The Alpha Girl and Her Rogue Mate

Ceremonies

The ceremony takes place in a clearing outside town. It always does. It’s nestled deep in the woods of the National Forest and only a short walk from the river, which leads to a small lake and a small tumbling waterfall. It’s one of my favorite places. The waterfall is only about as tall as two of me, if I were standing on my own shoulders, but the sound of the water is a soothing place to go and read or even just think on days when it’s sunny and warm. The clearing is beautiful too, but this evening it’s eerie and unfamiliar. Wolf pups and teens aren’t allowed at the shift ceremonies, because the last part of a shift ceremony involves the whole pack shifting together, and young wolves can’t shift yet. I’ve only seen the clearing in the daytime, when we hold other ceremonies. Usually, they’re marriage ceremonies, but occasionally we hold funerals here as well. I’ve never seen it, of course, but the Alpha ceremony is held out here too, when a new Alpha takes over a pack.

So tonight, even though I know where I am, I can hardly believe my eyes. The shadows play with my eyes, making the clearing look larger than usual in one moment and smaller the next. I see the pack, excluding the Warriors patrolling the clearing and the town and the Omegas who are watching children too young to be left alone. About 150 pack members are gathered, though they stand largely in the shadows, standing in a ring around the clearing except across the path we climb to approach.

I see three other young wolves, all older than Rosa and I, waiting in the center of the clearing. They stand in a small, nervous circle. We know roughly what will happen in this ceremony, but of course we’ve never seen it. Although I know all of them by face, I am only familiar with one. I nod at her, a girl a year older than Rosa and I who hangs around with my mom a lot, studying her healing techniques. 

“Valeria,” I say with a nod and smile toward her. She graduates at the end of this year and I know she hopes to go to medical school. My mother has spent a lot of time helping her research schools.

“Hey,” she says quietly, her eyes lowered when she looks in my direction. I suspect that subconsciously, her wolf is reacting to mine, the daughter of an Alpha.

“Ready for this?” I ask the group. Everyone nods, and a few let out a slightly nervous giggle.

My father and mother take their places at the front of the clearing, where one of my ancestors had built a small, inconspicuous shrine to the Goddess. It’s a roughly hewn stone table, but it’s carved with the phases of the moon across the top and the carvings are inlaid with bronze. My parents stand on either side. The shrine is mainly decorative, and many packs no longer even use them, but my mother has always been fond of the ceremony and long ago convinced my father not to get rid of it. It does have a convenient function, as behind it is a small space enclosed by four walls but exposed to the moon. We change into our robes in this space. Rosa arranged with her mother to have her bag left in the space so that we didn’t have to ruin our dresses.

We wait for a long moment, knowing that Beta Pierce and Gamma Heath are going to be the last to arrive, bearing the duty of carrying the ceremonial robes and paraphernalia. 

After a short time, we hear their footsteps approaching. Pierce is carrying our robes and Heath is carrying a bundle of firewood, incense, and a small bottle of wolfsbane tea. In our pack, the legend is that the wolfsbane tea is made from the ancient leaves of the first wolfsbane plant in the world, when the Goddess would commune directly with us as her creations. Supposedly, she told our first Alpha that the plant was toxic, so he carefully dug up every plant in our territory he could find. And to this day, we have no wolfsbane on our property. He had left the leaves out to dry, they say, in the hopes that he could create a weapon to be used against another pack if they chose to attack us. But a rogue snuck in one night and poisoned our Alpha’s drinking water with the plant, killing the Alpha, his Luna, and most of their children, who could not smell the deadly poison in their cup.

Their one surviving son, a second son who had married a Warrior wolf of a neighboring pack, moved back to take up the mantle of Alpha, and he decreed that a tea of wolfsbane from the same leaves that killed his father should be made, and every young wolf in our pack should learn to identify the scent at their first shift, so that we would never be tricked again.

So every month, on the new moon, my father charges a wolf he trusts to go to the river and collect fresh water. The water is added to the bottle to refresh the wolfsbane, which somehow never disintegrates or loses its smell. We believe the bottle, and it’s contents, are blessed by the Goddess as a safeguard and a sign of favor to our pack.

Other packs have a similar ritual, but every legend is different, as is every method of preparation of the wolfsbane. And some packs don’t teach their new wolves the smell of wolfsbane at all, either because it isn’t a native plant in their territory or because they don’t fear the poison. The Blood Soil pack is one such pack. They believe that to learn the scent of wolfsbane is to distrust the Goddess and her protection. The Blood Soil pack doesn’t even have a healer. They simply don’t believe in intervening in the Goddess’s will. I have heard that when it comes to their more highly ranked pack members, they don’t follow this ordinance, but that’s not confirmed.

