Two - A False Dawn in a Storm

My afternoon was spent between honing my aim with the javelin and descent into teenage existential dread. My aim was terrible; my dreading was superb. I was well aware of my faults as both a young man and wolf in recent months and years, and now I had also been exposed as just as much a magician. As though some cosmic joke, the folds of the fabric of reality had fallen just so that they could make a voice I could hear. This voice had taught me that fire was not truly inside my body, but both could make heat, and that could be our common bond. In knowing that, my self became a being that was almost as much a thing of energy as it was matter; in knowing that, I became aware of those concepts in the first place, not to mention their properties. Through that, I found ways to make that common bond manifest. And in putting that to demonstration, I had exploded a fireplace and terrified the local flavour.

How do you cope when you get the distinct feeling that the stars are looking down at you, laughing at what they’ve made?

And so was my state, of replaying sounds of whooshes and booms, of gasps and chokes of surprise, of still feeling eyes on me that were hours removed from their stare, startled, horrified, confronted with a half-bestial monster that, also, just happens to control flames. I’d grit my teeth, I’d set my feet, I’d compact every whit of might I had in my boy’s frame to hurl my javelin as far as I could. And I’d miss, often widely, and take the walk to retrieve it, where there, the mess would start again, new paragraph, same as the first. The inner workings of Ekil Den-Burner, of his sixteenth summer; no more magnificent a mind, beholden to the primal, chaotic glories of creation.

What keeps a wizard more honest than poor self esteem?

My people grow learning that they’re individuals of a dual essence, one of mortal and one of beast. We are told that all the ways that this is a blessing, and one of the lesser ways is that when one feels low, the cheer of the other can lift it up. My heart may not have lifted when I saw my uncle emerge from the woods with a beheaded and gutted boar carcass. The smell of still warm blood from an opened kill wasn’t ever enough to lift me from a funk. But the smell of that kill salted and rubbed with herbs cut from the same wood it was taken in, roasting on a spit? Even today, I get a little too eager.

Wolf-folk don’t speak when we’re hungry. Not unless it’s telling someone who had no hand in the kill to wait their turn, then things get loud. We become as much beasts as we can when we’ve not gone to the Place Beyond, where the change becomes more literal and more drastic. Nuance leaves us almost entirely. It’s meat. It’s good for you. Eat it. Lick your fingers. Gnaw the bones. Your teeth aren’t for show.

“You should not be troubled, Ekil,” Freikya was the one to break the silence. “They know now that you’re friends with fire, and they’ll respect you because of it.”

“They were afraid of me,” I said.

“May well be the same thing in the right circumstances,” she said, a glint of the campfire’s light sparking in her eyes.

Uncle smirked and shook his head, a piece of gristle yielding to his jaw with an audible snap. “I think what she means is that these people are faced with something that isn’t from their world, and perhaps knowing that someone that also isn’t from their world has come to stand in their defense is a comfort to them.”

“That’s not what I said?” Freikya asked.

“No, it isn’t,” Uncle replied.

She stared at him. She processed him. For a moment, her lips drew back to challenge him, and then, from her right side, she found herself gazing upon some new point to consider, intently, and stopped.

“I disagree,” she said, curtly, and softly. She reached into the carcass and broke off a rib to gnaw on.

My Uncle turned to me, leaned in and spoke just above a whisper:

“I know nothing of magic, only that some can do it and that it works to varying degrees at the things it can do. What I do know, is that something lives inside of you, and it won’t go away if you don’t embrace it. It’ll be there, being, not doing, and like a broken arrow tip in your gut, the very best it can be is no trouble, and the worst it can become is an infection. So then, would you rather it be, or would you rather try to make it do?”

He stared me in the eyes. His look had a razor edge, but a warmth behind it.

“I would rather that you try to make it do. Because I believe you can.”

Then he leaned back, and was himself again: “The monster we’re here for. I wonder if we can eat it…”

Blink sighed.

Despite everything, I smiled.

---

I woke, instinctually. I felt like warm blood and flesh wrapped around cold bones and breath. I had been dreaming, of things my wolf-mind desired, of dark woods, gamy flesh and playful companionship. That dream halted, as though it was a man walking that met a stone wall- sudden, shocking, with undeniable clarity of what had happened as I fell sharply back to the world of the waking.

Something had gotten in the way. Like it had stepped into the path of my mind’s wandering and attempted to redirect it.

So I was, bolt upright in the den. Uncle was nowhere to be found. Blink and Freikya had set up their blind a half mile from us, at the opposite of Nactesbourg’s limits. There was only the hides we had lined the den with, my fleece, and the light from my brass candle lantern.

I had left it burning as I slept; the wax had yet to melt.

