Prologue: A Blur of Shadows
The beast was nearly upon her.
Claws, as keen and sharp as the deadliest of war blades, descended in a terrifying arc from high above. They were a blur of white within the creature’s ragged shadows, and beyond loomed the mysterious wall that dominated the northern horizon.
That wall, the Encios, was her only salvation from her monstrous tormentor.
Her every jarring footfall sent her heart racing faster, hammering from within as if it meant to break itself free from her chest. Each rapid breath seared dryly within her depths, feeling more like hot sand than fresh air.
She was no longer the bright-eyed child she had been when she enlisted in the Westport Watch decades before, but she had always prided herself on her conditioning. She was exceptionally fit, especially for a woman well into her forties. Physically, she could match or surpass every fellow member of the watch to a woman and man… but not the terror at her heels.
If it caught up to Watcher Ronah Gustav, it would kill her. She would draw steel… she would make it earn her death… but she had no delusions.
She could not hope to win.
Ronah had never in her life been as close to the Encios as she was at that moment. It had always been a worry to her as it monopolized the eastern views from her family’s home on the shore of Roan’s Bay. Her aversion to the wall was a consequence of the superstitions in the wool of her weave, as her mother would have said. However, she meant to live, and living meant reaching the wall.
Superstitions be damned.
She dove between the boughs of a strange, crooked birch with lichen festooned in bright green bands against its coal-black bark, her boots crashing into the soft earth on the other side of the bent-trunked tree. She scrambled frantically to resume her flight, and another swipe of the savage beast’s claws burst through the ashen skin of the tree’s knurled limb.
Wet chunks of gray-green pulp splintered and scattered through the air, pelting the watcher in the backs of her legs. The creature grasped at her cloak, catching and tearing clean through its thick, woolen cloth. Ronah felt her cloak twist and tighten around her chest and neck, but she thanked the Divines it didn’t slow her flight from the snarling brute.
The great beast slammed heavily into the mossy mud caked against the base of the tree, sending a fan of stone-littered soil from beneath the black, matted fur of its massive wolfen hands. It loped after her using all four of its powerful limbs, gnarling and grunting through its slavered muzzle. Its lips quivered and rescinded above its teeth, still wet and red from its recent prey.
The wolf-like monster barreled toward the watcher with wild and reckless abandon. Ronah knew that she was but one poorly chosen step from meeting her ancestors. Even with the aelfen blood of her foremothers coursing through her veins, Ronah’s lithe and nimble body could not long remain out of the wolf-like weren’s reach.
She chanced a glance over her shoulder. It was a risk borne of both terror and curiosity, as if she needed to confirm that the nightmare behind her was real.
What she saw was an embodiment of mad rage and bloodlust three heads taller than the tallest man she had ever seen. Before that day, she had only seen creatures like this in her mind’s eye and the nightmares of her childhood. From the tales told in tavern song, she knew that this was a canithere, a wolfen species of the accursed shape-changing beasts.
Weren.
Among them, the canithere… weren-wolves, were said to be the deadliest of the lot.
Before her, in the space between the watcher’s certain death and the dread visage of the mysterious wall, stretched a grassy tract of lush and fruitful lands. They were fecund. Fertile and prosperous, the Freewilds were, yet they had gone untouched and unsullied by the hands or the plans of mankind. From the distance and relative safety afforded by the Westport city limits, the Freewilds were breathtaking to behold.
Like a siren, it beckoned, tugging at those seldom touched places within the mind and the soul with promises of adventure and glory. It would not reveal its true curse, its hidden malice, until moments like these.
Centuries ago, Rayeia the Surveyor perished with admonitions about the Freewilds upon her dying lips. As Ronah Gustav, Watcher of Westport, made desperate flight toward the Encios down a rough, stone-strewn hillock and across a shallow and meandering stream, she spat a breathless curse that so many foolhardy romantics, like her grandmother Alyce, abandoned the wisdom of the Surveyor for the sake of their own adventure and glory.
We do not belong here, she thought, clenching her teeth as she vaulted over and around the jagged shape of a tree trunk.
She chanced another look back. It had gained ground once more, the weren. She was bearing uphill, and it had the advantage of its witless, feral drive and its four powerful limbs to spirit it after her.
