Brewing Trouble

Klaus...

The night's silence was paradoxically noisy. And its vibrant silence was made more intense by the universal trill of a million forest insects.

But the Alphas' place was the opposite. There must have been twelve men there, all breaking into intermittent peals of laughter and mirthless mirth before talking again in low voices.

The Blue blood pack had gone to war and had just returned. They were simply ruthless so that the other pack took to flight halfway into the battle. But the blue blood pack was not one to deal ruthlessly with one halfway, they went after them hastily and caught up, making sure they all were all murdered brutally.

Klaus was a boy but he was not. He wafted his perfect, tall and muscular frame through the room and silence returned once more. There was an authority in his bearing and he looked every inch the Alpha of the menfolk in this large and prosperous pack. He was half-clad so that his enviable physique was exposed, giving an account of the luscious talent of the moon goddess in glorifying the male body.

He walked languidly to a couch and sat indifferently among the rest. Despite the happiness that graced the air, something on his face suggested that all wasn't well. Something was amiss.

The rest who had read the foreboding ceased their banters and a perfect silence surfaced.

You could hear a pin drop.

' Those beasts, those bastards' he swore through white teeth firmly clenched 'they have dared to murder one of our women' he threw down his head and gnashed his teeth, allowing a murmur of suppressed anger to sweep the pack.

When he continued, the anger and resentment in his face had cleared and had given way to a wan of smile which was more terrible, more sinister and more ominous than the anger.

He told them in a clear and unemotional tone how one of them had been attacked and murdered at Greenville, a neighbouring town. And that she was murdered for no apparent cause.

'That woman,' he said 'was Kai's mate' he pointed at a man who sat beside him. The man's shadow was vaguely lighted so that one could only see his silhouette repressed against the wall, but they knew him quite well just as they knew the other. He was smitten with grief and smote with the hard reality of things.

The pack gasped just in time with anger and want for more blood.

The other Alphas spoke, and at the end, it was decided to take the normal course of action. The following day, an ultimatum was dispatched to the Ash pack asking them to choose between two options. One was offering a little boy and a Luna to appease the mate's deceased.

The blue blood was greatly feared by other packs. And that was because she was powerful in war and magic. This was because of a century-long sin against the moon goddess.

At the dawn of lycanthropy when the world was young and they were one, Druidry erupted. But as time's whirligig formed years, things began falling apart. Like brothers, they had welcomed the druids to their fraction of the earth and let them settle.

But like mad dogs, several packs being enchanted by their magic turned against the goddess and went astray. And the goddess, in her anger, swore an oath to forever denounce the rest that had gone their separate ways.

It was only the Blue blood that stayed behind. Alpha Klaus had made sure of that then. He was not only a wolf but he was as well a damphyr. Through thousands of years of life, he still hadn't let go of his resentment for how he was treated as a child, which sometimes led him to express his anger in violent creative ways.

This as well is all the more problematic because Sleamann was about the strangest creatures around. Unlike others, he was not just a wolf, warrior, war-lord or whatever. He was a vampire and a vampire-werewolf hybrid, which made him the first damper.

As a result, he could take on whole packs of normal vampires or werewolves with terrifying ease, while normal people barely registered as more than food to him. He was a thinker and he thought about the sad fate of the pack which had offended.

Because of that, he, with his pack was blessed above all. No one knew how old it had exactly happened, but at a point, there was a general agreement- the active principle in that epoch was Klaus himself.

And so the neighbouring packs who knew naturally of these things feared Klaus and his pack, and would not go to war against them without first, trying to sue for peace and appease the offended. The pack they had gone to war with chose war over peace and paid dearly for it with their heads.

And in fairness to the Blue blood, it should be recorded however that they never waged wars unless its case was clear and accepted as such by the moon goddess. And there were indeed times when they had been forbidden to go to war. If they turned deaf ears and went, they surely would have been punished or oddly enough, been defeated save for Klaus.

The war that was threatening was a clear one and even the enemy knew that.

The next day he arrived in Greenville as proud and imperious emissary of war. He was treated like a king. At dusk the following day, he returned with a little child and a ripe Luna.

The little child's name was Tristian, and his sad story is still told everywhere among lycanthropes and humans, even to this day.

The rest met later to hear the report of Klaus's mission. In the end, they decided, as everyone would, that the Luna be replaced with the murdered. As for the boy, he belonged to the pack as a whole, and there was no hurry therefore to decide his fate. Klaus was, therefore, asked on behalf of the pack to look after him in the interim. Because of that, the little boy lived with him.

With everything thus settled, Kai was still so grieved. He was a man who thought about things, and because of that, he thought about the value of women. They were treated instead as assets and that was why the pack had not gone to war.

If it were a man, Greenville surely would have become an empty town. But he could do nothing about it. The thoughts instead led him to greater complexities.

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