sparkleandfade

He had followed the scent from the inn to the kennelmaster’s quarters on the edge of the small village. Invented some reason to argue with Adrin to allow him some time to sneak off without questioning. He walked in his human skin, tall and golden and beast eyed, the clothes Adrin forced him to wear becoming more and more uncomfortable the longer he was forced to wear them. They felt even more suffocating, strange, when he saw her there. She was chained to a post, harness clamped so tightly around her lithe frame that her silver pelt had worn away to raw skin. She was still beautiful, though.

She had recognised him at once, despite his skin. Had tried to run to him, but the chain had strangled her. He had held her, for just a few moments, to inhale the scent of home, had felt his heart lurch when all he could smell was man, the north gone from her as it was from him.

They spoke of what had happened. How after he had left, the humans had come, driven them out or slaughtered them. They might have ran, but the Father had demanded they stay and fight. He had murdered them all with his pride. Only she had been spared, chained and taken, beaten and mouth bound shut, and forced to sleds of supplies. Years later, somehow, she was here.

“You were right all along. We should have followed you when you left. I knew this then, when I was free under the gaze of the North eye; and now, when the – have me in shackles. Iga—”
“No. That is not my name anymore, has not been my name for—”
“Why? You are you. Those traditions are dead as the pack as dead”
“As Iga is dead. As Mirak is dead”
“No. I am alive. You are alive. You are Iga still, even if you walk in some other skin”
There was nothing he could say. Nothing that he wanted to say. Her beast’s eyes were full of longing, alight with the last embers of hope in the dying fire of her soul. He could allow her this small thing. Once, he would not have honoured such a pathetic display with even a sneer, an acknowledgment, but now… what were those things, those traditions, which they had all valued so much, now that everyone who ever believed in them were dead? The world was so much larger than the pack.

“I will free you from here, but not tonight. Wait and do not do anything rash. I will get human clothes for you”
She laughed. “Is that how would prefer me? Is that how you prefer yourself?”
“There is no preferring. Both are me, as both are you. But it will be easier for you to run and stay hidden that way”
“I see” She had always teased him, ever since they had been children together, still gnawing at bones with milk teeth.

Adrin was still in a mood enough to not question him about his disappearance, and he was glad. There was no way he could find explain what he had found in a way he was sure that he would take seriously. He was dismissive of so much, even if it was only his nature to repel any kind of emotional interaction. And what was more, Wolf did not want to hear his objections.

The next night, he travelled silently, cloaked in his beast’s skin. He smelt the blood on the air a while before he even neared her, and knew. She had fought.

“Mirak”. His beast’s face was stoic, emotionless, his eyes two shards of topaz. But his voice, the word scraped across his tongue like a blade, filled his mouth with blood and hurt and tears. “Mirak”.
Her mouth was filled with blood too. She choked, tried to move, winced as the arrow bolts shifted inside of her, gave up. She would be gone soon. “Mirak, do not…” Do not die? How could she not? Already she was barely hanging on. The stink of death already clung to her. What would it do to just give her another request she could never fulfil? To let her die knowing that, again, she had failed him? “Do not linger. I am here”
“Its been so long since I heard that name” Her voice was so weak. Soon it would fade away forever. “Seeing you again reminded me of who I was. I couldn’t live on as a beast of burden. I wanted to die still knowing that”
Yet I persevere, little more than a hunting hound, a vampire’s pet. He calls me Wolf, but I follow him like a dog. “Whatever will bring you peace, my sister”
“Sister” He could hear the smile in her words, even if he could not see it. “So many years ago, I dreamed that one day you would call me your love, that we would become Bound, that I would give you strong sons and daughters. And we would lead the pack, together” Long ago, that had been the arrangement. Then he had found his elf girl, and everything had changed.
They spent several minutes in silence, as he lay next to her, waiting for the moment where her breathing stopped, his head laid across hers. She had no final last words, no goodbye. Suddenly, she was gone, and that was it.

He thought, for a time as he moved back through the trees towards where he had abandoned his clothes, of pursuing the men, murdered them all and feasting on their corpses, and returning to Adrin in the morning. He would know, though. It would be hard enough to explain his disappearance, let alone the stink of human death on him. He was all he had left now, truly, in the whole world. His pack.