What Will You Do?

Indrik

Do powers cause nightmares? I highly doubt that or Blaire would have spent every other day screaming from her sleep. Or perhaps, they were just signs of my body getting used to its new heightened senses. Again, I doubted that. Those dreams had looked and felt very real. Like something that had happened, or worse, something that was about to happen.

I placed an arm under my jaw as I tried to recall my dream. The mere thought of relieving that nightmare scared the marrows out of me but I decided that I had to face it to know what the problem really was.

In my dream, I had seemed to be watching the pack from the hill that was just behind the royal training grounds. Once upon a time, that had been my favorite spot for hanging out. In my dream, or was it a nightmare? The scenery had rolled out before me in the same way it had the last time I had been there. There had been the palace to the one side closed off with high enough walls as to prevent me from seeing past them. Then there were the training grounds, spread out from the base of the hill looking sad and empty like it always did at night. Looking straight ahead, I could see the outpost of the major gates of the pack which always remained closed for reasons I could never understand. I mean, we had a pretty open boundary not too far away from it through which enemies could easily attack and which rather ironically, wasn't very guarded. Some distance from the palace and the training grounds, the living area of the people sprawled. Brick and stone spread as far as I could see, lit torches minimizing the darkness that would otherwise be profound due to it being a moonless and starless night.

This was where things had started to look strange. It was the dead of night which meant the pack members had to either be sleeping in their homes or be out in the woods patrolling, hunting, or simply taking a stroll. Instead, they all seemed to be huddled before the palace, shaking with fright like they were expecting something to burst out of the gates, something which was likely to destroy them but which they could not escape from however hard they might have wanted to. Even from my vantage point, I could sense the absolute dread that was rushing through their minds, nearly driving them crazy with its intensity. I was still wondering what could be responsible for scaring them so much when the huge white gates of the palace suddenly groaned, falling to the ground and flattening some unlucky ones under its massive girth.

I had winced and wanted to scream when the others still would not move. "Fools! Get out of there. Can't you see it is not safe?" I had wanted to bellow but my voice had chosen that time to fail me. I was still battling my vocal cords when I saw what the people were so afraid of.

I had never seen a transformed werewolf. From what I heard, it was a preserve of only the strongest werewolves and even those only did it when they totally had to. I had seen a wolf though, if only in paintings. That had not resembled a wolf and I dare say, it did not look like a werewolf either. No werewolf that was the size of a man could transform into something that huge.

Its head was massive, large enough to conveniently match the size of the head of two grown elephants. But it was the head of a wolf. The snout and black, beady eyes convinced me of that. After that, it became hard to believe that I was still looking at a wolf. The wolf rose to a height of about ten feet with legs thick enough to be mistaken for oaks. Each leg was so massive that each step caused a mini earthquake, crushing whatever got in the way into an unrecognizable pulp. When it raised its head to the sky to howl, it seemed to block the sky out completely. Its fur was black, blacker than night, I dare say. And its body? Oh gods! You don't want that to fall on you. Trust me!

The wolf lowered its head and stared at its cowering audience then slowly, it had turned its head until it was looking directly at me. I had wondered about how it could have known I was there but it was definitely staring at me. Strangely, rather than feel frightened by this massive creature that had just killed several before my very eyes, I had felt a sense of kinship instead, like I was finally meeting a lost part of me.

"What will you do?" A voice had asked in the back of my mind. I had looked around wondering where the voice had come from but had seen no one except the wolf who continued to watch me like I was the most amusing thing in the world. I turned toward him, wondering if the speaker might have been the wolf.

"Decide quickly. Time is not on your side. What will you do?" I had stared at the wolf, realizing with growing horror that he was the speaker but before I could even think of the proper exclamation to make that would not make me end up in the powerful jaws of a mega wolf, I had felt the vision fading and the next thing I knew, I was awake.

I frowned as I pondered upon the question. "What will you do?" I could not shake the feeling that it was a message. "Time is not on your side." He had said.

"For what?" I muttered out loud before I could stop myself and then blushed gratefully when I found that I was the only one in the room. I wasn't very eager to explain that I wasn't crazy.

I glanced out the window at the slowly brightening day as the words continued to resound in my mind. "What will you do?"