LEUKAS
Atlas and I were three years old and Amethyste was but a few months old when we moved from the dark and cold fortress we had once called home and into what was then dubbed, 'The floating palace.' Not that people were comfortable enough to say it to our faces back then, people were still wary of the new Alpha who was killing all of their oppressive traditions and promising them things they had never even thought to dream of; promising them a life where people weren't born as slaves, where wealthy man didn't do as they wished despite the fact that the kingdom was ruled by a tyrannical woman. Everyone had known of Jason's existence of course, but back then, back when Abattohn was not a town where people had equal rights or safe homes; when people were born into money or poverty and died the same, it was a crime punishable by death to actually see the son of the queen; the apple of her evil eyes, Jason. So when he took over the rule of Abattohn, everyone was understandably wary. It had taken a lot of time and development before they could all walk down the streets without wide looks of fear and suspicion thrown our ways.
Lanthe had made our new home so much lighter and homier than the cold fortress ever was. She had told us then, that the new house on the island would be signify a new start for everyone. New memories, new traditions and a new sense of community within all the wolves of Abattohn. The day after we moved in was marked as the first fruit-picking festival of Abattohn, where Lanthe opened the island to every single pack mate for a day at the orchard of Eden; an orchard which mysteriously grew random and different fruits plentifully every year, and the whole pack spent the day enjoying the gifts from the gods, a tradition that still lived to this very day. While Jason had tackled building the kingdom into the technologically and academically advanced pack it was now, Lanthe had tackled rebuilding the pack bond which had disintegrated years ago and had over time become but a myth. By the time we turned ten, the bond had a healthy glow that tied all of Abattohn together, and it had felt like a golden silk thread of family and solidarity, every lycan from wolf to bird bound by a newer solid foundation. And no longer were we treated like powerful strangers, but also like part of the big family.
As soon as things with the pack had settled down a little, we had really set about decorating the house to our liking. Lanthe had always instilled in us the importance of pack, and she had always told us that despite the fact that the island was a little further from the rest of the pack, it partly belonged to everyone in Abattohn. A lot of events were held at the house; at least two every month excluding the monthly lycan run and the kids' movie night that took place in our five-hundred seat home movie theater. To make us feel as like the home was more ours in a way, Lanthe had granted us all two of the fifty rooms to make our own havens as she called them. She had chosen two on the first floor and had torn down the wall to make herself a yoga and ballet studio, complete with all the best materials for both activities and a fully stocked minibar. Atlas had already been fascinated with boxing and had turned his two rooms into an impressive, black and red boxing gym which I would now value at about a million dollars, despite the fact that Lanthe hadn't let him use some of the material until he turned thirteen. I, with Jason's help, had made for myself a three-million-dollar laboratory, the laboratory where my current empire was born. I had also been chaperoned for the first three years after it was built, but I hadn't minded that much because I wouldn't change everything I'd learnt from my mentors for anything. Amethyste had also been extended the same courtesy when she turned had turned eleven and she had made herself a magnificent art studio.
Jason had turned his space into a mini hangout area with sleek couches, a huge screen television, a small wine cellar, a pool table, a PC system, and best of all, his sleek, in-home tattoo and piercing parlor. We called the place 'the hangout' because despite our different room choices, we could all agree that Jason's was the best and we always begged him to let us hang in there. It was by far the coolest room. His 'haven' was the least used since he barely had anytime to hang out and all but one of his friend, his right hand man Jared, were scattered throughout Azzuire. I had always wondered about his tattoo parlor though. I had no idea why he needed it since he didn't actually tattoo anyone but Lanthe and I hadn't thought that warranted a whole setup. I was fifteen and on the brink of death, my darkened soul bleeding out of me through my eyes and my ears and my mouth when Jadon first laid me down on the familiar but also unfamiliar leather chair. I had never seen such fear and panic in Jason's eyes. He had always been my indestructible dad, my hero, the Alpha of the Abattohn pack and the Prime. The fear in his eyes was as unfamiliar to me as the chair, as the feeling of my life seeping out of my body and as the coldness of death which I felt seep into my bones where my soul was bleeding out. I remember how his hands shook when the needle first pierced my skin. And I remember myself greedily clinging onto the life that he tattooed onto my skin.
