Red and Her Wolf

Chapter 1: A Dangerous Fruit

Theopania Teronia was almost an orphan at age 21. Almost, in that she had lost both her parents tragically years before, but she had a previously estranged grandmother who had taken young Theopania in and raised her in a general sense.

In the dark of the night, in the quiet of her mind where she was 99% sure that her Grandmother couldn't hear her, Theophania, or Tiffany to her Grandmother and no one else, thought that was the problem. She was being raised by a woman who had already failed at being a parent.

Failed is a hard term, and would get her a harsh punishment if she said it aloud, which is why she kept it to dark times where technology couldn't even guess at her thoughts and prosecute her accordingly.

Her Grandmother would protect her from the charges, but their 'home' was another issue. Secretly it was beyond Theophania why her Grandmother, having failed as a parent before, thought now to try, try again.

It was the Red cape her mother had sewn her as a small child that had given Red her new nickname. In the Red Forest where she'd lived with her loving Mother and Father, the Red cloak was practical at hiding her when she needed it. It hid her from cameras and wolves.

Her parents had been very clear that the cloak was more protection against the cameras than the wolves. In Rosa Verdain, the Wolf population lives separately and harmoniously with the human population. The Red wolves of the area were small, no larger than Proto-Wolves. They could climb trees as good as Proto-humans, or monkeys as they used to be called, when monkey's lived in the wild and not in special sanctuaries to keep their numbers going. Red had met some of the local Wolves at school events when there would be an exchange. That was before the Culling, of course.

Even in the dark, Red tried not to think of the Culling that led to the deaths of both her parents. But she was happy to place blame on the woman who had started the Culling, her Grandmother.

Grandmother Rose, or better known as Leader Scarlet Rose, lost her first son to a Grey Wolf attack. Red still had unanswered questions about that attack, as no Wolf had attacked a human before that time. But after the death of her Uncle, a man she had never met, Leader Rose used her considerable power to convince first the people who lived in the Grey Forest and then many other towns in other World Forests to hunt down the dangerous beasts and kill them before they killed us.

The Culling was swift.

The Wolves, although caught unprepared, were also better fighters and knew their forests well. What ended up taking more lives in the War between Human and Wolf was the confusion and division it created amongst humans and humans, or wolves and wolves.

Red didn't have many clear memories of her childhood anymore. The one that stood out the clearest was watching both her parents run into a burning pyre to drag out four red pups and then catching on fire, begging the suffering pups to run, their faces masks of pain.

Red remembers that three pups made it to the forest alive. The fourth was beaten by the crowd.

That was the last memory she had of her parents. She wasn't even sure how she came to be adopted by Grandmother Rose, only that from her small cottage in the Red Forest, she suddenly lived in a large, cold stone house in the middle of the largest town in the Grey Forest and was being called Tiffany.

Grandmother made her feelings known very clearly. Children were for smiling, not arguing. Any fighting was met with cold silence. She was expected to be perfect in every way, no exceptions.

For an 8 year old girl, it had been overwhelming. For a 21 year old woman, it was soul destroying.

Red walked calmly and carefully along the stone streets of Harmony. It used to be called Verdant Town, but it had been changed after the Culling to signify the unity of the Humans in the surrounding Forests. In front of her a mechanical Woodcutter marched, almost silent except for the gentle tapping of its double axes against its black metal body. Red didn't want to look at the Woodcutter or its giant axes, so she kept her smile on her face the way her Grandmother had told her and looked down, watching her red clothed feet peak out of the long red cloak, nothing like the cloak her mother had once made her, one step at a time.