The Lupine Curse: A Tale of Netherway

Deidre waited for Fenris to leave his cottage early that morning, as he always did, to relieve himself over the cliff. For years she watched the boy do this. It sounds strange, but it was something that was within their boundaries of what they considered normal.

He stopped temporarily after his parents’ deaths, instead taking to the trunk of a tree or sodden log. But now, she figured, since he had decided to sleep in the cottage once again, he would return to his normal habits, at least for his last day.

That morning, his last morning at Crowshead, he did.

Rubbing his tired, wearied eyes, he relieved himself over the cliff. Repetitive memories like specters circled him, making him so dizzy he might’ve fallen over the edge. A cold rush of air came up from the basin and made him shiver.

When he was done, he did not return to his cottage to rest until the sunrise, as he normally would. He merely sat, hooked his legs over the edge of the cliff, and watched the sunrise. A cold, emptying feeling of loneliness in his chest that was oddly purifying; it was simple, it was easy to understand. It was the feeling of knowing you will leave your only friend behind for the rest of your life.

He was holding the nail fragment in his hand, clutching it as if letting it go off the cliff meant his own death. Fenris couldn’t understand how he could hold onto something that cursed him so terribly, all he knew is that it brought a strange comfort.

Deidre was hiding not far from him, hoping to surprise him playfully and make him chuckle as she had done before. But when she watched him stare ahead, she knew there was no childishness left, or at least not the kind that brought joy. Only angst now. Confused, convoluted, undirected angst.

She sat herself next to him.

Fenris rubbed his eyes again. The dark crescents beneath the green of his irises were reddened by a night of sleeplessness, much like Ashara’s. “You were right,” Fenris said shakily. “They are going to throw me out.” He laughed at the irony of it, and tossed a pebble into the basin.

“I didn’t think it would be like this,” Deidre said. She rubbed his back, though she sensed it did little for him. She could see his hand was clutched around something.

“Neither did I.”

Deidre frowned.

“How long until it happens?” he asked her.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve heard some say a single day, others, a whole year. You’ve heard some of the stories too, you must’ve.”

Fenris nodded, then shook his head. “But your mother was a witch. Mine wasn’t. All I’ve heard are rumors. Your parents knew things that I reckon many do not. Did she ever speak of any cures?” Fenris asked desperately.

Deidre wasn’t sure what esoteric knowledge her mother had, if she had any at all to begin with. Higher magick was uncommon, but not unheard of. She had taught her so little before she passed, most of it lately was only her intuition awakening … “She—I … I don’t know, honestly. No, she never did speak of one. Some apothecaries on the road said they did, though.” Her voice was exasperated, clutching at the same blind hope Fenris clung to, and hoping it sounded stronger.

“Truly?”

“But it was just to make coin, Fen,” she added sadly. “You know how apothecaries are.”

He picked up another stone and chucked it. Hurtling downward, it didn’t make it to the opposite wall before disappearing into the white mists of the waters below. “I’m going to pack a few things,” he said.

“Do you want me to help?”

“Please don’t,” he said. He offered a grin that only hurt Deidre more, seeing how forced it was. Then he stood up and left.

Inside, he fought the urge to scream, keeping it all boiling beneath his skin while the heat rose up, and the sharp nail continued digging into his palm.

It drew blood, and dripped, once, twice, onto the floor, before he sucked on the wound, took a deep breath, and set out to determine what he would bring with him on his journey.

Boran came up behind Deidre. His scent—of raw meats and the sap of trees—was unmistakable. The small imprint that Fenris’ body left on the grass was trampled by his much larger stature.

“You’re up early,” Deidre noted.

“I thought I’d catch you out here. Why aren’t you in your old home?” He sighed as he sat down next to her and looked out at the dawn.

She shrugged. “S’pose I got so used to being out here. I left the dagger in there, though,” she admitted. “It just felt strange stepping around in a dead man’s cottage. The way he died … I have no doubts his spirit is lingering somewhere near.”

Boran grunted. He didn’t know what to think of that. The warmth of his body sitting next to hers was like a strangely-shaped furnace.

Finally she said, “If Fenris leaves, then I’ll follow him. There’s nothing else keeping me here. I thought about it last night. The lot of you made sure to make me feel like troll shit while I offered you my blood and life. Helped birth your sons, till your fields, and for what? Mockery? For once I was shown kindness, on that night, but … that was the first time. It should have been long ago that I was treated with such warm words.”

