Chapter 123: The Enclave

The council chamber had been carved from living stone generations ago, a perfect ring of black marble sunk deep into the hill that housed the Enclave. High windows stained glass of moon-silver and onyx caught what light remained and threw it back in narrow, cold bands across the room. A single round table dominated the space, wrought of dark wood and inlaid with a pale crescent of mother-of-pearl. Around it, banners drooped: each sigil and color the sigil of a pack that had once trusted the Enclave to keep them safe.

Victoria sat at the head like a monarch draped in flame. She had changed since the cavern below; where she had been black-robed and soft as shadow, in the council hall she was bold in a gown of lacquered crimson. Gold threads threaded through the fabric like veins of molten metal, and the dress clung to her form with expert cruelty, drawing the eye deliberately to the sweep of her chest, the severe line of her collarbones. Her pale skin glowed against the red, and the gold circlet at her hairline, simple but impossible in the way it caught the light, marked her as Luna: the visible mouth of prophecy, the one the Enclave claimed guided them by the goddess’ will.

Guards stood in silent pairs at each carved door, armored and still like sentinels from a dream. Their helms bore no crest to identify allegiance; the Enclave’s guard served only the chamber, only the law of the union.

Around the table, the commanders gathered. Not all were Alphas in the way cities labeled them, some were acting heads, others envoys but each wore the weight of a pack’s future on their shoulders. They came from the South’s sun-baked valleys and the West’s wetlands, the East’s mountains. Not a single voice represented the North and that wasn’t surprising. Orion’s pack was the only one settled in the North and they were outcasts after all. Traitors to the enclave.

"Nine present," Victoria announced, "Three packs deputized their lieutenants. Two sent envoys. We will begin."

An alpha from he marshlands spoke first. His voice was gravel and a sort of exhaustion. "Farmer’s fields blacken to the touch. My scouts came home with their throats raw. They cough and there is..." he swallowed, the image making him taste bile, "...blackness on their lips. Every livestock is dying. This plague has gone on too long."

A woman of the west added. "The soil kills new seed. Where we used to feed half the province, the earth cracks and refuses. We planted two months ago and there was nothing."

Around the circle, other voices lifted in a chorus of dread: children with pillows damp from coughs; mothers who would not wake to sing because sleep did not come; men who turned from work because their hands shook with a fever that would not still. The stories were the same in every tongue: a cough that grew violent, a fever that burned like a coal set beneath the skin, and then, the worst of it, the detail everyone ended on, blood. Dark blood, like ink, that stained the lips and face; tears as black as ink.

"It moves like breath," said an envoy from the south. "One touch. One kiss. A handshake at the market and they are gone within three days. Our healer’s halls are overflowing. We cannot bury them quickly enough, and the priests and priestesses cannot keep pace with prayer. Some are even getting infected by this...plague."

A chill threaded the chamber. The moonlight in the stained glass seemed suddenly small.

"You’ve had our reports," Victoria said, because she had to speak. Her voice, when it fell over the room, was the sort of thing designed to stop motion, an authority sharpened to silence. "And it’s the same thing we’ve been hearing for months. And like always, we do what we do best, we contain the issue with quarantine until we get a solution."

The alpha of Duskveil pack, Samuel spoke up. "And how long do we need to do that? We’ve been containing this for months and it continues to kill our people."

There was a murmur of agreement.

Victoria smiled discreetly. Samuel was the one person who always challenged her authority. And it was funny how his own priestess was working with Victoria and was one of the reasons why the plague was going around.

"I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again," Josiah, an alpha from the east spoke up. "We need to do a ritual or something. Invoke the moon goddess to help us because we have no idea what is going on here."

"The one person who is supposed to be a representative of the moon goddess is sitting right here and we’ve had no vision from her in months. Nothing that can help us." Samuel retorted.

Victoria bristled silently. Once she gets all the materials she needef for the transference, she will make him eat his words. Samuel always undermined her authority. She was the Luna. She had shown them visions, she had saved them numerous times but all of a sudden she was the one at fault for not coming up with visions?

If only her stupid daughter had done the work she had been asked to. All she had to do was to dream and see what was going to happen but her daughter failed to do that. At some point, the visions stopped coming which undermined Victoria’s authority hence why she was going to get the powers for herself instead.

Besides, the gift should have been hers from the beginning. The moon goddess must have made a mistake. But she didn’t let her thoughts be known.

"You all know how much I’ve begged the moon goddess, I kneel in front of the shrine praying everyday that she sends a sign that can help us but we haven’t gotten anything at all. Philip is my witness." Victoria said pointing at another alpha from the west.

Philip was a young alpha who had just taken over from his father and would do anything to appease Victoria. Hence he spoke up on her behalf.

"But that isn’t enough!" Samuel said in anger. "How do we cure this...this disturbance?"

"I thought we sent word to that pack in the North?" Gloria, a woman from the south spoke up. "Was there no reply?"

She said that pack from the North like it was poison she refused to swallow, refusing to name the pack itself.