Morrigan: I Am Your Fate

Morrigan Awakens

The next time I regained consciousness I was parched. I needed water, and I knew that I would not last another day if I couldn’t get out of this tent and find it.

It took me an eternity to sit gingerly up, and I had to crawl to the edge of the tent to grab one of the supports so I could pull myself up.

My head spun and I almost threw up again but I took deep breaths to try and work through it.

The tent smelled like rancid blood more than anything but the undertones of stale sweat, and the fact I had thrown up beside the furs did not help.

When I pushed aside the flap of leather covering the entrance I was almost blinded by the sun. I threw up again and felt ashamed for it.

At least the air was fresh and the only scent that remained was from the ashes of the campfire I had been staring into when I still thought that everything might be OK and that my baby would be cradled in my arms by now.

I had not been excited by the prospect of motherhood. When my body began to change I didn’t feel a sense of wonder, I just felt like I looked grotesque, and I hated it that Luc liked seeing the effect that carrying his child was having on my slender frame.

He started to look for me whenever Gaella was away from the camp, and he would rub his hand across my distended stomach in a way that felt more like it was supposed to be erotic than tender.

Towards the end, he would send her away and call me to their tent each night so that he could make me strip and stand still as he walked around me looking for any changes in my body that he could comment on approvingly.

It was always the same routine to begin with, but he pushed it just a little further each time.

He would walk around me. Then he would stop close behind me so I felt his powerfully muscular body against my back as he took my increasingly full breasts in his hands to grope me like I was a piece of meat. He would whisper that he liked how huge I was getting because it was a sign I was carrying a boy - his boy. Then he would slide his hands down over my stomach as he kissed my neck and told me he always knew I was destined to be mother of an Alpha.

He was always aroused, and he never hid it, but he only ever took his game of self-gratification further than running his hands over my body once.

He usually stopped,  told me to be back at the same time the next day, and then called Gaella back in so that he could rid himself of the tension he had just worked up.

 This time he hesitated at the point he normally would have removed his hands from my stomach and sent me away and slid one hand down between my legs as the other remained firmly on my stomach holding me against him. 

He groaned in frustration and then told me that he needed to feel me again and that I needed to know that I was his.

I got down on my hands and knees and he took me roughly and mercifully briefly. When it was over I was further humiliated by the fact I needed his help to get up from the floor. His hands were immediately drawn to my stomach when I was stood in front of him again. He seemed to see my body as a trophy that was the evidence of his s****l prowess.

He leaned closer to me, and kissed me so softly that my skin crawled before he told me sadly that we should not do that again until I was ready.

I thought he meant that he wanted me to have feelings for him. My heart sank when I realized that ‘ready’ meant the next time I was on heat, because he liked the fact he had this power over me and he wanted to live out his fantasy again.

This one wasn’t even out of me yet and he was planning a second as if I should be happy about it and desperate to go through this hell again.

When I left his tent after that Gaella was stood waiting. She slapped me hard and called me a w***e and told me that I would never replace her; then she spent the rest of the night making sure everybody knew how well he treated her in the privacy of their tent compared to what he had done with me. They all knew that she was not the one he wanted to spend the night with, but I did not have enough status within my pack to be able to stay with him for longer than the five minutes it took to try and impregnate me - it would have humiliated Gaella and her family were powerful enough to cause us trouble if she felt spurned.

Despite everything that Luc had put me through, when I looked down at the blood-stained dress I was wearing my heart ached for the loss of that child. Even if I had not been happy about being chosen by Luc, I did not think our child deserved to die at Gaella’s bitter hands.

I sighed, and knelt beside the ashes of the campfire. They were still warm, and when I nudged them a spark rose. The others had probably been gone for a day - maybe a little longer. It didn’t seem like the fire had been extinguished when they left, they just left it to burn out. And the embers were still warm, but if I left it much longer I would not be able to relight the fire from them.

Everything I needed to do felt like an impossible challenge.

I needed the fire lit, but that meant getting something to burn, and that meant standing back up, and then finding and gathering materials. But my head was pounding from dehydration and I would pass out if I did not resolve that soon.

I had no idea about the terrain we were camped at. I hadn’t been able to get out and see any of it, and I was relying on other people to provide me with food and drink.

My senses were not back to normal, and my hunger and thirst weren’t helping.

There was no point even trying to transform right now.

And I had nowhere for shelter but that tent, which smelled bad enough that I would rather have used it to fuel the fire than to sleep in.

I looked around the abandoned campsite to try and determine where to go, and noticed for the first time a small heap of things near the tent.

I forced myself to stand up, and approached the pile cautiously.

I knew what it was.

Everything I owned had been thrown down and left for people to rummage through at will.

All the things of value were gone, including my weapons.

I pulled a dress out of the pile. It was another of the plain linen shift dresses I had been given to wear as I grew out of my own clothing. They made me look like a peasant and the one in my hands had been too tight to get past my stomach for weeks, but I managed to get it on now I was not so huge and the clean material felt like the finest silk caressing my body.

I screwed the old dress up and took it over to the ashes, dropping it down to use as kindling and waiting with my breath held in anticipation as it started to glow orange at the edge before the fire came back to life and I knew that I could leave to find water without losing the ability to keep myself safe and warm.