Fie upon this blighted and beauteous land… I refuse to die, here!
The Encios was a palisade as tall as a hundred men, an unfathomable edifice that stretched to the far horizon in either direction before her. It was an enigma at the heart of the vast Freewilds, with the Castillands cradled within its embrace like a babe at its mother’s breast. Formed from the intermingling boughs and exposed roots of an uncountable multitude of colossal, petrified trees, its gnarled spikes of jutting branches offered asylum to those who dwelled within, and certain death to those trapped without.
She spat a breathless curse, clinging to a mantra repeating within her mind to the rhythm of her footfalls:
I’m not dead, yet!
The drumming of her beating heart left her unable to hear much else, but the watcher did feel a rhythmic shudder and vibration beneath her feet. The wolfen creature’s great, raking claws milled the grassy soil as it drove its mass nearer and nearer. It let out a terrifying, thunderous growl. Hot, wet breaths could be felt against the nape of the watcher’s neck.
She knew that she was not going to make it to the wall in time. She knew that she would have to turn and fight. She knew, but she was too frightened to act upon that knowledge.
Ronah’s every fiber was driven to press onward. The watcher would have to rely upon each shred of her resolve to countermand her instinct to flee.
To draw steel, to spin around, and to stand her ground, she would need to accept the inevitability of a grim and grisly defeat.
The watcher felt crumbling clumps of sod and earth shower upon her back as the creature tore after her. Amid her harried retreat, she struggled to recall how she came to this perilous state, wherein climbing up an unclimbable wall represented her last, best hope of survival. Tears clung within the wells of her eyes and escaped across her cheeks, tracing icy patterns across her wind-stung skin as she scrambled, gagging and gasping to reclaim her breath.
It was too damned fast, this creature, and she was too exhausted to maintain such a hellacious pace. Her training and aelfen heritage could only carry her so fast, and only so far. Her resolve to survive would not spare her a grim and grisly fate. She cried and grasped hand over hand, scraping and climbing up the edge of a boulder, then ducking beneath another swipe of the weren’s clawed fingertips.
She could measure the remainder of her life not in years, but in precious few footsteps pressed into Freewild soils. She was terrified of being torn open and devoured by the weren horror she could feel hot upon her heels. Her fear threatened her focus. Her discipline was waning. Her hopes sank, much as did the soles of her boots into the muck and mud beneath her feet.
Just then, opportunity!
She noticed a seemingly abandoned thatch-built burrow just a few paces to her right. Bent, wattled grasses and clay mud were caked about a skeletal framework of interwoven, overlapping tree limbs, The burrow was likely built by some manner of hill-dwelling creature. Dire beasts thrived in these lands, and some were keen den-builders. The watcher prayed to her ancestors, to the Divine Ehlon, and to the heart that yet beat within her chest to see her safely to the burrow.
She took a great risk in spinning suddenly to her left, taking advantage of her smaller size in relation to the great beast. Momentum would carry it ahead and to her flank, but though the canine weren was massive, that did not make it slow to react.
Fortunately, the monster had become so enrapt within the fugue of its bloodlust that it pounced off of both feet, overcorrecting for her sudden turn and causing its rimy silhouette to overshoot her relatively tiny form.
Its outstretched claws were so wickedly sharp that as they swept through the air behind her, they sheared off a few inches of her bedraggled, windswept locks. By the time it reclaimed its footing, hind legs whipping outward in a clumsy arc, the watcher succeeded in reaching the burrow. She slid into the hollowed-out shape of the den, finding it not nearly as deep as she had hoped.
It was also far from abandoned.
However, the smallish critter that had taken up shelter in the burrow seemed content to keep its distance from weren and watcher, both. It had hidden itself well enough in the depths of the den, covering itself with mud, grass, and reeds. Ronah noted its presence only by the prominent reflection of the far-western sun in the mirror-like pupils of its eyes.
Her attentions were rightly affixed upon the weren threat.
The weren wolf clawed its way within the first half-dozen paces of the burrow, the high ridge of its bent spine snagging at the weave of twigs and straw encased in the den’s red-brown clay roof. Despite its immensity, the ravening beast managed to press itself down close to the earth and pull itself far deeper than the watcher could ever have fathomed.