Boran’s expression hardened. He knew every words was honest. “I’m truly sorry, lass.” His contrition was real, and Deidre knew it, though even as she watched him look down at his palms shamefully she could not bring herself to forgive them all so easily.

“You could’ve taken me into your cottage, you know,” she said. “I don’t mind that you gave away my mother’s home to that man passing through, he was offering good coin … that night. But it became his home, and now it’s no longer mine. It’s been years, Boran. Years.”

“But, you know how the others feel about ya’. If I took you in, they’d be threatening me with pitchforks before the next dawn. Maybe now that they’ve seen what you’re capable of, they won’t mind you stayin’ half so much. But … you can’t leave.

“Crowshead is barely survivin’. We’re struggling just to get along, we need more bodies to work the land. And we can’t get through the childbearing without you. No one here likes to admit it, but it’s true, this village needs a witch. And you’re a fine one.” He gave her a smile, and when she saw it, she struggled hiding her own.

Then the mood turned solemn again as Boran said, “And what of the wolf boy? Our dearest Fenris … where would you go with him, anyways? He is dangerous, Deidre. The world is not kind to folk like us with one name. And that boy is only a boy so long until he’s transformed. Then you’ll see a side to him that will leave you wishin’ for a nice fire in your dead man’s home. He won’t be Fenrisulfur anymore. He’ll be some creature with fur as black as the hair on his head, covering his whole body, and he’ll be as foul as the rest of ’em. And you’ll have wished you stayed. You may not be alive to wish it, to begin with.”

After all that, Deidre just fiddled with the ends of her tangled hair and wrinkled her small, reddened nose against the cold wind. “Thank you,” she finally said, “no one ever said things like that to me before, besides Fen, of course. The higher magick is … it’s just luck. S’pose … ” she mumbled. “And as for Fenris, well, we’ll see.”

“We won’t see, lass. He needs to be gone before he’s more than just a danger to himself. And as for you, little hare, I’d say it’s not just luck. That’s the light of a star in your hands.”

Boran put an arm around her, pulling her in for a hug so tight she could scarcely breathe. “I would miss you terribly if you left, anyways,” he admitted with a laugh.

Fenris looked up from the leather rucksack in his hands. Deidre’s silhouette in the doorway was grey against the soft light of the early morning.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to help you pack your things.”

“I told you I didn’t—“

“You stupid! You’re the only friend I’ve ever had. You’re not the only one who will be crying all day for weeks.”

There was an aura of stubbornness around Fenris, but after she shut the door and walked closer to him, he didn’t say anything with her arms around him.

“I want to come with you,” she whispered into his neck. One of her hands went to his stomach, over the small mark the Cursed left. Her touch was cold, but he didn’t recoil, or even flinch. “I don’t mind this,” she added softly.

“But I do. And you won’t be coming,” he said firmly, putting a hand on hers—first to hold it, then to brush it away. The dawning light was coming in through the only two windows in the cottage. Just enough so that he could see the blue in her eyes.

Then he sat at the foot of his parents’ bed and let his head fall into his hands, his elbows on his knees, groaning. “There’s a god for beggars, a goddess for thieves, and a god for every last scoundrel in Netherway. All of which are praised by shrines, centers, chapels. But who is the divine keeper of werewolves, of the Cursed? What is his name? Tell me, so that I might pray to him.” He felt more alone than ever, feeling bereft of even the small comfort of assuming a benign god or goddess was looking after him.

“You’re still human, Fenris,” Deidre said, secretly uncertain. She sat next to him. “You can still beseech Calan for guidance. She is still your divine mother. Your goddess.”

“Some mother she is, letting her sons and daughters become tainted with this foul curse.”

“Well, Calan won’t help you if you continue to spite her like that.”

“And I won’t pray to her if she continues to neglect me!” Fenris said, louder than he wished to. Fenris picked up a wooden bowl and threw it across the room. The dried wood splintered, and he sank to the floor as pitiful as the remains of the bowl. Deidre knelt with him on the ground and wrapped her arms around him. He cried into her shoulder.

When he recollected himself, he looked into her eyes. “If you come with me, this is all you’ll see of me. This, and something much, much worse. I’d rather endure this alone than let it consume both of us.”

A tear that Deidre had tried to hold back fell down. Fenris caught it with his finger and wiped it on his own face. It made her laugh, and for a moment they were smiling together.

