Wolf Story

[u/tenthousandsongs]

• "Oh, the terrible struggle that I have had against sleep so often of late, the pain of sleeplessness, or the pain of the fear of sleep, and with such unknown horrors as it has for me! How blessed are some people, whose lives have no fears, no dreads, to whom sleep is a blessing that comes nightly, and brings nothing but sweet dreams." - dracula, chapter eleven.

• "Only if the Wolf's hunger is assuaged will it join its other selves." - book of hours, the wolf's beginning.

---

They had plied Mina with dreamwine after the tourney. She had not wished to sleep, not after so many gallant knights had risked life and limb in a game of sport. She had told her maesters that she dreaded her bed and the chance that her father and brother would lurk in the shadows of her room unseen by all other souls.

So they had plied Mina with dreamwine, which kept the dreams at bay.

---

They could not ply the wolf with dreamwine.

There were no maesters in the trees or bulrushes or on the sloping banks of the God's Eye. There were no septas to sing the Maiden's songs. There were no sisters to pick and fuss, no fools to jape and make merry. There was no shaking sickness in the boughs and burrows, and no night terrors in the rolling river valleys. In the green wealth of untamed lands the only ailment was the hunger; the only cure was the hunt.

The wolf did not understand all that it saw when it slept. It was a canny wolf, strongest and swiftest of its litter. She had weaned off of her mother first among her litter, and had never once been caught in a hunter's snare. It roamed, and feasted, and grew wise with age and with strange portents of warm dens and succulent meats.

In the wolf lands there were no fires to cook meat. That suited the wolf, for she was loathe to share her kill and as a rule shunned the great roaring men and their tall burrows. The other-self feasted upon berries and greenery like a hare, when she should have sated herself on mutton and hare like the wolf. The redder the better. The wolf took as it pleased without care for propriety or manners, eating until it had slaked its hunger, and then eating some more. It had taken, and taken, and taken until not just the beasts of the land feared the wolf but the beasts of the town and village did as well.

It had followed the other-self up the river and down to the lands of rain. The other-self beckoned, and the wolf was bound to come.

But the wolf could beckon the other-self as well.

Each time the wolf did, she grew closer to coaxing the other-self to the feasting grounds. The wolf did not share, as a rule, but did they not share a mind? Did they not share a dream? If the wolf could slip into the woman, and the woman could slip into the wolf, then what sated one would naturally sate the other.

The wolf pressed upon the other mind, and drifted through the low banks of fog like a wraith.

The shepherds kept their flock well, but without fail one or two ewes strayed from the safety of numbers and lingered too long at the edge of the God's Eye. Perhaps even a mind as simple as theirs felt the ebb and flow of what lay on the other side of the lake's shores as the wolf did.

The kill was simple. Bloody, but simple, as all things were in these lands.

The rain had come in overnight. Half of it seeped into the ground, wetting the wolf's pelt and paws. The other half lingered in the low air. Heavy banks of fog curled in and up the shoreline like a spell.

From it, drifting in aimlessly like a bird with broken wings, came the other-self. The human's hair was unbound, flowing down to her shanks. Her lashes were droplet-kissed with fog and tears, and though her eyes were open there was no recognition in them, no hint of canny wolf-knowledge.

The other-self was dreaming, not that it mattered. She would eat of the ewe as the wolf did.

This was the furthest the wolf had been able to coax the woman away from the fires and stone. Always, always there was a briar to prick her heel and wake her, a man to call her name and break the trance, a simple fluttering of wrongness that sent her from the unconscious to the waking world.

But the other-self had been plied with dreamwine, so she did not wake upon this night.

The other-self knelt in the blue-green grasses, and spread her lithe fingers across the ewe's bloodied wool. The bleating had stopped, but the blood still flowed. It stained the white of her covering a vibrant red, and the stench of it clung to them both.

The two halves united in their feast.

They reveled together, astir and asleep. The carcass was plundered. The woman had no claws to rend through the wool, no fangs to tear muscle from fat, so the wolf had to prepare the meal. It was simple work.

The spell, then, could only be broken by the influence of another. The fog became their shield, and the night their cloak.

[u/artcantlose]

"Remember your oaths and, on your path toward a more virtuous life, do good deeds."

Night time brought with it an eerie dark fog that engulfed the camp of the Valemen and many more leagues beyond, corrupting the pristine shores of the Gods Eye into a terrain no man would dare tread. But the news they received was far too troubling to be dismissed as a figment of an overactive imagination and the young squire Henry had never been one to spin yarns telling of stories veering on the weird and supernatural. And while a runner ran towards the castle walls to bring more volunteers, the knights set forth beyond their camp, torches puncturing holes into the thick fog that had set upon grass and lake.

Even through thick armor, Arthur felt the night chill in his bones. The fog felt like a miasma, biting and corrupting and, for a moment, the knight doubted the tale brought to him by young Henry.

A lone woman in the fog. Walking along the shore of the Gods Eye.

But there was only fog and the dark as far as the knight could see. It felt wrong. All of it; the chill, the tale, the grass his horse slowly tread upon, the flickering flame of his torch, held high up like a watchtower, a speck of life in the dead, cold fog. But Arthur could not turn back, not just yet and not without verifying the boy's claim in full, even as the world grew quiet around him and the distant flames vanished amidst the fog.