Ronah Gustav feared that she had become the bait in a trap of her own making. She slammed her back against the scooped and hardened earth, twisted tree limbs and crude wattles of straw all about her, gritting her teeth as she slid laterally against the rough wall of the den. Then, she found her panic and fear supplanted by a defiant rage, each emotion feeding into the other.
Her lips parted, baring her teeth in a strange, primal smile, and she wrapped her shaking fingers around the haft of her only remaining weapon.
Stomping, digging her toes in, she roared into the face of the feral monster that would have her as its next meal.
Exhaustion had begun to take its toll upon the watcher. She had been fleeing from the weren beast since the earliest hours of the morning, when she became separated from the search party that had led her so perilously close to the Encios. Enlisted by a mercenary knight, Ser Thamus Ramelle, to seek out the wayward daughter of some affluent Ilrasi oligarch, the search party had been scouting through the Thicks, a smattering of dense wooded coverts in the shadows south of the wall.
When she realized that she could no longer see nor hear her fellows, Ronah quickly became the intended prey of the very same weren canithere her group had been tracking. For all she knew, the pink slaver that dribbled and drooped from its quivering jaws may have been all that remained of the poor aelfen girl they were searching for.
Ronah had the advantage of her wits and her experience as a hunter of both beast and man, preparing her to survive being hunted in ways she could never have anticipated. Even as she fled, hiding herself now and then to catch her breath and regain her bearings, she had taken stock of the beast that had stalked her all that morning. She recognized the similarities between the way her pursuer conducted itself and the way a true-born wolf might stalk its prey.
Wolves were pack hunters. Many of its physical traits were tailored to coordinate with other wolves, to harass, corral, and surround their target. This weren, though mighty beyond measure, chased her on its own.
It was also preoccupied, somehow. It would have had her several times if not for occasional moments where it seemed to get confused, losing her scent, even losing its own sense of direction. The feral creature was distracted, and it seemed to Ronah that there was some sort of a conflict within the weren’s mind.
She was reminded of a paranoid sailor she encountered years before, in Westport. He had lapses of concentration, looking off in strange directions as if he just overheard his name being spoken by some cloud, stone, or tree nearby. She and her fellow watchers often attributed these eccentricities to drugs or drink, but sometimes it really did seem as if there was some unseen force tugging at the poor man’s mind.
The weren was much the same, though it could be just as lethal in its fits of confusion as it was in its more salient, calculating moments.
She could not know for certain what foul thing it had done just prior to setting its cold, savage eyes upon her, but its jaws and chest were still stained sanguine, rivulets of pink saliva pushing out from between its sharp teeth. Its eyes shuddered rapidly in chaotic patterns. The watcher could see her distorted reflection in their glassy surfaces.
Retreat further into the burrow was no longer an option for the watcher, and she was left only with her will to survive, her fear-driven focus, and her long-hafted double-edged sword. The canithere’s shoulders snagged and scraped against the loosening thatch over its head, growling in frustration, wanting badly to stand itself upright once more.
Ronah’s second primal roar prompted the unknown creature concealed further within the burrow to shudder and shake loose a bit of the detritus it had pulled atop itself. She took notice through her periphery, but her eyes affixed firmly upon those of her enemy. She meant to make the canithere aware that its prey had teeth, too.
In a desperate, foolish stride forward the watcher maneuvered herself for a piercing thrust, which was all she could manage within the confines of the den. It was an inefficient strike, she knew; hers was a sword meant for hacking and slicing. Though her blade tasted weren blood as it dug a few inches into fur, flesh, and shoulder muscle, the watcher’s sword did not bite so deeply as to deter the mighty monster’s pure, instinctual resolve to kill. It grimaced. It grunted as its eyes narrowed and glanced instinctually toward its left shoulder.
But it did not retreat.
The weren-wolf’s attention was now divided between the threat she posed and the pain she had already inflicted. Ronah took advantage of the distraction, managing to move laterally and push back hard against the sloped rear wall of the den. Damp clumps of straw-strewn clay were dragged along her backside to cake into the claw-shorn tatters of her woolen cloak.
The weren responded by rearing back and reaching a death-dealing hand underneath the fragile framework of overlapping branches, decayed leaves and wattled mud overhead. The tangled thatch burst upward and flew into the air with a jarring, noisome crash. Stunning rays of light from the waning western sun pierced through the chaos of clattering debris, chasing the beast’s long shadow into what remained of the ruined burrow.