Clouds had rolled in and settled thick as mortar; no light from either the Rabbit’s nor the Wolf’s Moon could punch through. Rain fell like pebbles off a cliff. In the distance, from whatever faint light cast from the mouth of the den, I saw the shape of my Uncle, standing, waiting. Backbiter was in his hand.

By breath left me, and my body blurred, diving back into the den to ready myself. I had a thick, bossed shield and a bearded axe for my fighting arms, and my javelin, which I most certainly could use to scare someone with, provided they were already fleeing. I took my lantern too, closing its glass and hooking it to my belt- flames are harder to make in rain, easier to work from up from an existing foundation.

Armed, I set my shoulders and dug my heels into the ground, remembering the Fourth Martial Virtue of the Wolf, Wrath- that a mind, body and spirit honed to an edge is still no weapon without the readied and summoned malice needed to wield it. My chest tightened, and I felt my blood surge and grow hot. I drew in a deep breath, and when I exhaled, it came out primordial, a low growl any with the talent for the tongue could hear as my declaration of readiness.

I stormed from the den. Immediately, the Wrath I had brought up from the deepest part of me made itself scarce. The primordial growl I carried out with me turned to a whine. Because I saw it. 

And it saw me.

I was not expecting to need to look up as high as I did. Because at first, all I could make out was insubstantial, shapes and contours barely there. Tall strands, like alder trees, rose ahead of my Uncle, set at odd and inconsistent angles, with joints that looked like the segments of an insect’s leg. They were stock still, the sort of inanimate stillness that made it seem they could only have ever been there, because the idea of such things moving by themselves seems absurd. They joined at the top in a bulbous mass, the true shape of which I couldn’t judge. A silver light, like the sun through ice on an overcast day, issued from eyes that dotted its surface, the number and shapes of which I found myself pulling away from, less I found myself looking too closely. The majority of them were focused on my Uncle, holding him under a baleful light. A few broke his gaze and settled on me.

“Ekil,” my Uncle said, his voice strong and clear over a world that felt as though it had broken down into fit of screaming, “bring Blink and Freikya over. Now.”

At that, the monster made a sound I wasn’t fully sure was a sound. It shrieked, but it came out like a moan that wasn’t heard in the ears, but felt on the skin. The rain began to feel slick, oily, like some sludge issued from the thing’s awful presence was beginning to collect on me. Its eyes wheeled about, lancing out pillars of the stained light, as though to taunt the absent stars. Each the glare of one danced across my face, I saw in my eyes and felt in my mind a whit of its wretched nature. Words. Commands. Hate. Own. Rule. Kill. Despair. Fear. Control. Die. Live. Serve.

“Ekil, now!”

My Uncle broke the spell the thing was weaving on me. It was no magician, but its power was similar and limited, the equivalent of a bird trained to speak words, confusing sophistication being driven by a more simplistic will. I closed my eyes and felt the rain again, the real rain, clear, pure, cold. I was myself, and that was workable. My hand fell to my side and opened; flame lanced through the glass sleeve of my lantern and into my hand, and with a throw, a bellow and a command more subtle, I sent it into the air as high and bright as I could make it.

The thing made another sound that wasn’t a sound, and became indistinct in its motion. Legs like pike shafts momentarily became oil smears on water in their motion, swirling and tangling around each other. They turned solid again, as they struck at my Uncle in sequence. They found nothing but air and dirt, screeching through the air and slamming into the ground with enough force I could feel it beneath my feet. Uncle surged between the thrusts, dashing with a single step beneath a sideways swing. He ran, and it pursued him with stabs, kicking up a roostertail of mud and carnage as it drove limb after limb down like ballista bolts into a berm. 

I my mortal mind had me staring. My wolf-mind, however, found my Wrath, and also my courage. It growled and my heart burned; my hands found their grip on my weapons, and my feet dug in.

I didn’t see the limb that hit me when I charged to assist my Uncle. I sensed enough of to catch it with my shield, but the shock turned my arm numb to the elbow and lifted me off my feet. When I landed, “up” became a tenuous concept, and moving my limbs were an impossibility. I could see Uncle, see him moving, barely touching the ground at any moment. It was in pursuit of him, still, but he had changed his strategy, not fighting to tire it into exposing a lethal gap in its defenses, but to draw it away from me.

It saw this, and leaned away from him.

It loomed over me, instead.

The space I was in is difficult to explain, a place of extremes. Time stood still. I remember looking at a raindrop and seeing myself in it. I was afraid, I could tell. I felt what the thing was again as it pressed both body and essence toward me, felt the base animus driving it at its core, the commands it had to issue to me. I felt my wolf-mind driving me to reach for my axe and my shield, to find this thing’s guts and decorate myself in them. And there was my mortal self, the boy whose fear and shame had yet to leave him since he first lit his home on fire, who tried to lose that fear and shame on the trail of an Errant warband. That foolish boy, confronted with true terror, who was asking himself the same question he first asked himself when the first flame he had made in his hands lept free and caught the den on fire: “what do I do now?”

