Wyvern Woods

Prologue - Night of Scales

On the day of the Night of Scales, people would expect a sense of dread in the city of Polistia. After all, it was the night that comes around each year when a newborn baby was destined to be snatched away by a Wyverns. But since it happened every year, the people learned to ignore it. The only people would felt pain that day were the parents of the babe, but they were already told about this night by the local diviner, so they had time to cope. It didn't make it much less painful to know, but it was better than not knowing. There were two women in Polistia that were near the end of their pregnancies, one was eager to finally become the mother she always wanted to be, and one of them was as prepared as you can be to give up your child. No one felt that bad for her, partially because of the tradition of this night, and partially because they were under the impression that the baby was the product of a one night stand with a traveler she would never see again. The town was full of chatter, no one ever went to see the wyvern that would come in the night as they were too afraid to approach it, but that didn't stop them from talking about it.
          "If I am being honest, just the thought of a wyvern being in Polistia is enough to make my hands start shaking and my shoulders go tense! I can't even imagine what it must be like to actually see one," said a woman as she walked down the street with a couple of friends and two of their husbands.
          The first woman's husband chimed in, "You could always ask Violet, within the last year she saw one up close. She looked the beast in the eye and everything."
            "I don't believe that story," scoffed one of the woman's friends. "Who would believe Violet anyway? Anyone who knowingly sleeps with a married man can't be that trustworthy. I bet she made up the story for the same reason she picked up the hobby of being a home wrecker, she desperately wants attention."
           The friend without his husband with him corrected the sour lady, "No, it's true. I don't trust Violet for anything outside of medical treatment, since she is good at that, but my husband saw the wyvern too. He spends a lot of time hunting in the woods, hell, that's where he is right now, and so he has gotten good at scaring off wyverns. He saw the wyvern that was staring down Violet, looking her dead in the eyes, and had to frighten it off. It doesn't sound real, but it is."
           The sour friend simply shrugged. "Well, even so, I'm almost tempted to say that her bastard ought to be taken into the woods instead!"
           "That's too far, don't you think?" Her patient husband interjected. "The kid did nothing wrong, and I wouldn't wish that kind of pain on anyone. Besides, Violet isn't due for a couple more weeks, so it could never happen. Bertha said it wasn't going to be her, and there are few dividers on the planet that are more trustworthy than Bertha."
          The group agreed and switched to a far less gloomy topic. Little did they know, earlier that morning, something unexpected happened. Something that would make the bitter woman regret saying she wished death upon the innocent child.

         The night, the diviner, Bertha, sat in shame. The vision she had a year ago was wrong. It wasn't possible for it to be different in the way it was, as it just switched two people's situations, unless the vision itself was cursed. But why would it be cursed? Who would do it? It didn't matter, it was too late. The birth of the woman she had said would be giving up her child was late, but Violet's was very early. Early that morning, Violet was finally given a way to ignore the malice the town would spew at her until the moment they needed healing of some kind. She almost had everything she ever wanted, she had a child of her own. And even though she lacked the fatherly husband she always dreamed of, she was more than happy. She was happy until she heard the news of the mix up.
          Violet's tired body pulled her into a deep, rejuvenating sleep after labor, but when she awoke she immediately noticed something was wrong. She whipped her head around, checking the entire room in panic, but the most important thing she had ever had wasn't there.
          She was devastated to find that her baby girl was gone, the only other person in the room was her dearest friend since childhood, the beloved diviner, Bertha. "Bea, where's- what happened to-?" Violet struggled to get out the words though her panic, "Bertha, where's Diana? What happened to my baby?"
           Her friend looked up at Violet with her pained eyes and tear stained cheeks barely visible in the room lit only by a small lamp in the night. Though the words were hard to say, Bertha explained the situation to her distressed friend. She apologized over and over for her mistake, but all Violet managed to process was that her baby was at the edge of the woods. Despite her own best interest, she tumbled out of bed and began to stumble her way outside, falling onto the walls for support over and over again.
          Violet found herself crawling on her hands and knees, weak and in pain, as Bertha tried to stop her until she reached the edge of the woods. There she heard that damn heartbeat in her ears that had been in her head for nearly a year, louder than usual, and as she looked up and saw a silhouette with a familiar pair of orange, alien eyes she understood why she was hearing the foreign pulse for all this time. She just couldn't believe it. In the dim light of the night, Violet could make out a basket in the wyvern's mouth, the outline of her sleeping baby's face, and the beast's expression. He looked as if he was just stabbed in the heart with a dagger made out of solid guilt. Violet was too shocked, confused, and devastated to process anything well enough to understand exactly what was happening or to get herself to do anything about it. And then, just as he did every year, the wyvern disappeared into the shadows of the thick forest, leaving the woman he had been wishing not to see again to sob alone at the edge of the forest. Violet never brought herself to truly believe that her baby girl, Diana, was dead, even though deep down inside she knew that there was no way that little Diana could be alive.

          A few days later, the other woman gave birth to a beautiful baby boy. Violet loved delivering babies, bringing life into the world, but this one was bittersweet for her. Even so, there was a secret between her, the mother, and the son that no one in Polistia outside the three of them could know about. And she agreed to keep it. So the boy grew up living a normal life, until he was much older and he found out about another secret. The secret he had kept since birth would only alter his mother's life and his own life, but the Earth shattering secret he found would alter the lives of every human and wyvern on Earth.