The watcher moved to her right, then shuffled out in the shrinking space between the creature and the tangle of the den’s doomed roof, some of which clung to the beast’s powerful forearm as it thrashed about to free itself. Sensing her moment, she wheeled upon her left heel and drove her weight into her right shoulder, slipping the straight, keen edge of her sword beneath the canithere’s arm.
As she gripped the long haft of her sword with both hands, Watcher Ronah Gustav cried out in panicked defiance, pushing off against a solid mass of mud-slick stone, and felt the grind of her steel against flesh.
Her sword bit deeply, this time. She knew it from the sudden, slick heat and noxious smell of the creature’s blighted blood washing against her right side. She knew it from the sudden lurch of the beast away, like a child having just learned to pull their hand away from something too hot to touch.
She knew it from the tantalizing tremble she felt through the palms of her hands as her blade was sawing into bone.
Ronah inhaled the hazy stench of the canithere, then thundered a warrior’s shout, even as did the roaring beast she injured. She knew she had only slowed the weren. Her strike had purchased her at best a few brief, precious moments. She was determined to make it to the Encios, and as she spun about to race away north once more, she uttered to herself, breathlessly.
“Not… dead… yet!”
The watcher grinned, blinking away the weren’s spilled blood as it fell down her brow and across her eyelids, and looked back briefly toward the brooding shape of the weren as it shrunk in the distance behind her. She found herself laughing with satisfaction, believing that the wound she inflicted was delaying the beast even longer than she imagined it would. It was clutching its left arm against its ribs, staring off into a darkened space in the burrow.
It wasn’t turning toward her. Not at all. How badly had she injured the beast, she wondered?
It was fixated on something, and it wasn’t the wound she opened.
Then what?
To spite herself, the watcher slowed her escape, panting and bending at the hips to reclaim her wind. Then, she saw something moving within the remnants of the den. It was the creature that had itself hidden further within the crumbling burrow. The weren had its eyes locked upon the trembling shape even as it took a few timid steps into the amber glow of the late-afternoon sun.
“Divines!” she gasped as she came to a stop, breathless as she blinked in disbelief. It was a quivering child of no more than nine or ten years, by the watcher’s hurried estimation. The perspective… the disparity between the monstrous beast and the crouching, terrified child before it, brought forth a wave of panic within the watcher’s guts as hot and wild as a raging fire.
She hesitated, haunted by the prospect of leaving the child behind, yet terrified that to do otherwise would be a futile, fatal endeavor. Her eyelids closed. She frowned and cried out in frustration and grief.
“Shit!”
Before she realized what she was doing, the watcher’s legs were carrying her toward the burrow, the weren, and the child in its sights. Despite her fear, the fingers of her right hand tightened upon the roughly indexed haft of her sword, her pace quickening, her lips parting to issue a rebel shriek against the terror of black fur and coiled muscle. Some furnace of valor had been stoked within her.
She would sooner die defending that child than live with the nightmare of regret having chosen, instead, to save herself.
To her astonishment, however, the weren wolf backed away from the burrow, its face cowering behind its right forearm. It knew she was coming; it looked in her direction briefly even as it continued to rescind from the child.
“Take the child,” it suddenly said. Ronah had no inkling such a creature was capable of speech, at all. Its voice rolled in its depths, low and grave, fraught with inner struggle. Under different circumstances, it would have been a tone to tug upon the watcher’s very heartstrings. Even if she couldn’t bring herself to feel piteous of the wolfen horror, the fact that it chose to speak, rather than to strike, lent the beast a semblance of sincerity. Of humanity, even.
She slid to a stop facing the black-furred canithere, placing herself between it and the child at her back. The weren bore a tortured expression in its eyes as it regarded her. It twitched, seeming to fight some inner urge to lunge toward watcher and child, both. It became obvious to Ronah that the wolfen creature was drawing upon some buried semblance of control to stave away its instinct to kill them. For the watcher’s life, she could not fathom why. It still hid its face, but not from her.
It was affected by the presence of the child. Why?
