Are we out of the woods?

Chapter One

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters and places are either products of the author's imagination or used in a fictitious manner.
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The autumn breeze delicately swept through the leaves above her head, bringing the smell of the woods to her nostrils. It smelled of trees and earth and of faraway campfires where people were waiting for her and the little basket of mushrooms at her side. Little autumnal white flowers grew all around her long legs as she sat in the grass with her eyes closed, her back rested against an old stump.

At the start she couldn't hear anything, perfect silence, then little by little the sounds started to come: first the voice of the wind, who was gently blowing across the tall trees above her head, then the tap of a near woodpecker, followed by the call of a blue jay and at last the soft pouring of a small stream that flowed beneath the small hill she was on.

The sun was starting to set, but its pale rays still reached her skin, warming up her face and upper body, transforming her messy blonde locks into gold.

The girl opened her eyes takin' in the magnificent view in front of her: miles and miles of woods, where layers of green were occasionally interrupted by small rivers which, with the coming of winter, had turned into half dried streams.

The lonely hill had become one of her favourite places since the pack had moved there a couple of weeks before. It wasn't the first time the pack had moved for the winter, in fact they did it every year, but this was the first time that Taylor had started wondering around the forest, leaving the safety of their makeshift village. Thinking of why this was only the first time made her heart sunk, but she wouldn't think about that any longer.

The girl took a deep breath and passed a hand through her messy blonde hair, trying to push behind her ears the locks that kept going into her eyes and at the same time trying to push back the dark thoughts that had gripped around her heart. Memories of laughter and warm hugs disappeared into nothingness as she stood up.

The woods in front of her seemed to be endless, with billions of tall dark green trees that reached the far away horizon, where the sun was slowly disappearing. Taylor wondered how it would have been to walk through them, to reach the large lakes she could see in the distance, to feel warmer air feeling her lungs, but even if the horizon seemed so near looking from the top of the hill, Taylor knew that she would have never been able to reach it.

During the summer it was rare to meet other packs, since alphas usually preferred to stay as far as possible from what they felt was their competition, but during winter, with all the packs migrating south, it was hard to avoid one another, even if the forest extended for miles. That's why they had borders: each pack stayed in their own territory, hunt in their own territory and tried their best to survive winter in their own territory.

Taylor had never saw any of them, even if lately she had wondered a lot on the southern border, the little stream just at the bottom of the hill, but she had smelled them. The sweet delicate smell of omegas, the relaxing trace of betas and above all the strong arousing sent of alphas, who clearly had been the ones passing nearer her pack's territory.

There were three packs in that area, two small ones, Taylor's and the one controlling the eastern area and a bigger one, which, by having the strongest alpha as their leader controlled the warmest and southern territories.

Taylor's pack was pretty small, not more than fifty people, counting even the youngest pups who had born during the summer. Most of them were betas, then there were four alphas, the strongest one West was their leader and then the other acted as his terrifying minions that followed him everywhere. Their last omega had died the previews winter.