Written by emma.stormbornelore
in Ancient Britain
Once, I was a man.
A cherished warrior.
The youngest of three lords, the only surviving heir before the word chieftain had even been carved into stone.
I was a protector, a trader,
a traveller to far shores…
but above all, I was a husband and a father.
Morrigan.
She was everything.
Three children had blessed our home and that was enough.
It was all her body can carry after the night she met the old crone in the woods.
The one whose words still haunt me.
“The howl will return to your house, but not in the way you dream.”
I remember that day like thunder.
I had walked the long trail from the hunt., a wolf’s pelt across my shoulders, the carved head resting like a crown.
There was smoke above the village.
And shouting.
An old woman beaten, clothes torn was being dragged toward my father’s cave.
“Wait!” I shouted.
I stepped ahead eighteen, tall, muscle-bound, burning with promise.
They said I would one day unite the valleys.
“What’s the meaning of this?” I demanded.
A freckled, tattooed man stepped ahead, fury carved into every line of his face.
“This enchantress worked against us in the last battle,” he spat.
“She betrayed us, Boldolph. We demand justice for our dead.”
My jaw clenched.
I turned to her.
“You?” I growled.
“You’re the reason my brothers now sleep the eternal sleep?
The reason my mother weeps?
The reason the blood of my people feeds the grass?”
She said nothing.
With a roar, I seized her
hauled her high above the firepit, as if ready to cast her into flame.
But then
“NO!”
A voice like wind cut through the rage.
Morrigan.
Only she reach me.
Only she still the fire in my chest.
“This is not you, my love,” she said.
“Let the chieftain decide. Please…”
And I listened. Because she was the one thing I would never fight.
I carried the woman into the cave.
The chieftain stood waiting.
Red-haired, tattooed in victory and sorrow, wise beyond warriors.
“I have heard your crimes, Whitehair,” he said, voice like stone.
“You drugged the warriors. You let the enemy pass through us like wind through grass.
You gave our children to fire. You made the wombs of mothers empty.”
Still, the woman did not plead.
“Death is too easy,” he continued.
“You will be taken to the deepest part of the wood.
Stripped of your name.
Your hands will be marked so that the spirits do not recognise you.
You will eat only what you can dig or steal. None shall speak your name, nor carve it. You will walk in silence until the earth swallows you. Or until the wolves forget your scent. So say the spirits. So says the tribe.”
And so she was cast out not as woman, not as witch. As nothing.
But my rage had not cooled.
“Father, banishment is too easy for one who knows these lands,” I said.
“Bind her. Take her children. Take her tongue, and theirs,so none curse us again.”
And that’s when she finally spoke.
Her voice was dry like wind over bones.
“I curse thee, Boldolph… son of Marnak.
And thy wife Morrigan, daughter of Ayr.
You shall be wolves until the day you meet a boy. a giant of seven feet, who befriends all animals and dragons.
The house of your father will fall.”
The pain came instantly.
My darling wife and I we transformed, howling and breaking,
before the entire tribe.
Thousands of years have passed since that day.
Many cubs later, we have never seen each other in human form.
I bear black fur as dark as night.
a golden five-pointed star on my head,
a red crescent moon on my chest.
And my Morrigan…
She is snow-white,
with a red star between her eyes
and a golden sun over her heart.
If I have spared her this
I would have.
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