I choose Power

FIVE

Dahlia's eyes dart around, estimating the number of wolves and finds out that they are not less than fifteen, and the only weapon she has on her is the short little dagger she had found in her satchel, the satchel which is securely tied and on the other side of her rock-pillow. Great, she thinks, eaten alive on the first day by a pack of wolves. The animals circle her a few feet away, trying to determine the level of danger she represents, any minute now they are going to realise she is tender ready meat and close in for the kill. And no matter the amount of skill she has, she does not delude herself that she could take on an entire pack of about  fifteen wolves and come out unscathed. But she sure will try.

They growl at her, beginning to inch closer and on her knees in the dirt, Dahlia, former princess of Solaria growls back at them, her hand inching out in search of her satchel. She instinctively knows that to take her eyes from them for a second or turn around to look for her dagger would immediately paint her as easy prey and she could bid goodbye to life and vengeance. She is at least grateful to have solid rock at her back. The wolf who seems to be the alpha growls deeper, inching closer to the ground as he shuffles forward, readying for an attack, the rest of the pack nearly dancing in excitement and anticipation and finally, her hand catches on her satchel and she pulls it towards her.

At the same moment, her horse lets out a scream and nervous shuffle and from the corner of her eye, she makes out her horse trying to get away, her reins stretched to breaking point as the instrument of safety turns into her instrument of death. And most shocking of all is the silhouette of wolves that close in from in front and behind her, and she thinks one of them already took a bite of her because there is dark runny patch on her side. She has run out of time.

The alpha wolf lunges for her and she rolls out of the way, coming up with a long branch she had earlier scouted and her satchel which she quickly opens, digging out her dagger. Keeping the rock to her back, she faces the vicious half-circle of wolves, foaming at the mouth and getting more aggressive at the thought of food. A brave one lunges at her again and she thwacks it out of the air with a branch but there is another one going for her arm and she barely dances back to safety in time. They growl louder, fuelled by hunger and excitement at their brothers' failed attempts and inch closer to her, a press of bodies and sure death. She moves back steadily until she meets the rock wall, she is trapped. Her horse lets out another scream and she darts a glance to see about five wolves rush her at once, one going for her throat, another her leg and yet another for her underbelly. The keening of her horse as he is torn into is a sound she will never forget for the rest of her life. It is too bad that it seems that will be a very short time indeed. And then the wolves, noticing her distraction attack.

She dodges beneath one's leap, slashing the underbelly with her dagger and it lets out a whine as it lands to the side of her and then there is another coming from the side. She hits it with the branch and it darts away and then, she swings the branch outwards in an arc to keep the rest away. But the wolves will not be kept at bay. Either the scent of blood, the promise of fresh meat or the rush of the fight has them coming at her again and again, heedless of her branch. Her knife is not much use either, lacking the reach she needs and she has a tough time keeping out of the snapping jaws.

One snaps at her legs and she dances to the side only to meet the lunge of another. Only the swoosh of air alerts her in time to swing her branch blindly, knocking the wolf from the air. She is hard-pressed for thoughts as she concentrates on staying alive, realising with each passing second how little of a chance she has of making it out from this escapade alive. Now would be a good time for those powers to come again. But the powers do not come, try as she may.

"Stop!" She screams and it is only her typical voice, lacking none of the power that it had commanded the day before. She tries to recollect what had triggered the power, was it anger or fear but her thoughts are disjointed and incomplete and only make her angrier. Angry at herself for even thinking to rely on stupid powers that had hidden beneath her skin for seventeen years and displays only at its will. Angry at herself for being defective and not being able to control said powers like her sisters. Angry at herself for getting stuck in the hopeless situation in the first place.

A wolf closes in on her and she zeroes on it, channeling her frustration to punch it in the side and it flies back and crashes to the ground. But her thoughts and decisions are muddied by anger and she does not take into account another just behind it. Her hand is still extended from the punch and she is not able to retract it fast enough when the second wolf lunges and his teeth snap around her arm like a vise. She screams and plunges her dagger into his eyes and the injured wolf lets go and withdraws, staggering and falling as it crawls backwards.

She is panting and sweating as the wolves regroup, a mesh of furry bodies as they ready for their second attack. Fiery pain radiates from her arm and she clenches her teeth and groans. Somehow, she is going to die tonight and whether it is to armed men or wild beasts, she will do nothing less than die fighting.

She yells a blood curdling battle cry, having nothing more to lose in that moment and jumps into the fray of the beasts, dagger flashing in the moonlight as she slashes in wide unpredictable movements. The wolves are surprised and many are hit by the fury of her slashes before following the lead of the alpha, they attack her as one.

