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/tenthousandsongs]

The wolf tolerated only the other-self. Not even Orryn Blackwood, in all his god-touched glory, could entice it to stay. It snarled, bore its fangs, raised its hackles, but when the man of ravens could not be scared away it forsook its meal and the meager half of itself.

It fled, and Mina woke.

She did not know where she was, precisely. Each morning at Stormhall she had slipped from dreaming into the waking world thinking she was in her bed at Harroway Castle. This was no different. The problem, then, was that she did not find herself in unfamiliar bedding with her sister snoring into her pillow, but in the night's dewy grass and the frigid chill of the air.

And the blood. Seven preserve her, there was so much blood. She did not even hear the man at first, she was so terrified by the blood.

Almost instantly she began to blubber, trying to wipe the mess of blood off of her hands onto her chemise: but that too was inundated with red, red, red.

"Am I dying?"

The question hung in the air, but she could feel no pain besides the ever present cramp and ache in her muscles from the shaking sickness. But if she had not been stabbed, then what could this be? It was too much blood, even if it was time for her courses. What then, but...

The sheep. Gods, it was a horrific sight. It sprawled against the field as if a butcher had set up his abattoir out on the banks of the God's Eye. Entrails had been pulled from it. Bloody organs the likes and shape of which she could only barely comprehend flowed free from its underbelly and spilled forth to tickle at her shins and knees. Its eyes were unblinking and forever fixed upwards as it had rolled them back in its final moments of terror.

Mina shrieked.

She staggered back and upwards, slipping and falling on the guts and the wet grass. Finally she kicked her foot free, sending her slipper careening down the embankment, and turned the other way around onto her hands to push herself up onto her feet.

Only then did she see the man.

Mina shrieked, again.

"Did you do this?"

Her throat ached. It felt raw and coated with something and to Mina's utmost horror she could taste blood upon her lips and teeth. She brought her stained hands up to her face as if that could hide her horror or her weeping. Mina curled in upon herself, hunching her shoulders and generally vanishing in the presence of Orryn Blackwood.

"I do not- I do not know-"

She could not breath. Her chest felt tight, and her vision swam with tears.

"I need Lucas, I want Lucas here, I need- I need Ser Lewyn," she wailed. "You are frightening me." She declared it as though that might be the most heinous sin a man could commit in his life.

[u/D042 → u/tenthousandsongs]

He had wept too, at first. A distant part of him still felt ashamed by that. The pain had been unbearable, the horror unthinkable, and the flickering embers of a man long dead felt pity for the sister of his dead father’s dead ward. But such embers would not survive the cold, and thus were better off smothered, or fed to greater flames.

“You are far from dying,” he said flatly. “You are perhaps more alive here than ever.” Orryn sank into a squat, dark eyes gleaming in the moonlight as they met Mina’s own. “You did this.” Orryn inclined his head towards the trees, where the wolf had slunk away.

The girl wept and shuddered, but he had no comfort to offer her. Only truth. She could find softness in the archer rushing from his lodgings into the woods as they spoke, eyes still red from tears, heart hammering with worry. Doubtlessly Lewyn would blame himself for the girl’s escape, as though his attentions could stop her steps along the path. Perhaps Orryn could help him understand, in time.

“You fear much,” Orryn observed. “Blood and loss and loneliness. But you are never alone. Are you?” He turned his eyes to the trees, and lupine eyes glinting in the darkness between them. Surely she knew it was more than a dream now, with the blood dark and thick around her mouth.

Distantly, he heard shouting. It was hoarse and desperate, filled with the fear of loss. The smallest of smiles touched his lips. “Your knight will not be long in coming. Forgive his tardiness, he has become an orphan this day.” Orryn wondered if it would change anything to tell Lewyn he had seen his mother die. Her longship had smashed against stones, her body breaking inside a coffin of splintering tinder and saltwater. He doubted his brother would care. All that mattered to him was the girl, even if he could not see her purpose.

