Age of Sagacity

Chapter 5: L'Impératrice

"It's time. Are you ready?"

I gave him a slight nod as my insides twisted into knots with the renewed hot flush of anxiety and took his hand.
The woman came to steady me and help me along a narrow pathway to a cabin I hadn't noticed hidden in the dark by it's rich deep sienna walls. A tiny spark of light appeared in the window before the door opened and the blond man stepped out with an old style oil lantern.

"A lantern? Really?" I asked with a chuckle as they ushered me inside.

"This cabin is a safe house. We feel it is safer not to bring in modern technology and risk compromising what our ancestors have protected without a problem for generations."

The woman flipped her hair over her shoulder and tugged her bright red shirt down where it had ruffled up past her waist before she helped me sit on a wooden chair near the center of the plain living room. The wood groaned under my weight as if it had been left untouched long enough to forget it's purpose. The rich scent of aged white cedar drifted throughout the cabin and gave the small dark space a homier smell than it's outwardly coffin-like appearance. I certainly wasn't nervous, was I?

"Kate, she asked you a question," Uncle Rolf said as he shook my shoulder gently.

"What?"

"I asked if you knew anything about what is happening to you."

I shook my head as the muscles in my back began to spasm in waves that bowed my spine.

"Breathe. Try and relax your body and the pain won't be so intense. Once your beast nears the surface of your skin we will move you to the other room, but for now I will try and fill you in on what you should know. Normally we have three days to prepare you for your rebirth, but you are an unusual girl it seems."

I heard somewhere that as a woman nears a certain point in childbirth that she can become irate and snap at people who are trying to help her. I hadn't believed it before, but now as I felt the soft caress of thick fur along the inside of my ribcage in a place no one should ever feel the brush of anything I knew I could become dangerous if this woman didn't get on with it.

"Kate, when you were young you were given a choice to embrace who you are or to destroy it. Do you remember a time when you were taken away or you wandered off and were lost in the woods perhaps?"

"When I was six," I whispered as she nodded and knelt in front of me to take my hands.

"No one could explain it. The cuts, the scars," she traced the long white scar down my cheek and continued, "you remember what happened though. You remember the black wolf who came to you and showed you kindness and kept you safe. She offered you the choice."

I had faint memories of the jet black wolf who came to me when I had wandered off long ago. We had locked eyes across the shallow creek when I had stopped to play in the cool water. She had backed away slowly and urged me to follow with a deep stare of nearly orange eyes clouded with the familiar dark flecks of brown; the eyes from my dreams.

"I followed her past the trees. She let me pet her head and lay beside her when I was cold. I remember she brought me two stones. One a pure black and the other a milky white."

"The black symbolized the death of who you were to become. The absence of all there was to awaken inside of you. The white was to keep your gift and to allow yourself to become what you are soon to be."

"I took the white stone. I don't know why. I guess it felt right."

"Your innocence as a child allows you the freedom of choice without misguided judgement. It was pure intuition that led you to choose what you did."