Pierce and Heath approach my father. They bow deeply before him and place the ceremonial robes in front of him. Then, they place the wolfsbane into my mother’s hand, the incense into the bowl on the shrine, and the firewood in front of the five of us standing in the center of the circle. They take their places, Pierce behind my father and Heath behind my mother.

The ceremony starts as soon as my father lights the firewood in front of us. He steps forward. Many packs still use the traditional method of fire creation, usually a flint rock and a ceremonial knife. But my grandfather started using matches when he took over as Alpha, and my dad hasn’t gone back. So when he steps forward, he pulls a set of matches from his pocket, strikes a match, and drops it onto the firewood.

We wait with bated breath. If the light fails to take, the ceremony won’t go forward. After a moment, though, we see a flickering, fragile flame growing deep within the pile. A few moments later, the wood bursts into a larger flame. My mom smiles over the flames at me and I smile back.

Next, my father steps toward the shrine and lights the incense. He drops the lit incense into pine needles that had been gathered into the bowl beforehand. As the smoke rises, he begins a chant. It isn’t quite a prayer, because wolves don’t exactly pray to the Goddess. She is all around us, and in our wolves, so we don’t have to. We do sometimes talk to her. But the chant is to channel her, and her energy, into us as we undergo our first shift.

“Goddess, we feel you in this wood

We feel you in this air

We feel you in this water

We feel you in this soil

We feel you in all of us,

Your children,

We feel you.”

My mother steps forward and joins him in the chant. They chant together a few times, and then Pierce steps forward. Heath is next, and the pack continues to go down the line of pack rank, until each and every member of the pack has joined in. Although I am not yet connected, I know that by the mindlink, any wolf not at the ceremony has been instructed to join in as well.

It is our turn. My father steps forward so that he is in front of the fire and it casts dark shadows over his face. Without ceasing his chant, he waves a hand. We step away from the flames and form a single line, with me at the head.

I step forward, into the light of the fire. My father stops chanting, as does my mother, Pierce, and Heath. The pack continues to chant, more quietly. And perhaps it is a trick of the light, but the fire seems to dim ever so slightly. 

“Skylar Crescent, firstborn child of your Alpha, child of the Goddess, step into the light of your true essence. Tonight, among the pack you call home, under the light of the full moon, you will commune with the Goddess. Please step past me, collect your robe, and change. When you are finished, approach the Luna and learn the scent of our greatest enemy, Wolfsbane, so that you will never be caught unawares by it.”

I nod, seriously, at him. He sneaks a small, almost imperceptible smile at me. We aren't permitted to speak again until after the ceremony has concluded.

I grab my robe from in front of the shrine, and I head into the tiny space behind the shrine. As promised, Rosa’s mom has slipped the bag into the room, so I strip my clothes off as quickly as possible and throw them into the bag. Then I pull the robes on. They are massive on me, but will be only slightly loose on my wolf. I notice with a grin that Easton, the Omega who tailors the robes before any shift ceremony, embroidered my sleeves with a light lavender color I love.

I hear the boy who stood behind me, a Warrior’s son named Etan, grabbing a robe, so I quickly exit the structure and walk toward my mother. Very carefully, so as to avoid any spillage, my mother uncorks the bottle of wolfsbane tea, holding it out before me.

“Three deep breaths,” she whispers as I lean over the bottle. I breathe in and a feeling of nausea overwhelms me. The fumes emanating from the bottle smell at once like the moonshine distillery humans once built on the other side of town and like rotting vegetables left to fester.

I lean away from the bottle and breathe in fresh air, hoping to calm my stomach. I am very close to vomiting, and I want to hold it together. When my stomach feels ready, I lean back in. The second breath is more tolerable, and the scent is clearer. By the third breath, I know I will never forget the smell. As the legend goes, if the wolfsbane plant is steeped, fermented, or pressed into oil, the scent is unbearable for a wolf, but when it is fresh or dried, the scent is nearly imperceptible if a wolf hasn’t smelled it before. My mother pulls the bottle away from me and nods to the space directly in front of the shrine. 

“Wait right there,” she says.

I take my place as indicated, and watch my peers step forward one by one. After a few moments, only Rosa is left in front of my mother. After she takes her three deep breaths, remaining impressively impassive, she flounces over to the shrine and stands with the rest of us. I take a moment to appreciate that even in a giant robe, she can still flounce. Then, the chanting stops. We are moments away from midnight, and my father retrieves a bowl of rainwater. He uses it to extinguish the fire, and we are plunged into sudden darkness. 

I feel 150 eyes on me as we all wait. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, at what I imagine is the stroke of midnight, I feel a sudden blaze across my chest. To my left, I know that Rosa feels it too, because I hear her gasp. 

This is it.