The Lupine Curse: A Tale of Netherway

Vidarr had been too busy taking care of the Hands in pursuit of him. Meanwhile, Markus was preoccupied gathering the guards together, or at the very least, those who weren’t taking advantage of the lack of justice and peace in the city.

The elf had his back against an old armory, which from the looks of the cobwebs on the forge, had been out of business for awhile. The shadow of the city wall loomed like a giant, as if the winds weren’t cold enough already.

An arrow bit the dirt at the corner of the armory. His brothers had noticed how independent he was, furthermore, his lack of willingness to kill civilians in his way made him an easy target.

Vidarr nocked an arrow. He feigned as if he was turning his head around the corner. Six hours flew in unison at the spot where he had been only a moment before. Murmuring a prayer, he jumped around the corner, drawing the arrow to the corner of his mouth, aiming at the first Hand he saw.

He didn’t have time to watch it, but when he returned to the safety of the stone wall, he heard bones crunch after they dropped from above. Despite the satisfaction of that noise, he wasn’t pleased. The door to the guard tower had been so close, and inside, the lever which would close the left half of the city gates waited.

Now he was stuck.

He checked his quiver and wondered if it was worth risking his skin for one of the ones buried in the dirt next to him.

In the guard tower to the right of the gates, Deidre slammed the door and calmed her shaking hands. Looking about the confined space, she saw overturned tables and a ladder leading up to the trapdoor at the top. Several of the rungs were broken.

A patch of smeared blood was on the wooden floor, with no body to accompany it.

To her left there was a lever. Excitement started through her, even a pinch of hope. She had to jump to grasp the lengthy, iron handle. Nothing happened. She hung there as the iron lever held her weight stubbornly, refusing to switch down. The mechanism inside was far too rusted.

Fenris dashed between two strangers who’d just begun a quarrel.

“Get back here, swine!” his pursuer’s voice nipped at his back.

Fenris could swear by the look of his eyes that he was enticed to kill him, not for the sake of vengeance, but only for a few moments of entertainment.

His lungs burned. His Curse was igniting. He gasped for air as he sprinted, but each time felt that fire billowing upwards in him, parting his human mind from the chaos around him. It was beginning to feel like a dream; beginning to feel as if something else would take over for him.

A stand of trinkets and jewelry was being raided. In his thoughtlessness, Fenris slammed into it, overturning the whole thing and sending his own body hurtling.

He shook his head. The beast within him was delayed from that interruption, so he continued running, the man behind him stumbling over thieves and bandits, cursing at them, telling them to mind themselves next time.

An idea stopped his legs. Fenris dove for the safety of a nearby stack of barrels beside a tavern and poised himself. He waited until he could hear his pursuer’s feet stomping down the road after him. The precise moment arrived, not at all too soon.

Fenris leapt from his cover and made sure his dagger bit deeply into the man’s back.

An agonizing cry. But it wasn’t enough. Fenris took out Ash’s blade and found his heart with it.

The pain of a weapon being unsheathed from your skin is enough to silence to silence even the most crazed warrior.

Fenris’ head swam as he ran back towards the main district with the entrance, wondering what words he stopped in the man’s throat.

Vidarr had tried sneaking around the other side of the armory to get a view of the archers. But they’d already thought of that, and nearly riddled his head with arrows when he peeked around.

Panting and searching the sky for an idea, Vidarr could see the crowds growing all around him, growing with anxiety, with malice. The screams of the dying became more frequent, the pitch more predictable, as if a song had broken out in the city and the singers were beginning to understand the tempo.

Never had he been under such pressure, not even when facing a werewolf in a complete frenzy.

It was impossible for the Hands to know why Vidarr wanted to get to the guard tower, just that they had figured he was determined to get there, and so they became equally determined to stop him.

Then the fires of Crowshead came at him, took him by the shoulders and dragged him off to those horrid moments he knew would stain his memory forever.

A hand grasped around Vidarr’s cowl, stretching through the broken glass of the windowpane behind him. Vidarr jerked his body with such a force that his arm came into view of the archers. Three arrows fell down around it instantly.

The fourth thudded into his forearm.

He screamed, wrenched himself to the left while a dagger nipped his shoulder.

He dragged the hand through the windowpane until it relinquished its grasp around his cowl.

Vidarr stared with cold eyes at the elf, smiling arrogantly, dusting himself off. He came through the empty doorway of the shop. “Thinking to outsmart my archers, dear brother?” Dalibor asked him.

“Your archers?” Vidarr felt as if Netherway owed him all the time he needed to relish killing him. “What happened to your lapdog sense of loyalty, Dalibor? Are you so quick to replace your eagerness to please an elder with the pride of backstabbers and thieves?” Vidarr looked at the arrow in his arm as if it was a fly that had landed there. “Fool,” he said with genuine sadness.

