3.Seriously, Screaming Birds?

***Thyra's POV***

My weekend was the same as always, sleep, train, study, eat, sleep, rinse, repeat. Friday evening, I calmed down from that rage monster that was building. So, I did do something a little different to distract me this morning. I am starting at the results in the mirror of my barracks room now. Since I was 16, I have kept my hair cut to my shoulders tucked back in braids. I needed to focus on something other than my anger, and I took some clippers to my hair and buzzed off most of the right side of my hair. My scalp is only a little paler than my complexation, but I have always been pale. My black hair is combed over to the left side of my head, showing off the new style I gave myself. I look into my murky green eyes, and thank the Goddess that I got bored with cutting my hair before shaving all of it off in frustration.

Ana has clinic hours and isn't in our barracks suite right now. She has always been the one that cares for anyone else, the pack mom of our little group, and now is focused on becoming a combat medic. Just one step of many toward becoming a doctor for her. Her being at the clinic is another reason to thank the Goddess. She has been trying to get me to go out with her and Kenny tonight. I just want some time to myself. I have been stressed about moving to Capitol City for the leadership course and stress makes it harder to control my rage monster. I really need to come up with a name for her. But, I am lucky to have the three of them. After rogues destroyed the Onyxbite Pack, the three of them are my family. Ana and Kenny are from the same pack, and we picked up Mak along the way.

Makawee is my other roommate, and is off on a scouting mission. She is a little weird and awkward, and we love her for it. She doesn't look like a scout, she looks more like she would fit in behind a computer working on something brainy but cool. She can also move so silently that she sneaks up on me all of the time and loves to jump scare us. My wolf, Sel, loves it and never tips me off when Mak is making her sneak attacks. Mak has different colors in her hair every month, and is covered in piercings and tattoos. While Ana is beautiful in a feminine way, Mak has more of the dark alternative beauty that turns heads.

Turd McFergusson... seems like you already have a good name for the rage monster. Sel mentions to me.

What?! No, that is what I call you. I snark back.

Oh, well I don't answer to that moniker so I figured that was the rage monster.

No, I like that name for when you are being too snotty.

Sel "hurrumphs" in my mind and languidly stretches out and curls back up going back to her nap. See, snotty. And she knows she is pretty. She is mostly black with some white markings, a lightning bolt down her chest, and a gray circle on her shoulder. But the most pretty part is her eyes, they are the same green as mine. But set against black fur, her eyes don't look like murky green swamp water, they almost glow to a jade.

Mak and her team are out surveying The Darkness making sure it hasn't grown. Mak is always worried that she will come back with bad news, but in over 1,300 years The Darkness hasn't grown. Everyone knows about the prophecy, some screaming birds, a tree, fated mates returning, and the return of the royal family. Mak is always talking about some new theory of the prophecies coming true, but it never really concerned me. Everyone is taught the prophecy in primary school:

"In the bygone era, the royals, beacons of luminance, relinquished their celestial radiance to shroud The Darkness, veiling it from their subjects, but only for an ephemeral epoch. For in the weaving of fate, an evil unseen shall unfurl The Darkness anew, a forecast foretold by the lamenting birds departing their ancestral throne."

"A great tree, colossal and venerable, rent asunder by an inferno's fury, stands bifurcated—half in desolation, half in verdant resplendence."

"Fated hearts, intertwined by cosmic loom, shall rediscover their resonance amidst tempestuous tides. Their union, ordained by celestial weavers, shall ignite forgotten embers, crucial in the tempest's midst."

"The Darkness, shrouded in its insidious might, shall succumb solely to the ascendance of a royal born from the crucible of loss and rebirth, one from the ashes to the fire."

"Upon their visage, the countenance of the celestial orb, completed by the sacred sigil upon the union with their fated's mark."

Thinking about the prophecy makes my skin crawl. Any time I think about ashes, I see my home, burnt to the ground. I hear howls of pain, remembering that they came from me as I held my baby brother's burnt body. Who needs screaming birds when I have already seen the hell that The Darkness hides.