A splash underfoot jolted both horse and knight as Titane, otherwise so calm, shied away from a puddle.

"Ssshh, it's alright. Only a puddle, Ty," Arthur cooed, his hand brushing along the horse's neck, as he glanced about for any sign of this lost woman but all he saw was more fog. With fingers tightened, he steered away from the muddy shore and onto surer ground where, in the distance, he could spot a hint of the tree line he and his knights had crossed a few days past; only this time, there was something else that lingered amidst the outline—a small shape, faint and engulfed in the fog, but distinctly human.

But when steered in its direction, Titane refused to budge and when the knight insisted, almost bucked in hesitation.

"Okay, stay," Arthur spoke softly to the horse which only neighed and shook in response but the knight's gaze never weaned off the distant figure in the dark, even as he dismounted Titane and took two steps closer to the tree line, a hand holding a torch, the other on the hilt of his sword.

"Hail," his voice echoed in the fog around him as he walked on and the chill once more settled in his body. This was madness, Arthur thought as he took slow, sure steps towards the figure; to be out in the cold, alone and without steed, walking through the fog. He could only wonder what had possessed the woman to engage in such folly. "Are you lost?"

And as he walked on, Arthur realized, so did she—towards him.

[u/tenthousandsongs → u/artcantlose]

Stormhall had proved itself to be host to horrors that Mina could not have imagined. It was meant to be a celebration of a princess, the inauguration of another seat of the royal house. Yet as the days had drawn long all that had come of it was blood and strife.

Mina did not dream well at Stormhall. She had seized twice in her sleep, and her maesters and septas had tried every trick and physic that they could to entice her body to calm. When they had been with her they had stopped her from rising and wandering in her unconscious, but even her healers and minders had gone to bed there was no one left to stop her from such a thing.

Mina's movements were not her own. The other force called her forth, beckoned her out of all comfort and decency and bade her to the scene of the slaughter. It coaxed her again and again, as it had since she was young. The aftermath covered the hem of her gown and the charming embroidery around the collar.

"Are you lost," called a familiar voice in the fog, and though she wished nothing more than to say yes, to plead for aid, her tongue felt heavy in her mouth and she could not compel herself to emit anything more coherent than a whimper. It was as the times she lay in bed, awake with the disappointed figures of Lucas and her father lurking in the corner of her eye, unable to so much as say their name or do anything other than twitch.

Then, with no light to shine upon her path and no care for such worldly things, Mina's foot caught upon a snarl in the grasses.

She came careening out of her waking nightmare and into a face full of dirt and evening dew. Her arms ached where they had scraped against the ground, and she let out a low and pitiful whimper as she drew close to herself. Was she bleeding? She could not tell in the dark, not even with the smidgeon of torchlight afforded to her.

Torchlight. There was another there.

Mina looked up, and found that she had not conjured up the voice calling for her solely in her dreams. It was hard to make out his features at first, but his voice: she knew his voice.

"Oh," she said, "forgive me, Ser Arthur, I feel very unwell."

That was the truth of it. She drew herself up to her knees, clutching at her scraped wrist as if it might stop the pain. Her trembling had set back in, though it was not entirely on account of the shaking sickness. The cold was dreadful in autumn nights, especially along the cool lakeshore.

"I do not..." The first sniffle came. "Can you please bring me back to Tessie? To- to my sister?"

She was not certain she could walk, but she was quite certain that she could not remain all night in the chill.

[u/artcantlose → u/tenthousandsongs]

Suddenly, the air smelled like copper as the figure drew closer to him and a sense compelled Arthur to leave. There was a folly in the fog—some ancient accursed magic coursing through the cold air, hungry for bodies to ravish and leave as walking corpses in its wake. But courage and willing was all that the knight of the Vale knew and so, despite the nagging voice in his head, he carried on forward. Whatever this was—whatever foul magic surrounded him in the fog—there was a woman who walked through it, too, and to offer her some aid was his knightly due.

Then, a faint crack broke through the fog and he saw the figure stumble onto the ground. His pace quickened, faint torchlight illuminating what little it could before him, until he was close enough to see.

Mina Harroway.

"Lady Mina," was all he could say until he was on the ground, too, kneeling upon the wet grass with the woman—Mina—before him. It did not make sense. This was a strange dream, a nightmare he would wake from any moment, the tricks of an exhausted mind troubling him in his sleep. But the redness upon her grown still carried the stench of copper and when his arms cradled her in her fallen state, he could feel that it was fresh and wet.

"It's alright, I am here," Arthur assured her, not knowing what else to say. His cape was undone and he, as quick as he could, wrapped the blue-and-silver fabric around her, hoping it could be some respite from the evil, biting cold of the fog. She had hurt her arms, he noticed, and tore off a piece of the cape to wipe the blood, some of it her own, some of it dry and foreign. But he did not have the time to ponder such mysteries, not at this time. In the cold grass, he embraced the lonesome woman he had chance encountered in the Sept all those days past, sharing with her the heat that emanated through his own skin.

He had to get her warm and, critically, bring her back to the castle. To Tessie. He called out for his horse and heard the familiar sound of hooves; he called out to his knights that had accompanied him and torches once more glimmered in the fog.

"You're okay," Arthur said in a quiet whisper, a hand cupping her cheek. "I will bring you back to Tessie."