Sea Glass1

Installment 1
Part 1


Prologue
At one point or another in one's life you find your pack. This moment could be near the end of your life or you could find your pack and not realize until much later. Everyone has a pack. They stick with you through thick and thin. As your lives change you may grow apart but you never truly separate. A part of them lives within you and you them.

Pack members gravitate towards each other. Throughout your life they will play important roles after you meet them. You will never be able to get rid of them.

This is the story of a real pack... Not figuratively.


To truly understand how close these people grew to be you must first understand how separated they were before. Vast oceans separated them and the sad part is that they had created them with their own hands. They built these barriers so as not to get hurt.  The future was uncertain and in their fear they put distance between themselves instead of banding together. 


Each pack member was born into the pack differently but they all needed each other whether they admitted it or not.  Twins were born, one girl and one boy, possessed by wolf spirits.  What an ordinary person might call werewolves.  Their only resemblance was their bleach blond hair.  The boy strove to gain more strength in his noble form but the girl feared her own power.  The parents were not naive and understood magic's full extent in their children.  They fought over what to do and they finally decided to separate on the childrens' fifth birthday.  The mother took the girl and the father the boy.  The girls lived far away and the boys lived where the boy could join a pack.  But no matter how far the mother ran with her daughter the girl had a connection  to her brother and the pack that nobody could deny.  They tried though.


One girl in the pack was born with a fierce animal spirit.  She was born to a mother but no father.  He had run away from the teenage mother and the lonely little girl.  The girl always feared she had driven her father away with her strange gift.  The girl had fiery red hair to match her attitude and her wolf spirit.  She strove to gain strength enough to protect her mother.  Secretly she wanted to please her father and always imagined he would come home if she was strong enough.


There was a boy who at age ten had his parents stolen away from him when one night they were attacked.  His parent put up a good fight since they were powerful sorcerers but their attackers were possessors of animal spirits and so the sorcerers fell dead beneath them.  The pack searched the house and one somewhat decent person in the lot came across the boy hiding in a closet with silent tears running down his cheeks.  The boy looked up with sad, unafraid eyes ready to face death.  The man gave the young boy his animal spirit, sacrificing himself, so that the boy would be spared by his comrades.  Possessors of animal spirits do not kill each other as a code of law and honor.


Their original leader took them all under her wing.  Playing a different but important role in each child's life.  The last of her own pack, she accepted each child and would have done anything for them.  That anything turned out to be her life.


One girl was born with an animal spirit as well as a knack for sorcery.  Her mother was a sorceress who wanted to give her first child power to defend herself and those dearest to her.  The mother, with out telling the father who was naive to magic, performed a ritual giving the child a second soul.  The second soul harbored great strength in itself and the first had a strong heart so she could perform sorcery.  The conflicting souls within her showed in her appearance.


The girl gave part of her powerful soul away to the boy who would become another member of their pack though and maybe that's the best place to start the story.  To show how different it was before.  Maybe it was this event that started the change or maybe it was an event that came after.  Perhaps it was the string of events that changed everything but no one will ever know. 


Destiny is a tricky thing.


***


They all sat in the cafeteria, not together but they were all in the same room at their local high school.  Only Lightning knew that someone was missing, though the others probably suspected.  However, he wasn't Lightning at the time.  His name was Barnett, shortened to Brett.  The others were the same; Streak was Elizabeth, Scarlet was Vanessa, Goth was Charley and Leader was Widow Evena, one of the lunch monitors.  There true names, pack names, the ones they went by when they were truly alive were not their names daily.  Only when they met together on the weekends or had other business in their true forms did they go by these names. 


Widow Evena was a retired teacher and lunch monitor.  She went by Widow Evena because her husband and fellow pack member Dragontooth died.  The pack knew, sensed, that she wasn't just widowed by her husband but her original pack.  She was the very last of the original Lake Erie pack.  Her sorrows were deep but her outlook on the world was surprisingly positive.  She was popular among the kids because she could tell really good stories.  She was the only member of the pack who tried to keep in touch with the other pack members outside of their meetings.  If only they knew that her fantastical tails were almost all real.  She was old and looked it but was still physically fit.  Unlike a lot of elderly women you see she had long hair, tied in a ponytail that day.  She didn't die her hair, leaving it a perfectly white color.  Her eyes were a startling blue and she had more wrinkles from smiling than anyone else ever to walk this world, one sole or two.


