The Alpha's Blind Fate
Chapter 57: The Red Sisters (1)

Chapter 57: The Red Sisters (1)

ZINA

Five days into their journey, and they had already reached the North-Eastern borders without accidents much to Zina’s underwhelming surprise. She had seriously thought a claw or a canine would come swinging for neck... but no, the journey was proving to be one of the most boring ones she had encountered.

Not like she wasn’t grateful for the lack of action... however the silence was unnerving and slightly disconcerting. She still was unable to shake off the feeling that there was a whole dib she was missing out on.

At least, the silence provided her with ample space to think about a lot of things that had happened, and will happen. In the past six years, she had lived her life laden with a kind of guilt that had one point threatened to drive her to the point of suicide, and at another point, made her a shell of a woman whose life revolved around the man she betrayed.

What had she not done and undid for Daemon NorthSteed? What dreams had she not dreamed for him? And what visions had she not seen for him?

Guilt was a terrible thing. The moment the deadly emotion crept up, even reason was abandoned. For no matter how much Zina tried to convince herself that she was not responsible for what had happened to him, no matter how much Zina tried to tell herself that what happened to Daemon would have happened to him false vision or not... the guilt still clung to her like a terrible thing.

Now that she was meeting him soon, Zina wondered if she still had the courage to willingly abandon her life to him as she always intended... as she had promised him the day he marked her for the hunt.

That courage was growing dimmer and dimmer, for along the way, despite being the abandoned one... despite reconciling herself with the notion that no one would ever be by her side, Zina had come to appreciate life. She now wanted to live.

Whether as the Great Seer or as the Theta, she just wanted to live.

Zina sighed aloud and she felt Seraph who sat across from her in the carriage shift uncomfortably. Zina couldn’t fault her, it was true that in their five days journey so far, she had been sighing frequently.

The loud, reverberating sound of hooves and paws thumping against the ground dimly permeated through the carriage and the silent night. True to Falcon’s promise, they had been journeying hard day and night to reach Daemon’s camp. Zina transport retinue ran in their wolf forms, while Zina’s carriage was propelled along by two powerful horses that almost easily matched the strength of the Lycan and Fernan shifters among them.

At each rest stop, the horses were quickly swapped for fresh well fed and refreshed horses. The werewolves running along with the carriage flanked it tightly, maintaining a tight impregnable formation that was made for defense. No area of the carriage was exposed to external attack due to the formation, and Zina wondered how much of it was a pretense and a lie.

There was no doubt that among the people tightly protecting her like their life depended on it, there were many that wished to take her life. So why were they biding their time?

"I do not mean to offend," Seraph’s soft voice interrupted the silence in the carriage, "but may I inquire why you’re still ill at ease on this journey? Surely if not Alpha Prince Falcon and the Temple Knights, the WolfKnight’s will protect you from harm despite any reservations they have of you?"

Zina barely stopped herself from scoffing. "Why not?" She said sarcastically, "Because their rise is chanted as mine? Because they enjoy the fame that comes with being the original family of the Great Seer who foretold the equally as great famine?"

"I...I... I didn’t mean it like that." Seraph stuttered in an attempt to explain herself, "but surely, it would be a great shame on their side if the Theta who is chanted as their own blood is to die on their lands."

"Logically speaking I suppose so," Zina continued sarcastically, the hatred she bore for her pack seeping into her words. Although in actuality, it couldn’t be said that she was a member of the pack. Even in the past where they acted like a harmonious living family, the fact that Zina was without a wolf had segregated her from the WolfKnight’s. A fact that was reinforced after their stinging betrayal.

"Shall I tell you a story." Zina mused, her voice distant as she reminisced over past memories that her surname dredged up at any chance whenever it was spoken by another.

She felt Seraph adjusting herself on her seat as the pounding sound of hooves and paws reverberated through the oak made carriage. The windows and doors of the carriage made from cedar allowed for a sort of sound proof effect that slightly numbed the sound from the outside, and didn’t allow what they said in the carriage to travel out that much.

"In the little village I once stayed at in the East, there’s this feared and loved organization known as the Red Sisters." Zina began to tell Seraph.

The maidservant gasped lightly. "The Red Sisters? Are they not like one of the five Great Evils for the GreenLands Region?"

"Mmmm..." Zina trailed, the memory that was dredged up sending a bolt of hate coursing through her blood.

"I understand why they’re feared, but loved....’ Seraph trailed off sounding unsure.

Zina merely smiled because Seraph’s apprehension wasn’t exactly out of place. "They were feared for what they did alright. But poor families loved them for every ten years, an opportunity was presented before them by the Red Sisters... an opportunity to be free from the snares and pits of poverty. However monetary that freedom was."

"What do you mean?" Seraph inquired in a grave voice that expected the worst. Zina kicked off her shoes, flexing her toes in anticipation of the heinous things she was about to tell Seraph. For some reasons, she felt like being a particularly good storyteller.

"When I was a child, the elders of the pack told us small children about monsters that lurked under the bed of each and every child at night. They said if we misbehaved, these monsters would crop up and destroy us. But apart from these monsters, they told us of a very beautiful woman with amazing hair tied into a ponytail, red clothes, and blazing red lips. Honestly, I didn’t know what the color red looked like except that it is the same color as blood."

Zina smiled cynically, continuing, "I suppose that even now I still don’t know what it looks like. But back then, it didn’t matter, what mattered was that red was a universal sign of danger. So when we were told about a woman that was the very color of a bleeding heart, we surmised that she could possibly be worse than the monsters under our beds."

Sensing Seraph’s rapt attention, Zina continued. "But the elders told us that there was a catch. This red woman, unlike the monsters that rested under our bed, didn’t visit everyday. No, it instead came every once in ten years to special houses. And before it would leave those houses, it would leave a stack of gold coins and snatch their girl child away."

"I have heard it told before," Seraph said in a voice that dripped with trepidation, "but is it really true? Do they really take those girls away?"

Zina scoffed. "The elders lied. The Red Sisters do not snatch these girls away, it is their family’s that willingly give them away."

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