“Be brighter,” was the response. It was a fourth voice. One I had heard before; one that made the fear leave me.

I locked my two eyes to the thing’s many. I reached for my lantern, found the heat of the candle still burning in it, my hand sizzling against the hot glass and brass. I squeezed, and the glass gave way, shredding my skin. But the flame inside turned red. And then it grew.

For a moment, it was bright. For a moment, the sun lived on the surface of the World. Specifically, in my hand. In a second, morning came and progressed to noon, which progressed to noon at the height of summer. All I could hear was a sound that was like both a roar and a crash, deafening without pain, furious and exultant. I squeezed my grip tighter and for a brief moment the light grew brighter than any I had seen, before burning away entirely and ceding back to night and rain.

The thing made a sound again, but this time it definitely was a sound, the cry of an infant in distress and a grown man in mortal agony. It flashed its light desultory, erratic, and when the light came across my face the only thing it said to me was Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain. Pain.

That’s when I saw my Uncle from between it’s many legs, frozen in mid air, eyes wide, pupils turned to pinpricks, jaw clenched, teeth a row of serrated blades. He held Backbiter underhand, twisting the full mass of his body behind it as he leapt. When he struck, I swear I could see the steel turn livid and glow.

A leg came away at the joint, flipping end over end and digging sharp tip first into the wet soil. The cut was flawless, the paradox of Uncle’s sword- a ragged blade that slices clean. Oily filth curled out of the wound, half fluid, half vapour. It shrieked and thrashed, struggling to stay upright, confused and confronted by something it wasn’t expecting.

Then, from the treeline behind it, an orange flash arced and lanced into its stilt-walking mass. It was Hybbe, Freikya’s barbed javelin, steel head wrapped in sackcloth and burning pitch. Seconds later, three arrows found three eyes, loosed at once from a single hand- Blink’s Reaping, her signature.

A monster had come to Nactesbourg. But wolves had followed it.

I heard Freikya before I saw her, her war howl unmistakable, a sound like icewater being thrown on a hot flatiron. As the thing stumbled, she was suddenly across from my Uncle, hacking her falx, a great, two-handed cleaver of a thing at its legs. It staggered, made a sound though it was trying to roar from within, mount an offense. But even the one missing leg it wasn’t expecting, stumbling, trying to step with a limb that was just a leaking stump. It slashed weakly at Uncle, and Backbiter met the pointed tip of its leg, cleaving off the strange matter like it was warm wax. Freikya bent another at the knee with the blunt edge of her weapon and leapt off the joint, tearing free the still-flaming Hybbe from one of its destroyed eyes. Arrows seemed to rain down from multiple archers- Blink moved when she loosed, sprinting to keep the enemy confused to her position.

I, suddenly, remembered that this thing just tried to kill me, and found my Wrath again. Finding my more useful axe, I forced tingling legs to charge me at the thing and forced bruised lungs to make a warhowl. 

Which is when the thing turned to a construct of oil and water again, fluttering up in the air, tangling around itself, shrieking, moaning, vibrating some terrible curse at us in a language not spoken with a mouth or written with words. The grime it bled spiraled around it as it trailed from its wrecked legs and eyes, fully becoming smoke in this less tangible state, colouring the baleful silver of its light with sickly browns and purples. Then it screamed, and there was a thump; it turned to a blur and disappeared into the dark of the night, a cry of pain and wounded rage lingering on the wind as it went.

I slowed my charge, wondering what it was that I had just witnessed. Ahead of me, my Uncle slammed the heel of his palm into Freikya’s shoulder, got right in her face, roared from the depths of his guts. “You happy now?” his primordial voice said to her. She snapped at him, stopping inches from biting off his ear, roaring back “Oh, so happy,” in her own primordial voice. He pulled her into a headlock that was a hug and howled.

From the darkness, I heard Blink sniff and spit.

The rain poured down. It was freezing, but my blood was hot enough to not matter, and it washed the feeling of the thing off me. I realized I was clutching my axe in a torn up hand, a shard of glass still lodged in the scraps of skin between my finger and thumb. It hurt, and I didn’t care.

Wasn’t my blood I was concerned about. It was the first time I felt that, looking back.

Then my Uncle was in front of me. In that moment, he could have been ten feet tall and made of stone and water, a great primal giant born from the heart of the world. He was slick with the things filth, acrid, rotting, at once smelling like both diseased humors and surgeon’s water. There was a light behind his eyes, and from his grin, that same row of serrated blades I saw bared at a horror I scarcely could have conceived before he maimed it in a single strike.

He looked at me and said, “I believed you could.”