It is one of those awe-striking irreplicable moments of life, the woman a whirlwind of jabs and thrusts and the wolves leaping and roiling hungrily around her in a dance of death as it seems she will come to a tragic end and anyone that cared to be watching would forever remember them and mourn the loss of such a phenomenal woman. But on this very night, that is not how it plays out.

Her arm grows sluggish and the wolves sensing her exhaustion increase their frenzy. When a wolf leaps too close to her, she is forced to sacrifice the branch in favour of her arm, the branch which had grown shorter and shorter as bits and pieces sloughed off from her repeated bashings, is now a mere stick when shoves it between the wide open jaws of an overeager wolf, nearly losing her fingers in the process. She has only her knife now and exhaustion pulls at her limbs but she gathers one last burst of strength for a strike but notices a wolf leaping at her a side a moment too late. It happens fast, one second she is sure it has come to an end as the wolf and its wide open jaws fly through the air at her and the next second, it lets out a high pitched whine as it hurtles through the air and lands several feet away in the darkness. The wolves converge on the new threat and the next instant is followed by pain-filled whines and wolves hurtling through the air in all directions. Dahlia engages back in the fight, darting away from large teeth and stabbing with renewed vigour. Soon after, the wolves rear back and retreat to assess the situation and she spins around to face her saviour.

She is shocked into stillness. The woman before her, her skin a dark polished ebony is possibly the most beautiful woman she has ever seen. She is incredibly tall, taller even than her sisters with a shocking crown of glowing white hair that splashes onto her shoulders in spiky cuts. And most shocking of all is that as the woman stares condescendingly down at her, there is a ripple behind her and she makes out huge wings made of striking black feathers. In that moment, she also realizes that the parts of the woman's legs that she can see are covered with the same black feathers and that the woman's legs end not in feet, but in claws that remind her of the great eastern eagle's.

The wolves and her exhaustion forgotten, she forgets her manners and stares and finally whispers in awe. "What are you?"

"You're welcome." The woman says and turns to face the wolves.

The rest of the wolves which had been feeding on her poor horse's body had stopped and joined the rest, a mass of fur and bodies waiting for their alphas signal. The alpha growls and his hairs are raised, his ears perked up as he exercises his canine intelligence and a moment later, he raises his throat and lets out a long howl and turns around and disappears behind the trees, her pack right behind her.

Dahlia turns back to the new woman, sure she must have seen wrong but the woman is exactly as she had first seen her.

"It couldn't be, you're.. you're a--" She begins.

The woman waves her arm.and cuts her off. "Yes, I am a harpy."

Few things are capable of shocking Dahlia senseless and the proof of the existence of harpies in front of her is one of them. Everyone, including her has been told that they had all been killed centuries earlier.

The woman sighs."I have a feeling I should have let you die." She walks forward until she is eye to eye with Dahlia, or as much as she can get to eye to eye with Dahlia being so much smaller than her, and stares intently into her eyes. "You did not see me." She says and with a single clap of her wings, she shoots up into the sky and disappears.

Dahlia looks up and around, trying to figure out where she could have gone and seeing no more signs of her, sighs and looks back down. She remembers her horse and rushes over there but of course, she is too late, she had never had a chance to save her in the first place.

The horse lies on its side with its stomach wide open, spilling the insides of her gut. Her throat and her face are chewed up and mangled and strips of flesh hang off her in pieces. She runs a hand down her mane, unaccountably sad to see her one constant companion since she left her kingdom go, even sadder to realise that she cannot linger long to bury her as the area of the forest had proven dangerous.

"I never even got to name you... Braveheart." She whispers and sits there a moment staring at nothing in particulare, her heart rate slowly returning back to normal. Her body pings and stings from numerous cuts suddenly screaming for her attention, most prominent being the pain radiating up from her arm. She walks down to the stream, keeping an eye out for any more surprises the forest could spring and spends the next few minutes cutting a piece of her cloth, washing her injury and binding it, groaning in pain as she ties it tight to reduce the blood loss. When she is done, she gives a nod of approval and notes that she should get something for infection. Her clothes are still soiled and she still has the grit of the day before's travel on her skin and so, leaving her clothes on dry land, she gets into the cold stream and takes a quick bath. The water stings her many cuts but she barely notices as she scrubs herself clean and washes the dirt from her body. When she emerges from the stream, her thoughts are clearer and she feels lighter and better, better able to handle her second day of exile.

Finally, she walks back to her little camp, gathers as many leaves and stones as she can and piles them on top of Braveheart's body, gathers her meager belongings from the floor and sets out.

On foot and under the cover of night, she does not know where she is going, she could be going back to Solaria for all she knew but what she is sure of is that she cannot remain in the camp by the time the wolves and Freya knows what other creatures of the wild decide to investigate the camp further.

She is slow-going without her horse but as the night gives birth to a new day, she finds the crisp wind and the walk clearing her head further. She cannot go on without a direction. She is a high-strung arrow intended for a target that she has no idea about nor the slightest way to reach.

