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Beware the Wolf King, they tell you.
He who laughed in the face of Death, and was henceforth struck once, twice, thrice beneath the flat of her scythe, abandoned to roam the forests as a husk of his former self, wearing a thin trickle of blood like a collar.
He who held an empire between his claws, a concept of wealth and power dripping with gold and leather. He had a partner. An ally in the game of war. Hungry for the spill of blood, both of them, caught in the net of the Universe’s terms and conditions.
(Death made the best kind of entertainment, after all.)
He who mocked the Yellow Name, the last point of which to turn back, to make amends. He who was the first to fall to the cradle of Red. Blood and berries.
Once to the cruel stone of the cliff-face, jagged rocks puncturing his lungs, shin bones splintering. A death instant and painless.
Twice to an enemy he sought to kill, and was henceforth killed by. Defenceless lamb saved from the slaughter, owning neither armour nor shield but still succeeding in slaying the Beast. He’d crumpled to his knees, a laugh drying in the back of his throat as blade met skin. It was quick, and he was gone.
Thrice beneath the sword of Vengeance. Warm, golden blood that wasn’t his own had oozed over the cracks in his palms, between his fingers, under his nails. His sword was coated in a similar substance that lifted curls of smoke. Cured of the bloodthirst for a fleeting moment.
But there was Nemesis.
He had parried, and he had lashed out, and he had then sunk against the wall, dragging gold behind him like paint. The mirror-edge of a sword thrust through his skull.
Nemesis had stood, back straight, her eyes betraying nothing. She tugged out the bloody sword and wiped it on a sleeve of his blouse.
He was Yellow Name no more. His eyes bled into a wolfish red as his body dissolved.
The Wolf King prowls the tundra and the mountain, and you know to lock your doors when red eyes glint in the dark. Hunger of a predator, and you are but his prey.
He balances in the cradle of the scales, treading the beam, one step from rising back to secure Yellow or falling into the pit of the Void. Below the Universe. Left to memory and mourning, and the hope that someone would scrape loose dirt over your corpse, save become grave-food for those who scavenge the night. The ravens. Skulks of foxes. And the ever-present, starveling wolves.
Wall in your sheep, they tell you. Too high the risk for you to fling open your curtains and see a bloodbath in the fields, wool and bone stained with the blood and muscle of your flock. Wolves cannot climb fences. The Wolf King rises above them all, axing his way through wood like matchsticks, the scent of blood thick in his nose and his mind. By the morning, there will be nothing but warm skulls and the buzzing flies that blanket them. He takes their bodies, unlike the horses, which are left to moulder in the stables with claw marks hewn into their flanks and the underside of their throats.
The stable door is jammed. You wrinkle your nose at the sheer, rotting stench emanating from behind it, fling your entire weight against the latch in a bid to ram it open —
Daisy’s head has been removed.
The gaping wound of her neck is crowded with a heaving mass of black-bodied winged creatures, crawling and writhing like a liquid entity. Her spine is broken. You can see the jagged white end protruding from her back.
Daisy’s dead weight blocks the hinge. Flanks slick with sweat and coagulating blood, gashes colouring her usually chestnut coat like a wine stain.
There is a tufted ear on the floor that should belong on Daisy’s head. Matted with blackish blood.
You close the door silently bar the click of the latch and think about how it was a matter of time. Horses never last long with the Wolf King stalking the backwoods.
You hear him howl sometimes. First come the cries of his consorts, the pack that flanks him day by night, barks resonating through the spruces to herald the moon. And they are a symphony. Then the Wolf King joins them, and there’s the unnatural blend of Beast and Human writhing through the air, chords struck from a voice box born incapable of such bestial articulations.
That doesn’t stop him. He howls with his subjects, alongside, and you know he is nothing more than the demonic creatures which accompany him eternally.
You shiver and sweep the curtains shut, but the sound is still there. You don’t sleep that night.
Under your thin bedsheet, knees tucked up to your chest, you stroke the edge of the wolf claw set into the necklace you’ve worn since the Wolf King first posed such a threat. You’d found it collecting mushrooms in the pines, jammed into the rough surface of a weathered trunk. Surrounded with tufts of matted fur and splinters. Keratin. The soft pink tissue that bedded nails and cushioned their bases. It was the size of your curled forefinger.
You’d plucked it from the bark and picked splinters out of the fur, and kept it. Wrapped it tightly in twine, on a chain, a keepsake. The wolves have nothing on you. Nothing.
Shudders wrack your shoulders. You rub your thumb against the claw’s sharp edge, drawing over the pad a thin line of blood.
Avoid the full moon, they tell you. When the Wolf King’s power rises to its peak, with the swell of the moon, the bloodthirst bubbles inside him like thermal vents scorching the ocean’s underbelly.
You are alone, stumbling on roots, basket stuffed with ferns and berries and sprigs of herbs you’d eventually grind into a gritty paste. The black sky blends with the treeline and you’re not sure which direction the path is.
How could you? This is the woodland. Without the trees, ahead you’d see a mountain; atop it a mound of dirt that crackles with raw magic like the aroma of spring leaves — too bright, too saturated for the depths of this ragged winter. You know there are towers to the South — five of them that leap from the landscape, having appeared over the course of a week. Any landmark would be useful, and you know they are invisibly there. Tucked behind the backbones of the spruce wilderness.
