Chapter 5 -- The Birth Of The Warrior Luna
Julia POV.
FIVE YEARS EARLIER.
It wasn’t my own heartbeat that woke me up.
I sat up slowly, disoriented in the darkness. The ground beneath me was rough and rugged, the smell familiar and the feel hard and dry.
I felt tired. So unbelievably tired. And in pain.
My body ached. My teeth chattered. The very act of lifting my head felt almost impossible. Yet I had to get up, push myself fully upright, stumble out of the rubble I found myself in, and go looking for Damien and Pete. Nothing else mattered at that moment or the moment after.
Nothing else mattered ever after.
It had been a year since Luke’s death. A year since, I had sl*t the throats of his assassins and fled home in the middle of the night. This was another night just like that fateful one. A night of horror and mayhem.
Earlier in the day, I found myself wandering into a strange city named Blackburn where nothing was left standing. Everything lay in ruins or buried. Structures, vegetation, civilization, and even corpses lay either on the ground or half buried in the sand.
I knew I had made a mistake coming here the moment I set foot on this wretched soil. Not because there was no soil left. But because the air smelled of death and decay.
But what was I supposed to do without a roadmap or plan in a world ravaged by Nature and wolves alike? I had been wandering from town to town like a nomad for the past year looking for a place I could set up home. My pack members were now down to half a dozen, most of them taken by the unforgiving Nature. A few fell prey to packs of roving wolves out to satiate their bloodlust.
It was one such roving wolfpack that attacked us tonight. Out of the blue. They ambushed us from all sides, leaving little room to escape.
They were looking for fresh meat. Pups. And they found two in my pack.
Damien and Pete.
They say wolves eat their young. I had never witnessed it before tonight. And the realization that I could be witnessing the butchering of my own children right before my eyes tonight was enough to bring out the dormant wolf inside me in all its ferocity.
I fought valiantly. I fought tooth and nail. I managed to hurt a few of those vicious predators and damage their fangs with broken pieces of iron and steel. But I failed in the end.
There were too many of them. Too brutal. Too wild and too feral. I felt someone knock me out with a severe blow to the head. I blacked out.
It was those heartbeats that woke me up.
I knew there was no way my kids could ever be separated from me, even if they wanted to. The maternal bond of the Antumbra pack lasts forever, beyond time and eternity. The Luna might walk out on her kids, or the children may get tempted to break free of their mother, but they cannot ignore the Antumbra maternal bond. The children cannot detach their heartbeats from that of their mother.
In the Antumbra pack, the pups are joined to their mother, Luna, till the end of time. Till the moon stops shining at night.
But I couldn't stay behind and wait for my strength to come back to me on its own. For my head to stop hurting. I couldn’t allow those vile predators to dig their claws in my babies. I had to go after them and save my precious ones.
Somehow. Anyhow.
“Damien! Pete!” I yelled and screamed, hoping for a response. A sign – any sign – that they were alive. I was aware that they were not safe.
But as long as they were alive …
That night, I felt insane for the first time in my life. I had been sad and lonely before, happy and content before, enraged and vengeful before. But insanity was one state I had never found myself in.
Hunting for my two little kids in pitch black darkness among the ruins of Blackburn city made me realize what insanity was like. It was this all-consuming state of madness and uncontrolled frenzy that took over my entire soul and being.
Armed with a steel pipe I picked up from the rubble on the ground, I attacked the first lone wolf I came across in the dark. I hit him so violently and suddenly that he was left baffled and bruised.
I hit him hard to make him realize my intentions. I rained blows on him ferociously to make him remember this night forever.
“Where are they?” I yelled at him in frenzied rage. “Where are my pups?”
The lone wolf turned out to be a drunk. Drunk and washed out for no apparent reason except out of habit. The filthy creature writhed and screamed in agony on the ground as I wounded him severely. Finally, he pointed his finger in a direction that led to more darkness and endless hazy, foggy bylanes.
I stumbled onto those stinky bylanes with the steel pipe held in my fist.
Before long, I heard a commotion at a distance. Chatter. Loud laughter. Whistles. Growls and howls of a large group.
And whimpers. Baby whimpers. Coming from an open yard behind a rundown building. I recognized the whimpers immediately.
My kids!
I ran towards the open yard and swerved the steel pipe at the first thing that came in my direction. That ‘thing’ fell down with a loud thud. And a shiny steel sword fell out of its hand.
I picked up the sword.
I don’t remember much of what happened afterward. Much of it still remains a blur in my memory. Except that I kept swaying the shiny blade like crazy, and the bodies kept dropping like dead weight. I slipped on their blood, I got drenched in it, and I saw after a while that there was nobody left standing.
Except for my babies. Shivering and cowering in fright in a corner. I was drenched in so much blood that they could not even recognize me when I hugged them. It took them a while to regain composure.
The next morning, I saw the dead bodies of all the remaining six members of my pack. They were slain at night when I was knocked out cold. Damien and Pete were the only survivors that night apart from me.
A day later, word spread in the apocalyptic wastelands that a new warrior was on the loose. A female one. She was said to be roaming all over with a blood-stained sword in one hand and her two children in the other.
In a world devoid of hope, rumors and legends spread fast.
The legend of the Warrior Luna was born that day.
My name is Julia Kingsley. The Warrior Luna. I am the Luna of the Antumbra pack. The widow of Luke Kingsley, and mother of 2 little boys.
I have been looking for a home for the last five years.
This is MY story.