Chapter Text
Avid had always been unusual. His father left when he was quite young, leaving his mother to try and provide for both her and their small child. The many hours he was left to his own devices led Avid to create vivid worlds of make-believe, filled with dreams of forests and paws covered in fur. He was odd by most people’s standards, but perhaps his life wouldn’t have turned out like this had things gone differently. No, it had started with that night in the woods, the horrible, festering scratch, and the abhorrent beast that caused it.
It had been a cold night, the wind nipping at his skin as it whistled through the trees, the whispers of snowfall just starting. He and Elle shouldn’t have been out that late, they both knew, not unaccompanied, but the two of them were simply too adventurous to stay put in their houses. There had been a string of disappearances in the village, the adults talking in hushed tones about monsters in the woods when they thought the children weren’t around, and so, foolishly, the two had taken it upon themselves to investigate.
The woods were simultaneously too loud and too quiet, lacking the usual sounds of crickets chirping and owls hooting, yet the two of them kept hearing the sounds of wolves howling in the distance, the direction undiscernable, and Avid swore he could hear quiet whispers and voices calling to him in the back of his mind. Elle had laughed and told him to stop being a scaredy-cat.
They ventured further, the trees becoming denser and the path becoming less clear, until they reached the stream that ran down the mountain and through the forest, and that’s when they smelt it. Something vile and utterly wrong, like sulfur and decay and chemicals, all in a way that made the inside of his nose burn. Voices in his mind now louder, he tried again to pull Elle away, to convince her to return to the village, but she pressed onward, and he couldn’t help but follow.
Slinking around trees in their best attempt to be sneaky, whispers turning to loud, chaotic chorus and making it rather hard for him to focus, they soon found themselves staring at a horrible sight. A monster, made of flesh and bone and fur and teeth in all the wrong places, like some horrible malformation of man and wolf, eyes glowing a bright green and leaking some form of black inky oil-esque substance from its mouth as it feasted on the rotting, fly-infested corpse of the baker’s wife. As the overwhelming, mind-numbing terror of it all overtook his mind, Avid couldn’t help but scream. Elle tried to slap a hand over his mouth, but it was simply too late, and the monster’s attention snapped to them.
It stood up on its two horrible legs, quickly growing to be a hulking ten feet tall, back still hunched, as it took a moment to study the two teenagers in front of it. Elle squeezed Avid’s hand in her own and turned, beginning to run, and the chase began.
The two stumbled through the woods, the distance quickly beginning to be overtaken by the beast, before Avid was tackled to the ground. The impact was harsh, his vision blurring and ears ringing as his back slammed on the ground while the monster’s claws dug into his neck and chest, disgusting black liquid dripping from its gaping maw onto him. Avid was too stunned to put up a struggle, limp in the monster’s arms, but as the creature was just about to sink its jagged teeth into him, a shot was fired.
Avid’s eyes had snapped up to see Elle, hands trembling as they held her father’s gun that she had stolen, eyes full of panic, firing shot after shot at the creature. While the bullets did the trick to dislodge it from Avid, sending it a few feet away, the two of them had watched the monster once again stand up to its full height, the bullets pushed out of its rotting flesh as its body began to heal. Avid took the moment to try and scramble away, head still spinning, before it launched itself at Elle, her gun now empty of ammo.
Before it could make contact with her, however, it was tackled to the ground by some other wolfish beast. Neither Avid nor Elle paid too much attention to it, taking it as a sign to escape. While the two monsters were locked in vicious combat, Elle quickly pulled Avid up, helping him lean on her while they moved as quickly as they could back to town.
The claw marks burned, sending searing pain through his torso and into his very heart, making him stumble with every step. The blood that was pouring out wasn’t helping either, his vision becoming more and more fuzzy and his mind losing focus.
After an agonizingly long amount of time, they managed to make it back to the village, and Elle rushed him to the town medic. Most of the rest of the night was a blur of pain and panic from the doctor, Elle, and his mother, but he distinctly remembered for many years after how much Elle had struggled to describe what happened. Beyond just confusion and horror over what happened, it seemed that she had almost forgotten anything about the wolf-like monsters. In the end he had to push through his blood-loss-induced headache to explain the events of the night, though of course no one believed him.
The wounds became infected, and even though they did manage to dull the infection, they never managed to make it heal. They remained open, seeping black-tinted exudate, no matter what remedy they tried. Beyond that, though, there were changes that Avid didn’t notice. Paranoia, far beyond his previous nervousness, began to slowly infect his life, fears filling his brain. Always looking over his shoulder, shutting out everyone in his life. Everyone but Elle. But she was enough, and the two of them spent years together, trying to find something to cure him.
And then it happened. She came home, and something was wrong. Just looking at her made the hairs on his neck stand up, and when she moved in close, he just knew what she was about to do. Feeling the panic well up inside, that freezing feeling inside his heart, and he pulled out the stake and pushed it through her heart. And he grieved, sobbing and screaming as he clutched her cold, dead, body, and then he left, taking off towards Oakhurst.
That wound never stopped throbbing.