“What’s your game, cur?” she demanded. Even as she spoke, her voice cracking at the edge of each word, she felt the monster’s hot breath upon her face. She found herself involuntarily backing away from the weren, reaching an arm behind her to wrap her hand about the trembling shoulder of the young child.
“Go!” the creature said, slamming its right hand down into the earth and goring deep grooves in the soil. The impact caused scarlet mist to eke from the wound Ronah had opened atop the beast’s shoulder, and it tucked its left elbow tightly against its ribs to staunch the crimson flow of its life’s blood as it issued from the wider gash in the pit of its arm. Its lips curled and twitched, teeth gnashing before it spoke once more. “Get the child away from me… now!”
Turning to gather the child in her left arm, she did not let the canithere out of her sight. She could sense the conflict in the creature, its irresistible drive to kill tempered by some indefinable, volatile objection to endangering the child’s life. It was barely able to keep itself from descending upon them. Tears welled in the black lids of its eyes and ran down the sides of its muzzle.
Ronah backed away slowly. The tip of her sword, still wet and red from its wicked bite through the weren’s thick hide, was poised defensively toward the great beast.
Then, upon some intangible prompt of her deepest instincts, the watcher turned and began to flee toward the wall once more. Her every joint and muscle ached, and the added weight of the child made the going far more awkward than she could afford it to be. She nearly toppled onto the still and silent thing clutched tightly against her, losing her footing several times along the way up the broken ground before them.
The going became increasingly difficult as she drew nearer to the wall. The Encios was formed from ancient trees that sprung up from the dense, brown-black soil, twisting and enveloping one another as they climbed hundreds of feet skyward. The exposed roots of those trees spread out in abundance, making the lands surrounding the wall a treacherous crossing.
Chancing another look back toward the burrow, she saw no sign of the weren. She took a few cleansing breaths, scanning the horizon with her eyes. Then, far from satisfied that the threat had abated, she turned and made her way closer to the wall. She looked down at the child in her arms.
It was a dark-haired boy with haunted eyes that stared off into nothingness, his traumatized face lost in an implacable nightmare. Strange… when he was still hidden in the depths of the burrow and all she could see were his eyes, they flashed with reflections as bright as signal lanterns. They were dull, now, and impossibly black.
He was emaciated. His cheeks gaunt, and it seemed as if he had been in the elements, and on his own, for at least a week. She couldn’t fathom how he could have survived so long on his own, especially considering the ever-increasing presence of savage weren prowling throughout the region. He had the presence of mind to camouflage himself, coating his exposed skin with mud and grass where possible, but still… the boy was a complete mystery to her.
With the towering Encios but a few dozen hard-won paces away, the watcher heard a sound that made her heart leap and the child in her arms tremble and bury his head against her armored chest. It was a deep, resonating growl.
It was a warning.
She looked over her right shoulder and saw that the same weren was standing a few dozen paces away, whatever fleeting resistance to its feral bloodlust having faltered. There were flickers of restraint visible in its face and the small movements of its body, as if it was fighting to reassert control over its violent instincts.
It was as if an outside influence was feeding its inhuman rage, overriding its desire to spare the life of the child in her arms, if not her own.
Its movements reminded the watcher of a dog chafing at its leash.
She turned and ran once more, hearing the rapid approach of the canine beast closing fast behind her. Abandoning the sword in her right hand, she leapt desperately through the air with the black-haired boy held tightly against her. Weighed down by the child like a boat by its anchor, her fingers found purchase in a deep crevice gouged into the stone-like bark of the wall’s lowest bough. Straining, using all that remained of her strength, she pulled herself up by that tenuous grip. Her muscles burned in her chest and shoulders as she felt a sensation deep in her arm and down her flank like a taut rope snapping.
Ronah’s legs flailed beneath her, desperate in their search for a foothold. Her focus was on getting the boy up onto one of the stone-solid petrified limbs, safely out of their tormentor’s reach. By then, however, the weren had closed upon them both.
It slashed downward in a vicious swipe of its flesh-rending claws. She felt the impact against the back of her left leg, lost her grip, and fell to the hard earth at the base of the wall. The boy fell from her grip, tumbling roughly out of the watcher’s view.
