Agency
Elara
“So you know of Alphas.” She turned towards the board, writing the word "Alpha" at the top. “And then you know of Lunas. Although they exist separately, let’s think of it as people who are elevated to the current position they are,” she said slowly. She turned around. “Are you with me?”
I gave her a nod and nearly fought the urge to say, "Yes, ma’am."
“Betas,” she wrote under Alpha. “The Council,” she wrote. “Generals,” she wrote on the same line as "The Council." “War Chiefs,” she added. Underneath "The Council," she wrote something that looked like "Captains." “Marshalls,” she wrote on the same line. “Other Elders,” she wrote underneath that one, and then at the bottom, "Pack Members."
She turned, tapping on her chin. “Of course, before I forget—” She turned around and wrote "Humans" underneath everything, several lines at the bottom of the board.
“Was that necessary?”
“No. I didn’t see why you needed to.”
“Now, you exist outside,” she said. “I don’t know what the heck you are. People might think you’re human, but you’re no human.” She tapped something on the desk in front of me. “But that’s another story for another day.”
I blinked several times, staring up at her.
“Alpha means absolute,” she said. “Beta, not exactly. Everyone else just follows what the big guy says—and what the big guy says depends on how he feels, which, to some extent, by and large, is heavily dependent on who he is. We’ve had terrible Alphas in the past,” she said slowly. “Alphas so scary, Alphas so wicked they would make you cry just thinking about them,” she said as though she had seen it.
“Were you alive when you saw this?”
“No,” she said. “History books exist. You should read a little bit, human. Maybe it will help you.” She flipped her dark red hair.
I wanted to. I genuinely wanted to on the same capacity as her, but she seemed to operate on a different level of cognition, not one that I found that I liked. Perhaps you’d think she was smart; maybe she was. But there was just that one thing about her that made me want to smack myself on the forehead. She wasn’t. She was just… I didn’t like strange.
“There once was an Alpha, long ago before my uncle’s time, who believed the fairer sex was nothing more than a tool for breeding. And he had realized it in the laws of the pack,” she said.
“Did many agree with him?”
“No. But no one could dare say anything. Still, an Alpha’s strength is mostly reliant on the perception people have of him. If people perceive him to be strong, they will not cross him, and it will remain as such. If he’s weak, he will be crossed, and he will be removed swiftly, evenly.”
“And him?” I asked quickly, just as she opened her mouth to continue. “Your Alpha— which is he? Weak or strong?”
She shrugged. “He’s all right, I suppose,” she said slowly. “He’s hardly done anything significant. It’s not his fault,” she said. “No, far from it—it’s not his fault. It’s mostly the fault of those he left. They were afraid that he would become like his father, and so they clipped his wings before he learned to fly. So he’s not weak, human, get it straight. He’s just not quite an opportunist like you.”
She seemed to say it with a hidden meaning—something that caused me to frown yet again. Now my eyebrows were aching a little too much from frowning all day.
She then started to talk more about the different roles of each arm of pack governance. She then wrote "Luna" on a separate line.
“Yes, you might say Lunas are the other halves of the Alpha, but they’re only as powerful as they were before they met their significant others,” she said.
“Essentially, they would be nothing if they were not an Alpha’s mate. Times past, we’ve seen women throw themselves at these men as though they were nothing more than a mere consideration of, well, anything. With genetics nearly subpar in some instances, they still didn’t care. All that mattered was the power that came with being, well, an Alpha’s mate.”
She smiled. “Is it important to you?” she asked.
I shook my head. Really, I couldn’t give a fuck if any of this was important. Honestly, I just wanted to go home. I wanted to go back to what I know. “I don’t know all this. You’re just shoving stuff down my throat and I’m taking it, but—” I trailed off and shrugged.
She was silent for a moment and then went back to teaching. It was basically simple—at least to some extent—similar to what my world was like. The president was basically the Alpha and his First Lady was the Luna.
The vice president was the Beta, but instead of having a chief of staff, the Alpha had the Council instead, which might be the same thing as the lawmakers and Congress. The Alpha could act independently of his lawmakers, but oftentimes he chose not to. Oftentimes, it seemed the reason was more available to them.
There were other things she mentioned that seemed to fly over my head. Warriors—one of those—instead of calling them soldiers. “Warriors,” she said again. Soldiers of loyalties. “Warriors have objectives and goals,” she said. “Of course, our warriors’ loyalties cannot be questioned; after all, they are bound to the pack.”
“What does that mean?” I asked, genuinely curious. “What does it mean to be bound to the pack? Is it wrong for someone to have a love or two?”
She smiled, a rather stiff one. “Sometimes,” she said. “But who cares? We are born into this. Our blood leaks of this pack. If we leave, we can smell it on us. Anyone can smell a rogue. Anyone can be anything they want to be but not belonging to a pack.”
I frowned. The word made very little sense to me.
“Think of it this way,” she said. “Warriors have no choice but to fight. Soldiers are given an option—become a soldier or become something else. They don’t have the something else. They have to fight. They have to lay down their lives for the pack, and then again, they have no choice. Within all of us is the love, the undying, ever-present love for our pack that drives us to kill anyone for it, to maim anyone for it, to fight for it, to serve the Alpha.”
“So what is this?” I asked, genuinely curious. “Some collective hive mentality? If anyone hurts the Alpha you all get riled up and start buzzing all over the place?”
She smiled. “Cute,” she said. “Yes. True to a very large extent, yes. We beasts have no agency. We have agency, and we choose this to be so. Then again, you speak of this value as though you lack understanding. Sirens are more like bees. Waverings are a lot like…”
She made a vague gesture. “…and so at the giant wings. And witches?” She shrugged and chuckled. “They have perhaps the most agency of all but always align themselves to forces of darkness—though they didn’t.”
“Is it not better to have little agency but strong loyalties than to have all the agency in the world but loyalties so fickle they could snap like a twig? You decide, human. You tell me. You seem to want to be more like a witch.”
Her voice dropped as did her expression darken. Her eyes glowed faintly, and she took several steps forward at me as though she would go for the kill. And once again, I was reminded of my pathetic place in this pack of furries.