I'm not sure how often I will update this one - as a concept it's very much a work-in-progress and it's also my first ever OC-led fic. With good feedback, I'll continue. - Philip

The Rites of Spring

Prologue

Mother would watch the trees.

The southern edge of the forest lay barely a mile from the hole in the ground they called home. Mother had warned her never to set foot beyond the treeline, and from the tip of the hill above them Averell could see why – every so often the sound of groaning wood and rumbling earth would echo across the vale, and the sunlight shimmering off the canopy would play tricks; as though one of the trees had uprooted itself and was taking a stroll.

But it wasn't from on high that mother would watch; she would sit at the entrance of the cave, for hours at a time, eyes fixed on the horizon and the solid wall of leaf and bark which barred it off.

"I'm waiting," she would invariably say when Averell asked. "I'm waiting for your father."

"Where is my father?" She had begun to ask at a certain age.

"He's coming," was her unchanging response. After some time, Averell stopped asking.

Life was hard and devoid of luxuries. With just her and mother, wood had to be gathered and chopped between them, food hunted or foraged, and clothes sewn from what little quarry would wander through their isolated part of the world. Very occasionally, Men would appear on the horizon, and mother would travel alone to trade. Averell would wake long after sundown to hear Mother stumbling down the entrance to their home, carrying all she could bear in her arms – material, food and metalwork – before collapsing.

"Can I go and meet the Men, Mother?" Averell would ask. Mother's silence would fill the room every time.

"You'll have to," she had muttered once. Averell had pretended not to hear her.

Averell was twelve when she met the Men. Armed with her hunting-bow, Averell's heart pounded as she stepped further and further from the cave in which she had lived her entire life, further than she had ever been before. The Men were waiting for them in a clearing; huge, hairy, and stinking. Their clothes of fur and pelt matched Averell's own, but their faces were smeared with dirt of red and black.

Mother had offered hides and bones, leather and sinew, in exchange for steel. The Men laughed. "You know what we want," they said. Mother bowed her head and stepped aside.

The Men grabbed Averell. Her cries went unheeded but for a fist to the midriff, while Mother hid her face. All throughout, despite Averell's screams, she refused to even watch.

"This is what we must do to survive," Mother had told her the next day as she lay in agony on the bare stone floor. "This world is cruel."

It was some weeks before Averell was returned to full strength. Upon first rousing from her sick-bed, her eye was caught by the haul her suffering had won them; hunting knives, a quiver of arrows, and a pair of short swords in need of sharpening. Weeks she spent with a whetstone, buffing the beaten metal to a mirror shine and a keen edge. With a weapon in each hand, she felt somehow more complete; as though she had found a part of her body she had not known was missing.

Tree trunks and standing stones became her sparring partners. Upon each one she projected the face of those Men, sneering and pitiless, and hacked and slashed until splinters littered the ground, her fingers bled from burst blisters and the edge of her sword was dulled into bluntness.

"You move like him," Mother had once said upon catching Averell practising strokes and swings. Before she could respond, Mother was once again looking to the trees, not to be disturbed until nightfall.

Years passed. Her arms only became faster, her skin harder, her muscles stronger. But the lines in Mother's face became deeper, and she could no longer bear a full day's hunting as once she had, carrying a sleeping Averell on her back; now, some days, the responsibility was Averell's alone to fetch dinner.

It was returning from a hunt that Averell had found Mother splayed on the floor, blood pooling from her mouth. The old woman lingered for some days, in and out of consciousness. On the last day, she asked that Averell take her outside to watch the trees. The sun journeyed across the sky without a break in the treeline. "He never came," she whispered, before collapsing into a coughing fit so severe Averell carried her back inside to their bed. "I go, child," she croaked, "to the halls of my ancestors. May they finally forgive me." Mother closed her eyes, and her breast fell still.

As she descended the hill where she had buried her mother, the sound of mewling had caught Averell's ear. Swords drawn, she stepped cautiously through the brush to find an abandoned Warg-cub, eyes barely opened. Averell, feeling all too keenly its loss and distress, gathered the docile cub in her arms and carried him back to her cave.

The first few months were the hardest. Using Mother's herb-lore she was able to feed the suckling creature from her own teat, but weaning it onto meat meant she would often go hungry. Were it not for Eadwulf's growing hunting instinct, she would have easily starved to death during those difficult years.

Once she reached her twenty-first year, the words of her Mother came back to her. I'm waiting. I'm waiting for your father. Longer and longer Averell would find herself staring out of the mouth of the cave to the edge of the forest, wondering what possessed her mother to think her father could be found in such a treacherous place. And yet, she had to believe she was right – or else her mother had spent her life in vain hope, and died in despair. For the first time in many, many years, Averell began to ask questions – and all too late.

There was a world out there, a world Averell had never known. Those Men – long since dead and buried, rent apart by Eadwulf's mighty jaws – had come from somewhere. Mother was gone; whatever she was running from could not harm them now.

One day, she saddled Eadwulf and loaded him with enough supplies for a very long journey. They set off to the south, and without a backward glance the edge of the forest disappeared beneath the horizon. Their home beneath the hill would succumb to the elements, and within years no trace they had ever been there remained.