Rite of Submission - Rite 1

55: Selene

                I knew this place. It was the void that had swallowed me up the last few nights in my nightmares. Had I been dreaming about my death? I didn't feel the same sense of panic and dread that had me gasping for air when I woke up. This was peaceful, and serene; who would have thought that dying could be so comforting?

'Has this life been so difficult that we welcome the prospect of death?' a soft feminine voice mused.

"I couldn't take the pain anymore," I answered back, my voice sounded meek and small in this endless void.

Melodic laughter reverberated around me, 'It's been such a long time since we've last stretched our mortal legs. Did we expect there to be no growing pains. Surely, it could not have been as bad as the first time?'

"It felt like someone was trying to rip my body apart and rearrange it, and you're calling it growing pains?" Could it have been my first shift? And I wasn't strong enough to survive through what she called growing pains. Of course the introduction to my wolf would be the last thing I'd ever get to know in this life.

A ball of light appeared off in the darkness, growing larger as it moved closer to me. 'A wolf,' she laughed softly, 'no, we are not one of the spirits that run in our packs.' The ball morphed into something resembling a glowing rod of light, dancing off in the distance. 'Perhaps we've waited too long to walk among them again? But it does take a meticulous amount of planning and the right celestial bodies to align to craft a vessel compatible to carry even such a small piece of us into the world.'

Even in the end of it all, I was still getting talked to in riddles. "If you aren't my wolf, who are you?"

Laughter bubbled around me. 'I am you! Or, rather, you are me. Sometimes it's hard to remember which of us is which. Or are we one in the same?'

"Why can't anyone just be straight with me? Not everything needs to be a riddle to be solved," I huffed, so tired of having my world flipped over and snatch out from under me over and over again, for the last few weeks. "Who are you supposed to be? And, why am I here with you now?"

She laughed again, 'I am you,' the light zoomed up to me, growing to the size of a person. A slender arm separated from the bright light, reaching through the darkness to grab my hand. With a light tug, I was pulled into the light with her. I found myself floating in the center of a giant glowing orb, staring at... myself. 'I believe our mortal mother named us Selene after our self, but we've gone by many other names through the eons, Luna, Mani, Chandra, Artemis, Tsukuyomi-no-Mikoto, Soma, even a face of Hecate, to name a few.'

"Our mortal mother?" the only mother I had known had turned out to be my aunt. With a soft smile, she reached up and touched my forehead. The light grew so bright around us that all I saw was white.

The light dimed, and I could see a woman resembling my aunt, but with features more like my own. She was holding a small white wolf cub to her chest, pleading with another woman. I blinked a few times, not sure if I was really seeing my aunt standing there. "You have to take her. Take her and run! He's going to kill her or worse if he finds out!"

"So you want me to let him kill my daughter instead?" she clutched a newborn to her own chest.

"He'll have no reason to harm her once he sees that she cannot shift this young. And with you leaving with your mate, he'll never suspect anything of you. Please Kalli, you know what a shift this young could mean. If he doesn't kill her, he's going to try and use her for something far worse. I'll die before I let anything happen to your Alexandria."