Subconsciously you fiddle with the necklace beneath your cloak. Twine worn smooth beneath your fingers; the claw clatters against your collarbone. You are silent as the forest groans, chatters, screams around you. The hoot of an owl. You snap your head around to see a dark silhouette trace the treeline.
The night is dark. Gooseflesh prickles your forearms and thighs. You long for the security of your cottage.
There’s another shape, larger, bulkier, scuttling behind the trunks. You pause, clutch the basket closer to your throbbing heart.
“Hello?” you call, and your voice sounds awfully, awfully small in such a dense wilderness.
“Hello there.”
The voice responds from nowhere — you are alone, you tell yourself repeatedly — yet it’s a sharp, sudden shock like plunging into a tub of meltwater, grating over your eardrums.
The path is barely darker than the forest floor, but still you squint. Is it that way? You detach a hand from the basket and extend your arm before you, groping, feeling in the dark.
Your hand collides and the impact judders through your shoulder. Not with bark as you’d expect. There’s fur beneath your fingertips, warm and trembling and spiked with sweat like the coat of a hunting dog —
Or.
A wolf.
Every muscle in your body stiffens, tension hiking up your shoulders. You dare not move. Then you can’t. A clawed hand — paw — appears from the darkness, loops itself around your wrist and squeezes, gently. Your fingers clench without you willing them.
The Wolf King spins and the forest reels with him. Gleaming moonlight illuminates his fangs — pressing into his lower lip deep enough to bruise but not so to draw blood — and the corners of his berry-bright eyes — irises red, like spilt ink, and sclerae stained bloodshot. The plucked horse skull he wears as a cap leers down at you with a toothy grin. A crack splits the eye socket. You wonder if it’s Daisy’s.
A wolf sentinel rubs at your ankles from behind, and you can feel at least four distinct, wet, black noses sniffing at your skin, testing your innocence. They shuffle beneath your cloak and thump their tails against your shins.
The Wolf King fixes you with a bored expression. You square your jaw. If the night is your last, you’re going down staring down the King who rebelled against Death, in the hopes that Death herself would be merciful.
It was just a coincidence. A horrible, horrible coincidence.
You hope your family won’t mourn, instead save their supplies for such a frigid winter to arrive.
A wolf barks, and the Wolf King twitches his ears — decidedly canine, fur blending to the head of limp, greasy hair dark as dried blood. Your head rings. They can hear this from the village, and you would too, if you’d stayed at home, shuddering at the nightly chorus. The Wolf King — still clutching your wrist, pressure never wavering — touches the other hand to his collarbone, just below a jewelled clasp that secures his cape of wolfskin.
“You,” he intones, more of a growl than human speech. You understand. The Wolf King releases your hand; you fumble at the clumsy knot, sweating under his blood-red gaze. You can’t untie the twine. Bringing the necklace up to your jaw, you grind your teeth over its string until it frays, snaps, falls away in your hands. The Wolf King snatches at it. Your palm smarts and you scrape it down your cloak.
“Mine,” he says with a wide, stretched snarl. And he places a heavy paw in your own. The weight causes you to stumble forward, and the Wolf King pushes back on your shoulder blades to balance you.
You count the claws, strong and white and blood-tipped. One, two, and a gap. The fur is matted and black and there is no pressure on your palm.
It was his. It was always his. You should have known.
“Mine,” he growls again, and at some command you can’t determine his pack of sentinels begins to rumble, raising hackles, backing up to their master and baring pointed fangs in your direction.
He folds the necklace into his paw and flashes a smile like a dagger in the darkness. As he takes a step backwards, the wolves flow with him.
Your friend wanders. She’d told you, passing through your village for the first time that cold, deep winter, how she’d sold a bundle of sugarcane to those you called the gods. The type of trade that usually ended with arrows whistling past her shoulders.
Your great-grandfather was there the first time, a descendent of the village pair in the original world. The last of the gods had moved on, and their colony had grown, and with it a rich, wild culture that spoke of the Magpie and the Mountain, the Crastle and the Keep. Kingdoms that rose and collapsed into piles of ash long before memory.
You know about the Magpie and the Trickster, forever indebted to each other atop a fort of sandstone and rusted blood. The Hand and his King. And the others.
Your friend had seen them, seen the hunger in their eyes and the desperation in every stilted move. The Magpie’s wings were matted and bound and his eyes carried no gleam. Haggard, bruised, wrapped in rags of cloth.
These were no gods .
(But they still are. They create and destroy to their own will, barter with the deities larger than themself for second chances.)
They don’t deserve a second chance, you believe. They left their first land bruised and bleeding, ridden with smoke and flame and heaps of grey-white ash to drift in the winds. A desert left in craters. Castles burned, a fortress of wool and iron smouldering quietly, indefinitely.
They had their fun — a game of life and death, treachery and betrayal, loyalties spinning on a dime.
(And yet they return.)
Your friend says she couldn’t forget the greed, the raw power she saw within them.
And now — watching the retreating back of the Wolf King, cloak billowing above the mass of wolves writhing around his ankles, carried on a tide of blood and bones and teeth — neither can you.
A howl rips through the woodland, and you clutch at the abyss on your chest where the claw pendant used to lie.