Chapter Text
He was known as Fen’Elgar.
It was for good reason that designation belonged to him, and he to that designation, for he was as untamed as the wolf and as enigmatic as a spirit. He was not a shy creature, but he was cautious by nature, and perhaps a bit avoidant of the villages filled with people who looked like him to whom he did not belong.
They were loud.
Too loud.
Just as those he might have once called “babae” and “mamae” had been loud in the wrong ways. He craved fast an interesting, but interesting was quiet, and it wasn’t tethered to a smile, to a grating voice and false affections. Interesting wasn’t people, not the ceremonies they seemed to stand upon or the way they had mocked his interests.
“You’re too young to know what you really want,” they would say, and they would mean well by it.
He knew they meant well because they were smiling so gently, but sometimes being genteel and polite and well-meaning was just as damaging as a slap. It was a form of pleasant control, a shackle that they placed around his neck to tether him with their affections when he had started to manifest an interest in spirits and magic and the mysterious beyond the trappings of society.
“Spirits are dangerous things meant only for gods and warriors. You live on a farm. You do the work of a farmer. We use our magic for raising crops, just as it always has been, just as it will always be.”
And for a time he had listened, he had believed, sincerely, that what they said had been the best for him, but the more he spoke to spirits (in secret, dark places) the more he wanted to speak to them. Eventually, it had not been enough; eventually he realized that things should not stay a certain way simply because that was the way they had always been.
He had thrown away his old designation, thrown away “babae” and “mamae” and the farm and all that had come with it and set out on his own.
No, not on his own.
He had the spirits.
They were his friends, and where he was deficient in one area, they would help him improve, Wisdom teaching him patience, Purpose directing his thoughts, never judging him, never attempting to placate him with kind words meant to keep him bound. Yes, he learned much from his friends, the spirits, who had shaped the man he had become.
But they could not care for his needs, they could not clothe him and teach him to hunt, and that was why he observed the wolves, learned to take their shape and become like they were. If he had a need to eat, they showed him how to hunt game large and small. If he needed physical contact, he would sleep among their ranks, warm and secure.
And they did not judge him.
This was all that he needed.