The weren’s focus was clearly upon her, and she felt glad for that. She hoped the child could escape, and at that moment all she could think to do was buy him time to get as far from the monster as possible. She was unarmed, and her right arm hung uselessly from her dislocated shoulder, so she unleashed the hardest, strongest punch she could manage with the tightly curled fist of her left hand, connecting squarely with the weren’s nose.
It would not be enough.
In response, the beast descended upon her left leg, snapping its jaws down tightly through the meat of her thigh. Its teeth burst her femur as it clamped down and began to shake her by its grip upon her upper leg.
There was no pain, in that moment. Just shock.
A cloud of hot, wet crimson filled the air as she was flung and shaken about. She heard a snapping sound and went hurtling away from the wall, a dozen paces at least from the monster.
She knew she was screaming, but she could not hear herself over the rush and thud of her heartbeat in her ears. The world about her swirled and coalesced in a macabre spectacle of black, brown, and red that invaded from the edges of her vision, even as she saw the weren making a slow, sauntering approach to finish its kill. The majority of her left leg yet remained within its evil maw. It chewed and supped upon her very marrow as its shadow claimed her.
An eerie nothingness prevailed all about the watcher, and even the sound of her own beating heart retreated… fading into an oppressive silence.
⁂
A muffled sound pushed through the veil of emptiness. It was a voice… distant and familiar. A woman’s voice. The words were indecipherable, but the tone was recognizable as one of disbelief. One of dread.
“Ronah,” the voice called out, repeatedly, louder and clearer each time. Then, the battered watcher began to feel, again. Her hand was being pulled free from its glove. It was being held in someone’s warm grip. They were shaking her by that hand. Slapping the top of it.
They were trying to wake her, she knew, and she tried to oblige them… but the pain grew greater with each effort she made to reclaim her consciousness. The allure of that black oblivion, of an escape from the agony of her ruined physical state… it was so very difficult for her to deny.
Not dead yet, she thought once more, this time not as a mantra but as a lament.
Her eyes opened, at last, to see the face of Sare Agath, a sister of the Westport Watch and one of those who had volunteered alongside Ronah days earlier.
Pain.
Another figure came into focus standing behind and beside Watcher Agath. Ser Thamus Ramelle. He bore a grim visage, speaking plainly, if indelicately.
“I mislike her odds.”
Sare shook her head, not looking away from Ronah’s face, and forced herself to smile.
“Well, you don’t know her like I do,” she said, squeezing the cold fingers of Ronah’s left hand. Ser Thamus did not respond, but moved to kneel down to Ronah’s right side. He slid a gauntleted hand behind her back between her shoulders, coaxing her to sit upright.
Pain!
She squealed and struggled against the encroaching darkness, able to hold to the moment just barely. Ser Thamus looked down to Renwode Kherne, who busied himself wrapping the ragged, fist-sized stump that was all that remained of Ronah’s left leg below the hip. Kherne was an older man, easily in his sixties, who joined the search party as they passed through lands he claimed for a homestead beyond the city limits of Westport. None of them knew much about the man, save that he boasted more knowledge of the Freewilds than most. He also, apparently, knew how to triage a grievous wound.
Ronah mumbled uselessly. She couldn’t form words, though she meant to thank the old man for saving her life. She was trapped in a nightmare of agony, and she struggled to reclaim a momentary cognizance.
She had no bearings. Where were they? She craned her neck to look about, a sudden panic rising in her face. Her breathing became rapid and shallow. The darkness intruded at her periphery once again… but she was determined not to let herself succumb.
I’m not dead, yet, and damn me for wishing otherwise, she thought, gritting her teeth and gripping at the collar of Sare Agath’s surcoat.
“The . . .,” she began to speak, her voice deep, slurring, and alien to her ears. “The beast. The. . . the boy. . .”
Watcher Agath, Ser Thamus, and old Renwode Kherne all looked to Ronah Gustav’s left, and her eyes followed their gaze to find the corpse of a hefty, hirsute human male, his chin and chest still bloody from when he was in his feral canine form, chewing through her upper leg. A massive, piercing wound ran through the center of his burst-apart abdomen.
Beyond the dead weren, huddled up against the edge of the Encios clutching the haft of Ronah’s sword, was the boy she had rescued from the burrow. The feral canithere’s blood flowed down the blade’s edge and over the little boy’s knuckles, and his eyes yet bore the same distant, tortured stare.