The 'hangout' was just as I remembered and I had no idea whether to smile about the times Atlas and I spent trying to defeat Jason in 'Ubber Racin' or to cry about the fact that the walls were once covered with my blood and had witnessed the death of my God-given soul. Jason's hand on my shoulder pulled me away from thoughts, and by the look on his face, he still struggled with the same things. We stared at each other silently for a while before he patted my back and went for his tools.
"Let's renew your sigil." He said as he gathered his tools and I nodded, pulling my shirt over my head and lying down on the long adjustable chair. Even though he couldn't draw on paper, when it came to marking the skin Jason's skills were rivaled by few.
The first prick of the wahnd needle against my skin immediately brought about a surge of calm and relief, the darkness that was a constant hum against my skin quieting as the beginnings of the ancient runes began taking form on my skin. An unease that I hadn't even realized possessed started to fade, and despite all the good feelings the runes drew into me, what they represented was a constant in the back of my mind. The fact that I couldn't survive the place that I had called home since I was born without them etched on my skin galled, and the fact that the wolf that had been a constant inside me since the day I was born was now tainted by darkness that had enwrapped itself around me and my life since I was sixteen, and forever caged inside me, was for a moment devastating, until I reminded myself who I was and all I'd achieved despite all that I had lost.
I was rich, I had hundreds of academic and achievement awards and I had an entire catalogue of women willing to have sex with me whenever and however I required, no matter how dark my appetite got. I had no reason to feel so empty. But then again, something in me was so much lighter, so more fulfilled than I had ever felt, and two little someones had something to do with my mood. I couldn't help a smile at the thought of my kids, a smile which faded as soon as I remembered their mother. Their mother who had legs for days, legs that had felt so smooth and strong under my hands as I had owned her mouth and seared her taste to my soul. I shook the thoughts out my head and just concentrated on the addictive sting of the needle and the silence. It was a while before I broke the silence standoff with my dad, a standoff I had no Idea why I even attempted because Jason wasn't much of a talker anyway.
"So mom is mad at me huh." I commented, closing my eyes as the needle dug deeper at the end of one of the runes and I could feel the first artificial bond complete before Jason began another. He didn't respond for a while but I knew what's coming. Jason absolutely adored Lanthe and in his eyes, she could do no wrong.
When he finally spoke, he didn't necessarily defend her though. "I know how tempting it can be to be to choose anger over…"
I let out a scoff at his words because I knew where the conversation was headed and interrupted him. "Do you? Do you really?"
I could hear the frown in his voice when he responded. "Of course I do. Anger is almost always connected to caring and I do care about a couple of things, so I have struggled with having to choose the high road." His word sank in but I closed my eyes, clenching my jaw tightly. I didn't want to be so angry at Lander and Aleks. I didn't want to care enough to be. For a while we were silent again as he continued to tattoo my back.
"I know how you feel, Leukas. Probably more than you think I do. I know how it may seem to everyone, I've heard how perfect and effortless people think my relationship with your mother is; that our being together is some wonderful fairytale, but it's really wasn't. And maybe the reason we cherish everything we have together and why we will fight to the death for our love and our children and our family and our pack is because we know very well how it feels to be without these things and because we fought for them a lot, especially our love. Your mother had to get through the fact that I am the son of her best friend, a best friend who was younger than her as well, and I had to get over the fact that the woman I had known to be my mother my whole life, someone who raised me and loved me in the only way I knew then, was actually the villain in the story I didn't even know existed."