Memories of her father try to shove themselves to the forefront again but she shoves them back ruthlessly, needing to deal with alot of things before giving herself the luxury of mourning him the way that she wants to. A memory that she cannot supress no matter how hard she tries though, is her father's last moments. She goes backs and forces herself.to analyze the details.

In her mind's eye, she repeatedly bursts into the room to find his body on the floor tight with pain and she runs to kneel beside his prone form. Another piece of memory she eagerly latches on to distract herself from the only parent she has ever really known dying helplessly beneath her hands is that of the assassin slipping away through the open window. She recollects the billowing black material of his cloak and her running to the window to find that whoever it was had disappeared from view like he had never been. It had been her first time seeing an assassin and she had easily guessed that that was what the person was because of the scene she had walked in. She analyzes what she saw, remembering her only glimpse of the cloak in the noon sun and remembers that it hadn not been completely black, more like a deep midnight blue so dark it could easily be mistaken for black. The thought strikes a cord in her and she feels like she has finally stumbled upon the first piece of the puzzle. A midnight blue cloak, connecting the assassin with the Midnight King several leagues away in the Kingdom of Degolan. The queen had been wrong, the chances that he was the one to send the assassin just increased exponentially despite her belief that he would not be inclined to send assassins at the moment. That implies a level of, nothing so hard-earned as trust but a bit of mutual agreement, an agreement that Queen Thalia will most certainly hold on her end but if what she suspects is true, then the Midnight King has already began to sabotage the agreement, to go behind the Queen's back and betray her. That also means that the kingdom of Solaria is in danger, she is far away from the kingdom and from being any help and her words are no longer so credible that the Queen takes them to heart. She will have to get to the Midnight King first, before he has a chance to spring whatever plans he has prepared.

The kingdom of Degolan lies to the north of Solaria and the guards had deposited her to the Southern borders of the kingdom. Looking up at the sun and at the shadows, she gauges what she hopes is the northward direction and changes direction. She does not know how long it will take her on foot or exactly what she will do when she reaches Degolan but she cannot sit back and watch the Midnight King ruin her family and her kingdom after killing her father, and she cannot wait to make him feel the edge of her red-hot vengeance.

Her knees groan and her feet ache with all the walking but she pushes forward, keeping away the main path and going through the forest. She would prefer not to run into any more raiders or other unsavory individuals. She acknowledges that she will have to seek out travellers at some point, at least to confirm that she is on the right track, and maybe try to acquire a new horse,and new clothes. She walks like that, stopping only a few times to catch her breath against a tree trunk before continuing onwards. The sun rises to meet her on the trail, orienting herself every few moments. Noon meets her and goes and then the sun is far behind her and her shadow stretches out in front of her. She finally collapses against a tree trunk, sliding to the ground and clutching her stomach to try to contain the hunger pangs that bite at her. She had forgotten to feed herself in her determination to cover ground, but in the palace, she nearly never has to think of an empty stomach before she routinely has to eat. Being out of familiar ground for the first time in her life has put her on the wrong foot and made her make the most basic of mistakes.

Her bread and cheese are gone and her water bottle is nearly empty because she had been taking sips allevery time her throat got parched. She gets back up, determining to find a stream and refill her bottle, and hopefully get some food.

Luckily for her, she does not have to walk long before meeting a large fast-moving stream and she kicks off her boots and wades to the middle, dunking her entire body beneath the currents. The sun is not yet completely set and it creates beautiful golden rays slicing into the water from below.  When her lungs begin to burn, she comes back up for air, releasing her hair which expands and floats in the water around her. She refills her bottle and throws it on the side of the stream where it catches on a rock and proceeds to take another bath, also washing her hair as best as she can without soap. When she is done, she unwraps her arm carefully to expose the angry red teeth marks on her arm, taut and swollen and washes it in the stream, rinsing off the piece of cloth before using it to tie it back. The pain nearly knocks her off her feet. She will have to do something about these wounds sooner rather than later. Her clothes are completely wet because she had finally washed off the fruit stains to the best of her ability, even though all she had ended up doing was smudging it around and not really removing any piece of it. She walks naked to dry land, sending a prayer to Freya that she will not be stumbled upon by anyone else in the forest and lays them out on rocks. She gets a branch and her dagger and sharpens the branch to a point before getting back in the water, this time with the aim of catching fish.

She recalls a conversation she had heard in passing between two guards one of whose father was a fisherman, wishing she had paid more attention. But she did get from the conversation that catching fish takes alot of patience.

She exercises all of her available patience and then some trying to catch one and is about to give up in frustration when her luck finally strikes and she is able to spear an average sized fish out of the water.

