no child; it is a demon that needs to be gotten rid of."
"My child is no demon!" Marian spat, her feet stumbling backward as she looked into the eyes that held her death.
"Hah."
Another elder huffed, his dark pupils shifting into molten gold. His bronze glove, tipped with cruel spiked claws, scraped across his half-smooth face with a screech.
"You claim innocence, yet you fled from our summons," he said, voice sharp as steel. He stepped closer, closing the gap, his presence suffocating.
What did they expect of her? To walk to her death willingly? To kneel and accept slaughter?
She had run because she had no choice. And still, she had been betrayed, by the one person she trusted most.
"Marian Coal, You stand accused of crimes that can only be redeemed by death," another elder rumbled. Broad, fur-covered, he seemed carved from the very shadow of the eclipse moon reflected in his eyes.
"Paul."
The name slid from a woman's lips, sultry and teasing. Slender fingers trailed along his jaw, down his chest thick with hair, barely hidden by the fabric draped across his shoulders.
"Let Kanu take the first lead in her sentence," she purred, her gaze flicking to the first elder.
Paul scoffed at her suggestion. He was the Red Wolf, the rarest of them all. Dominance clung to him like a second skin. He had no need for interference, no need for weakness.
"I have done nothing wrong," Marian whispered, her trembling hands pressed against her swollen stomach.
"My baby is innocent."
Her words cracked against the circle of judgment, thin and fragile, but burning with a mother's desperate fire. She wove her fingers into the familiar pattern, her lips forming the silent words of a teleportation spell. She reached for her magic, the current that had always hummed beneath her skin, a lifeline she had counted on since birth.
There was nothing. An empty chasm where a river should have been. Panic seized her as she tried again, her mind screaming, but the only sound was the thumping of her own heart.
"It's useless," the sultry voice snapped again, irritation creeping in. "You can't cast a spell. Your magic is sealed."
The tea. The cursed tea her so-called friend had offered her earlier. It had blocked her channels, leaving her powerless, stripped bare before these monsters.
Tears blurred her vision. "Please. Don't kill me. Spare me, for the sake of my child. She deserves to live."
Her body collapsed forward, forehead pressed against the feet of the pale figure before her.
Mistress Lily, cloaked in white, luminous as the moon. The head of her coven. The woman she had always called her mother.
"Mistress," she sobbed. "You are kind, a mother to all. Please... doesn't my child deserve to live?"
Mistress Lily's pearl earrings glowed faintly as she closed her eyes. Her voice, when it came, was ice.
"I am sorry. But your child must die. To protect the many, I will not hesitate to sacrifice the one."
Marian's heart shattered. Then it hardened.
"Unjust!" She rose shakily to her knees, a broken laugh slipping past bloodied lips. "Seven elders against an unborn child? Is this your justice? Your strength?". She forced herself to her feet, swaying, but her gaze was unwavering. "Better to die protecting her than to live kneeling to cowards like you."
Silence.
"You will not kill my baby," she seethed, her voice a low growl. "I won't let you."
"Woman!" a voice thundered across the clearing, slicing through the air like a whip.
"Cease your insolence!"
King Suleiman.
The human king. Drunk on greed and power, he was a man drenched in blood. With a roar, he drew his sword, the blade gleaming as it swung toward her stomach.
At the same time, another figure, Rose Petal lunged for her throat. Just as she lunged for her throat and the king's sword swung toward her stomach, the air exploded.
A pressure so heavy it felt like the world was holding its breath crashed over the clearing. The scent of iron and ozone burned in the air. Wolves dropped to their knees, their ears bleeding from the force. The Elders were torn from the ground, their bodies hurtling backward to slam into the stone walls.
The power came from her. From within. A pulse like a beating drum, ancient and unstoppable, throbbed in her womb. A raw surge of energy ripped free, not from her hands, but from her very core, shattering the ground around her feet into a spiderweb of cracks.
Marian gasped, not from fear, but from a breathless awe. Her unborn child. Her baby. It was protecting them both.
Rose Petal's body convulsed in his arms, blood spilling from her lips as Paul caught his wife. A silent scream tore through him, his grief twisting into a white-hot fury.
His body began to snap and stretch , bones splintering and muscle swelling. A pelt of coarse red fur burst through his skin as he grew, tearing at his robes until the Red Wolf towered over them, eyes burning with madness.
With a monstrous howl, he hurled his colossal body against the shimmering shield of energy from the unborn child, again and again, each strike shaking the very foundations of the chamber.
"It's useless," Lady Mas said coldly. "The baby shields itself. If it wields such power now, imagine what it will do once born."
Disgust laced her tone. She despised being overpowered, by anyone, least of all an unborn child.
"What do you suggest?" Lucy, leader of the Cruel Moon Pack, growled.
Lady Mas smiled. "Let me handle this."
Mistress Lily's hands hesitated, then reached out. Their fingers interlocked. Magic bloomed between them, two forces, pure and corrupted, colliding into one.
Words older than empires spilled from their lips. The air shook, ground trembling under the weight of their spell.
Wind roared into a cyclone, spiraling toward the mother. It was enough to erase her, enough to snuff her and her child from existence.
She staggered, battered and bloodied. But she would not break.
Even if the world called her baby a curse.
Even if gods and kings decreed it must die.
Her child was hers.
And she would protect it.