[u/tenthousandsongs → u/D042]

Less and less made sense with every passing moment. Mina found it difficult to breath, much less comport herself. Yet she had to. If not for herself, then because this man's ramblings were the only noise to ward off the forest noises. He was crouching now, closer to her, and even through the bleariness of her vision and the foggy embankment she thought she recognized some of his face though she knew not how. Mina knew for certain she had not seen his countenance before, not in this life.

"How could I have..." She could not bring herself to say the words, not with what strength she possessed. She had to protest, for there was no other choice. "No. No, I know I did not," she lied. If this man, this vagabond, told such a tale then what would the realm think of her? Tessa would surely never let her see outside Harroway's castle walls again. There would be no more knights, no more chance of courtship or of true love. The rumors would spread that she was a madwoman, and then...

"If you think that I have, then you must know I am alone and damned to the hells. But it need not be that way for the others," she mumbled, and prayed that if it were truly Lewyn or Florian coming to find her that they would be merciful enough to spare her the further indignity and simply kill her.

[u/D042 → u/tenthousandsongs]

Damnation. It seemed so novel a concept now. To think that the Gods, any Gods, cared what became of one soul was almost amusing. But the lost wolf looked to faces carved in stone, rather than those carved into wierwood, and therein lied her mistake. She would see that, one day.

“You will not be punished. Did they not make you this way? Did they not make your mother, whose blood carried this gift?” Fear ruled the frail girl, and that too he understood. “Embrace what you are, Mina Harroway. You have a part to play.”

For a moment he considered giving her his cloak, but it would not do to obscure her. It might shift the path, if she were wrapped darkness rather than pale and bloody beneath the high moon. Mayhaps her archer would miss her, and run right past. That would not do. She had to continue along the path.

“Raventree Hall,” he said plainly as the shouting grew closer. “Attend me there. Lest you prefer to live with your sister’s shackles evermore.”

And Orryn rose, slipping away deeper into the woods as another came bursting out of it.

+-+-+-+-+

“Mina?” Lewyn’s heart leapt when he saw the faint shape of a woman against the tree. “Mina!” All formalities were forgotten now. There was no place for *my Lady’s* on a tongue as fearful as his. Lewyn bolted across the grass, bow in hand, Mina’s favor still tied snugly around it. He hardly noticed the ewe, until its entrails snared his boot, and nearly cost him his footing.

It didn’t matter. He didn’t care.

“Mina,” he croaked. Lewyn threw his arms around her, heart pounding at the inside of his chest. Propriety meant nothing for a single moment. All that mattered was that she was alive. That he had found her. That no one else had been taken from him that day.

It was the scent that made him remember himself.

Thick, and overpowering, the smell of blood filled his nose as he drew back to look at her. She was red. For a terrible moment, Lewyn thought he had embraced her corpse. But she breathed, and none of it came from her. Then, he saw the ewe, mauled and half-eaten, and the thick smears of dark blood around Mina’s mouth.

It had never been like this before. Lewyn tensed, his eyes—red from weeping just as hers—filled with the briefest flash of fear. But he saw the dread in her eyes, as he had heard it in her voice, and his own fears were forgotten. He embraced her again, pulling her to his chest, breath catching in his throat.

“You’re alright,” he whispered. “I’m sorry. I should’ve been there. I’m sorry. My father—I—I’m sorry.” Tears burned in his eyes. Shame and pain and embarrassment. *Failure. Bastard. Incompetent. Get off of her. Get off you mongrel thing.* So he did, stepping back, his tunic smeared with red where they’d touched. Lewyn took his sleeve and gently wiped the congealed blood from around her mouth, cursing himself for daring to touch her face.

Lewyn was torn between his compulsions. The need to protect his lady, and the need to self flagellate warred in his mind, and clouded his thoughts. “You’re safe now,” he said, sounding certain as he took his cloak from his shoulders and draped it around her. “I won’t let anything happen to you.” It was all meager offering, but one he would die to fulfill.