Vanessa sat with her close circle of friends, her red hair marking her as different.  Vanessa wore her red hair proudly and only cut a few inches occasionally, letting it tumble down her back like a flowing stream of rose petals. 


Brett didn't do any sports, Leader worried that one of them would accidentally transform into their true form, and shut people out so he sat with few friends.  Brett had bleach blond hair, like lightning... and like his sisters' hair. 


Charley sat by himself; a lot of 'goths' dress exactly the same, 'expressing their individuality,' and hang out in groupes but Charley didn't care about the title of Goth.  He just was goth.  He had naturally dark brown hair and unlike the generic goth he didn't have long hair that covered his eyes.  Charley was polite and kind to everyone.  He strove to help others but it was clear that he had a pessimistic outlook on life and he was hazed.      


Elizabeth, not shortened to anything, sat at a corner table with some other outcasts.   New kids, the kids who just wouldn't shut up, chubby kids and kids who's parents still pick out their clothes.  Elizabeth didn't look like she belonged there.  She was pretty, with short brown wavy hair held back with a head band and emerald green eyes.  Though, when you talked to her you would realize why she was shunned by her shallow peers.  She talked with out slang or text lingo and in an airy voice that sounded like chimes.  Elizabeth seemed like she had lived a thousand years.  This was probably because her second sole had lived a thousand years.  Wandering the earth, gaining wisdom.  Never passing on to the next world.


Another weird thing about Elizabeth was the markings.  She drew sorcery runes all over her body, trying to perform magic.  It hardly ever worked though and she was left with the ink on her skin.  A sorcery rune has to be drawn on the flesh to absorb spirit energy from the body and disappears after the spell works.  Her second sole overlapped hers though and muted her sorcery.  She didn't even try to conceal the runes like the rest of the pack whom she drew runes on.  


The packs' only real contact with each other outside of their meetings, other than with Leader, was to get their runes from Elizabeth.  With more than one sole, each pack member not only had a physical manifestation of spirit energy but a strong sense for it.  They could read other peoples' emotions, especially each others', and with lots of people around during the day it got overwhelming.  Elizabeth could perform the simple sorcery that suppressed most of their abilities during the day.  Sanctuary from a suburban school filled with emotional teens thoughts was more important than their quest to distance themselves from each other.


Even with the runes they could all sense the tension in the air; they knew something was going to happen.  It came in the form of slimy, yellow mac and cheese.  Elizabeth sat listening to a girl gab about something meaningless when...


"Ooops, sorry."  Said a girl sarcastily.  The mean girl had spilled her lunch tray onto Elizabeth's shirt front and the slimy yellow pasta oozed down her shirt.  It was probably an accident but she hadn't been very careful.  The girl walked away to get a new lunch.  Elizabeth was good at hiding her embarrassment but the others felt it too and blushed a deep red.  Vanessa was angry but stayed where she was clutching the table to calm herself.  Brett tried to look away and act like nothing had happened but he couldn't ignore her.  Charley rose from his seat, trying to decide if he should help and Widow Evena rushed across the room.  Before Charley could decide or Widow Evena could reach her a boy was there helping her.


"Are you ok Elizabeth?  Sorry.  Carmen didn't mean to do that,"  Elizabeth was pretty sure Carmen did mean to do that but she didn't really care and his smile was so sincere as he helped her wipe off most of the mac and cheese with napkins.  She could clean up the rest later with a spell when no one was looking.  Everyone in the cafeteria stared; this wasn't another outcast kid helping her but the athletic and popular Christopher Styles.


"I'm fine.  I've got a sweat shirt in my locker I can wear over it.  Thanks," said Elizabeth after a moment of stunned silence.  Widow Evena reached her and placed a protective hand on her shoulder.


"Thank you very much young man, I'll take it from here."  Widow Evena's and Chris' gazes locked.  Everyone in the pack could sense the connection even before he was technically one of them.


"Cool."