Jason and Iolanthe were beloved by all of Abattohn because of everything they had given it. Jason had changed a crumbling barely-there economy with oppressive rules and actual slavery into a striving economy and an industrial metropolis which owned multiple huge countries all over the world. He had improved the medical care, the education system, the standard of living and the security of every life in Abattohn. Lanthe had not only strengthened the packs' relations with each other and the rest of the hidden kingdoms of Azzuire, but she had also worked on the establishment of the secret relations and trading with the rest of the world; a task that involved paying of a lot of important people for discretion and sometimes selling our products off to the rest of the world under some other established brands. Because of all those investments, an abundance of all kinds of precious minerals and precious stones, a top tier education system, an education that was free for everyone, coupled with the naturally higher IQ of lycans and the relatively small population of about two thousand individuals, Abattohn had grown into an incredibly wealthy and developed place which looked more like a very big luxury resort with tall building and architecture the rest of the world was yet to discover than anything else. And Lanthe and Jason happened to be at the center of it all. The hundreds of billions I'd made for myself were merely a drop in the see compared to the amount of wealth and power Jason and Lanthe had. So it was no wonder that they were heroes to the majority of Abattohn and they were treated as such, with their birthdays declared as public holidays and an entire festival dedicated to their mating, among other things.
As per tradition, their love story was reenacted on the last day of the festivals, with different themes and dramatizations all applied to the same romantic story that portrayed Jason as the trapped prince who was locked away in a dark fortress by an evil witch who knew just how powerful he would grow up to become and the beautiful and strong enchantress who came and freed the prince and all of Abattohn from her evil reign. I had never thought much about the stories, to me they had always been mom and dad, fated mates who would have ended up together either way. Hearing this new information from Jason was shocking but not entirely unwelcome.
"I could have dwelt on the fact that a woman I had met and loved at first sight had come into the fortress under false pretenses and basically used me to get to someone else, and for a while I did, but that wasn't the crux of the matter was it? I was so hurt that my whole life had basically been a lie and I was basically Rapunzel and I felt weak and stupid because of everything that I was discovering, so for a while I did. I hated Lanthe and I thought I would be fine living the rest of my life hating her like that." He continued. Lanthe was mum and I loved her but still….
"You had the right to be." I blurted out, feeling a bit guilty for saying it out loud. Jason chuckled.
"Perhaps. But I chose to listen to her and realize that I was angrier at myself and that woman than at Lanthe and it was just easier to be angry at her than at anyone else, and I guess I just thought about her intent. Her friend had been killed by the same woman who went on to trap her friend's mate and steal their son and she had been looking for years for her friend's son and the woman who stole her. Her falling in love with me was a complication in so many ways and the fact that I was blind to all of that woman's faults and I had basically been brainwashed by her didn't help. So I tried to see things from her perspective, tried to put myself in her shoes and consider all her feelings and her reactions. Motive. She never intended to hurt me; she didn't set out to do it. But I was caught in the crossfire of her past making her react. Aleks is your mate…"
"She's not my mate. I don't have a mate." I interjected.
"You know she wouldn't have survived her pregnancy if she wasn't." I tried to interject, with what I'll never know, but he continued, "And no matter how much you tell yourself you're not Pack anymore, you are and you might not die without your mate, but you'll spend the rest of your life wondering what might have happened if you might have listened. Because the way I see it you're like me, sheltered and unable to comprehend any other reality besides black and white and that will cost you at some point, it's costing you right now. That young lady had a life that you are unfamiliar with and may be hard to empathize with her if she doesn't explain herself to you. How about you decide to throw everything away after you have all the facts. And please stop upsetting your mother, it's not good for me or the baby." He concluded, a final note in his voice signifying how done he was with our conversation. The intensity of my reaction to the pricks of the wahnd lessoned so I gathered he was just about done, the runes replenishing my life force to its' peak. I didn't mind the silence either because a lot of things were running in my mind; Jason's and Lanthe's history, my upcoming conversation with Lanthe, and Aleks. She wasn't my mate. I had lost everything that linked me to the pack and I had accepted it a long time ago. I wouldn't let anyone have that sort of power over me. I couldn't afford to.