PAWN OR QUEEN

“Again,” Morrigan grits out. 

Though the sun has begun its descent, it’s the warmest time of the day, meaning the perfect time to train. Traces of wet snow cover the ground, drenching Morrigan’s clothing; a plain t-shirt and leggings. She had just had the wind knocked out of her, but she forced herself to her feet. She clenches a small ball of soppy snow in her hands as she stands before it drips out. A few feet in front of her is Idris, her uncle and Gamma of The Summit Keepers. He watches silently as Morrigan raises her fists into a ready position before she gives an almost imperceptible nod. He repeats the same move he had before, one that Morrigan had seen in advanced training but had never had done to her. She responds differently this time and easily dodges the attack, even setting herself up for a counterattack.

“Alright,” Idris calls before putting his hands down. He knows from past experience that if he doesn’t call his niece off, she’ll keep going until one of them is on the ground. 

Morrigan lets her hands fall to her side, taking a deep breath and stepping back. They walk a few yards to a large pine tree, where the ground underneath is semi-dry and where they left their water bottles.

“Do you know how long it took the others to get that move?” Idris asks, uncorking his bottle.

Morrigan shrugs before tipping her head back, nearing the end of her water. If her cheeks weren’t already red from the wind, she would have blushed at Idris’s words.

“The quicker ones took at least five tries to even dodge it, much less counterattack.”

Idris looks like the typical Summit Keeper–five and a half feet, well built, weathered beige skin, and long black hair. Currently his hair is tied into two long braids and he’s dressed similarly to Morrigan in a t-shirt and pants, but his most noticeable feature is his piercing blue eyes, something that has run in the family for generations.

“That’s enough for now,” he says, looking up towards the sky through the sea of thick pine trees. In the near distance, he can smell smoke from a cooking fire. He turns to look at Morrigan before saying, “Dinner should be ready soon. We should go get washed up.”

Morrigan nods, noting her soaked and muddy clothing, before bowing her head towards Idris, as is customary for youngers to do to elders in the pack.

As he always does when they’re in private, Idris bows his head in response. Morrigan has never understood why he does this–it’s not customary for anyone to bow to a younger that doesn’t outrank them–but he’s been doing so ever since her first shift. She did ask once, but he didn’t give her any answers.

The two then turn their separate ways. It’s only a few minutes of walking before Morrigan comes to the backside of a cabin. After climbing up the steps into the porch, she lets herself in through the back door. She crouches down to take her boots off before slipping through another door and into the basement. The basement, like the rest of the house, is made almost entirely of wood. 

Morrigan enters her bedroom, grabs some clothes, and then walks into her connected bathroom. She turns on the shower and places her hand under the faucet–ice cold. She lets out a sigh before stepping inside, allowing the freezing water to run down her body as she washes herself as quickly as possible.

When she was younger, her uncle Oskar–whose house she lives in–had told her that there isn’t enough warm water in the pack for her to use since she wasn’t a pup anymore. It hadn’t taken long for her to realize that simply wasn’t true, considering her frequent trips to Idris’s house. She eventually pieced together that her uncle simply shut off the warm water to the basement.

Shaking away her thoughts, she turns the water off and wraps a thick towel around herself, goosebumps covering her skin. She quickly dries herself off and gets dressed before drying her hair. 

For a moment, she studies herself in the mirror. Dressed in a pair of pants and a long sleeved shirt, she stands at five feet and two inches tall, (an average height for women in the pack,) her black hair reaches her knees, her skin is the same beige as everyone else in the pack, and then there are her eyes. One is icy blue, like her mother–Idris’s sister–and the other is yellow, just like her father–Oskar’s brother. It’s not unheard of for members of the pack to have different colored eyes, but currently Morrigan is the only one. Some members say that her eyes are a symbol of the Beta and Gamma family joining to create a stronger bloodline, while others say it’s a symbol of the curse put on Morrigan when she was born–the same curse that killed her parents.