She shouts in joy before quickly looking around, hoping she did not attract anyone's attention and quickly exits the stream. She is hesitant to start a fire and has no idea what to do with a fire and fish and she is so ravenous that she tears into the fish and eats it raw on a rock beside the stream, crouching on the edge to rinse off her hands when she is done. She catches a glimpse of her face and nearly does not recognise the grim, haunted-looking woman looking back at her. But her eyes are their usual deep black and not any cursed silver so she is satisfied.

Walking back, her clothes are not yet dry but she is not comfortable lingering for too long and knows what a terrible idea walking around naked in the woods is and she yanks her clothes back on, shivering as they cling to her skin. She pulls on her boots and steps back into the thick of the trees, feeling instantly more protected. She still has about a hour before sunset and she decides to find somewhere better protected than her alcove of the day before to spend the night. Soon after, she comes across a tall sturdy tree with thick wide leaves and alot of branches. As she looks up into it and contemplates climbing, she acknowledges what a crazy idea it is for she could fall and break her neck in the night, she could be stumbling into an eagle's nest or some other vicious bird but she also does know that it is a better option than staying on the forest floor vulnerable to all kinds of attack, and this time around, she has no horse to worry about.

Decision made, she nods and drops her satchel, searches for a branch of adequate length and weight and gets into her training stance. If she is going to go after one of the most powerful Kings in existence, it would be a fatal mistake to be under-prepared and out of shape. She jabs, thrusts and retreats, doing the routine movements her and her sisters use to train everyday at the palace.

She wonders what her siblings think of her now, if they are all like Rose, believing that she is innocent but a victim of circumstance, or whether they believe she really killed their father. She remembers the entire fifteen of them lined up opposite her in the throne room, most not meeting her eyes including Niamh and Ciara who are closest to her and Peony than to any of their other older siblings and Falco who was her favorite brother despite the hard time he had given her when they were young. A sharp pang shoots through her heart, it must be the latter, they do believe she killed their father.

Her movements are deadlier, harder and executed with killing accuracy as she tries to outrace her thoughts. She wonders if any of them have even thought of her since the event yesterday, if any of them care to sympathize with what she must be going through or careto miss her at all. She wonders if her mother hates her, really believes that she could ever kill her father just for the sake of killing him.

Somehow, luck has drawn her the short end of the stick as usual, and as different as she has always been from her sisters with her powerlessness, small stature, midnight black hair and pointed ears, she is now even more different than them. A clear line has been drawn between them as she is spurned and exiled, like Sabine. 

Sweat pours down her body and her body shakes with tension as she lunges and comes up with a thrust, rejecting the thought with every fiber of her being. She is not like Sabine, she could never be. Her family might have turned their back on her but she would never hurt them, never unleash whatever powers she has on them. But then her mind goes to how good it had felt to control and punish those guards the day before, how amused she had been to make them fight each other to death and she recoils from the memory. She does not know what had come over her but it had not been normal and she would never have made those choices in her right senses. She would also like to believe that despite her cruelty towards the guards, she would have never hurt any of her siblings. She is nothing like Sabine. The thought resonates vehemently through her and she collapses against the base of the tree, her breath scissoring into her lungs.

When she calms down, she grabs her satchel from the ground and gulps nearly half of her water, making a note to refill it before taking off the next day. The wound on her arm burns, intense heat spreading from the spot up to her elbows but she grits her teeth and weathers it, there is nothing she can do about that. She does not know how she can help herself because she has no idea of the herbs that are used for healing and her satchel contains no healing ointment. Like her, Rose has never gone out of the kingdom and has no idea just how dangerous it is outside the safety of the Solaria.

She climbs up the tree, through the thick of leaves to one of the uppermost parts of the tree and looks around. The forest is spread before her in the dusk rays, birds chirping and little animals scurrying into their homes before night can bring the predators prowling. The forest is alive and breathing in her opinion, and she wonders how she did not notice that before then. She turns around to the opposite side to the same resplendent view and something catches her eye from a little ways ahead. A fire. She can make out vague shapes of people milling about a fire. She is curious, but debates the wisdom of leaving her well-protected tree in search of company that might be hostile.

In the end, her curiosity wins out and in the last light of the day, she makes her way towards where she had seen the light from above. She begins to hear their voices before she she can see them, men and women talking and even children giggling. She pushes aside a lean tree branch heavily packed with leaves that hide her body from view and looks out.

A camp. In the middle of a clearing is a camp with a small fire. Two armored men stand at attention at the outskirts of the camp with their hands on their scabbards. Beyond them are men and women cooking and laughing amongst themselves and about three children playing on the forest floor. The smell of soup wafts to her and her mouth waters and she sees horses, tied together to a tree close to one of the guards.

For the first time in her life, Dahlia not only contemplates stealing but begins to make plans on how to go about it. Surely the company can spare a bowl of soup and a horse.