“I am the fool?” Dalibor cackled. “I advise you watch your tongue. Your last words will be uttered soon, after all, brother.”

“If you’re my brother, I’d be more than willing to spill my own blood, as long as it’s got your stupidity in it. You might wear the clothes of an assassin, look down upon others, think of yourself as a highborn, but on the inside you’re just a child repeating the words your parents taught you, following the ways of ancestors who were just as witless as you are now. Haven’t you seen the folly in it? Tradition is only as good as the actions it provokes.”

“We protect these lands—”

“They don’t need protecting anymore, can’t you see? Not from the Curse, at the least.” Vidarr shook his head. He didn’t have as much time. Every time his heart beat, a throb of pain went through his arm. “But no, you can’t. You were born a mindless follower. You’ll die that way, too. I’ll see to it, personally.”

Vidarr knew any attack he made would only be mirrored by the same parries and counters he’d been trained with.

He hurled his dagger at him.

Dalibor made something of a grunt. He looked down at his chest, then back at Vidarr. Insanely, he laughed.

The dagger was deep in his chest, but he missed the heart all the same, and he was out of arrows.

Dalibor pounced on him. A dance of dodges began.

“I’ll avenge my father! I’ll make him proud, he’ll see just how loyal I really was!” Dalibor shouted, ignoring his training and slashing carelessly. He was pushed beyond the armory, into the corridor between the shops that led to the city wall, where the archers were posted …

The deranged cultist advanced faster. Vidarr tried for an opening, reached for his dagger while it taunted him, sticking from his chest, but his arm was caught by the edge of Dalibor’s blade.

Arrows fell around them, ceasing intermittently when Dalibor’s body blocked the view.

Vidarr veered them out of the Hands’ view.

He stumbled backwards to dodge another swipe, when his heel met a stray rock, and he fell to the ground. His heart panicked, screamed for his mind to figure a way to save himself. As Dalibor closed in the last of the distance with a dagger raised high into the air, Vidarr grasped the shaft in his arm and snapped off the arrowhead.

As he had always dreamt, Vidarr kicked Dalibor with all the stored hatred in his heel, sending him to the ground, breathless and coughing.

Vidarr stood up with vengeance in his yes, the wrathful swears and oaths he’d murmured beneath his breath over the years, built up and overflowing in that moment.

He could hardly control himself.

Dalibor raised his hand in resistance. Believe it or not, Vidarr took it, almost with a brotherly affection …

By the wrist, and twisted with all his might.

The bones cracked, a scream of defeat to add to the chorus in the city. The dagger felt to the ground.

“It was never your day, brother,” Vidarr said as he let his arms do the rest, like muscle memory from all the daydreams. The arrowhead went easily through his neck.

Vidarr had told himself before that he’d stab him until he could not recognize the body. But in that moment, he was sure he was feeling the shock that the son felt when he avenged his father.

He took his dagger from Dalibor’s chest.

Both of them were splattered. Dalibor held his gaze as he died, the two of them flecked in the blood of the other.

He was trying to speak, but only choked garbles fell out.

Vidarr felt the excitement of it, the sweetness of vengeance. It was a dense, heavy iron on his tongue. He held onto it as long as he could, but found it dying in his mouth before he could swallow it, with each and every last, sluggish beat of Dalibor’s heart.

And just like that, it soured.

Disgusted. With himself, with Dalibor’s frozen gaze. Disgusted with his childhood. Disgusted with the mess of blood covering him. Disgusted with the city’s incessant noise. Everything. He felt like he was going to vomit.

And did.

As soon as the elf had died in his arms, the chaos of the world rushed in. It rotted the moment as he tried to savor it.

Panting, trembling, aching and bleeding, Vidarr realized he was still stuck in the same predicament.

The tower is just across from the armory. If I can just sprint through …

He let the dead elf’s weight fall upon him, his blood saturate through to his clothes. It made him squirm.

Hiding himself beneath Dalibor, he rounded the corner and ran through the alleyway guarded by the archers. A flurry of arrows went into the makeshift shield. Vidarr could feel every thud, each time afraid that one had actually hit him but he was too shocked to feel it.

A second slew of arrows, and more target practice for the archers on one of their own leaders. Vidarr grasped the iron handle of the guard tower, pulled and let the body drop as he leapt through.

Inside, he barred the door. Like rain, arrows continued to slam into it.

Seeing the lever, Vidarr leapt up and tried to yank it down as Deidre did, ignoring the flaring pain in his arm.

But it simply wouldn’t move. Not for an innocent child’s wish, not for a warrior who created corpses to get there.

“Gods be damned!” he screamed as the blood flowed from his arm.