“But you don’t have to let this consume you,” she said. “There is a happiness in this journey, still. This curse is just another patch of soil to till. There is something to reap here. There must be something waiting for you at the end of all this. I trust that … or else I would not be sitting here with you right now. Please, Fen.”

His thoughts were only more convoluted after she said that. If she’s right, I’m weaker, I’m blinder, I’m more thoughtless than I could have ever imagined. How pitiful …

When he stood up, he embraced her tight, holding her, really, and then gripped her shoulders, looking into her eyes. “I’m leaving now,” he said, thinking the sooner would be the better. He grabbed his rucksack, burdened by the dagger he pulled from the werewolf’s back and another wooden bowl he believed he would seldom use.

He brought one book, an old tome of tall tales. Even the most basic of peasants know how to read in the Moonlands.

Boran was tending a fire in the heart of the village when Fenris strode out—eyes red and legs already tired—from his cottage. He could already feel the wound eating away at him.

“Are you leaving now, then?” he asked. Boran had the paternal urge to tell him to stay and rest for a few more days, but resisted it.

He nodded.

“A’right then. Gods be with you, lad. May our paths cross again, in good nature,” he said, half-wishing it wouldn’t come true.

Fenris put his arms as far around Boran as he could as he hugged him. The man was surprised, and it showed on his expression. Although he wouldn’t admit it if anyone asked, Boran had to stifle a tear as Fenris let go.

James was standing outside his home with Rikter beside him, holding an armful of clothes. Fenris was dressed in rags, looking at them with confused, wide eyes.

“Doubtless, you’re going to need much more than what you’ve got with you,” Rikter said. James forced a smile that might’ve been touched by some genuine sadness.

“What is this?” he asked suspiciously.

“It’s leather, and wool to keep you warm as the leaves change to darker shades,” Rikter said, and James nodded in affirmation. His arms were outstretched with the leather trousers, a jerkin with a hood and a long-sleeved, woolen shirt to match the black shoes on top of it all. There was even a belt.

He could hardly take them without grinning stupidly. Even as the pile of garments were in his hands he said, “But you shouldn’t do this for me. I’ll … ehm, ‘outgrow’ them soon.”

Rikter and his son laughed nervously. “Just, perhaps before you shift, you should take them off? Leave them somewhere safe and come back later.” Rikter shrugged after he said that. “If you walk around towns and cities naked and with new flesh and only rags, people will assume you have the Curse. You’ll be hung, or hunted. Keep these clothes, Fenris.”

And he did. The boy thanked them as much as he could before walking away, up towards the hill. No one else was awake by that time to see him off. He was too embarrassed to redress himself in front of them, so he stuffed the clothes in his bag and left.

Deidre walked past Boran, but was caught by the arm. “You follow him to the top, then no more. A’right?”

The way he said it annoyed her, but she nodded, then ran to catch up with Fenris. When her footsteps fell in line with his, they were both surprised to find only silence at their lips. And if they were to speak, it would be words of sadness, they both knew. Finding nothing else, they lent each other their hands and drudged up the muddy hill out of Crowshead, their feet stepping into the deep indentations left by the Cursed that and stormed down the hillside only two days before.

The tears that had built up since his mother’s death finally came back, and as they reached the top—breathing heavily—they looked past the tree-line to the rising sun on the horizon, hoping it would burn away the reality.

“I’m going to miss you,” Deidre said after awhile.

Fenris tried to say the same, but couldn’t get it out. He unlocked his hand from Deidre to streak the tears across his cheek.

From here he could see how he must’ve looked to the Cursed as he stepped out of the door to look at him. Just an outline, a shade in the darkness. Up here, Crowshead seemed much smaller. And it was a peculiar sensation: looking at his world so condensed now into one look, when it was a complex thing of stress and worry down there, being apart of it all. To the right of the cottages were small fields of cleared forest where plants were growing—some dying.

For no reason in particular, Fenris laughed. A sad, shaky laugh. He was going to be a dark, forgotten legend to that village. “I’m going to miss you too,” he managed to say, before turning his back on her and starting his first steps away.

As he walked down the road, he thought about how that might’ve very well been the last time he hugged her, so before she could think that he’d hardened his heart against her, he rushed back, and nearly tackled her to the ground with another embrace, holding her as tight as he possibly could, stifling his tears, and finding room within himself to smile as he felt her heartbeat against his.

And at the worst possible moment, as they withdrew from their hug, he found himself closer to her face than he ever had been before, relishing each feeling accompany it, the soft glow of her eyes as she stared, bewildered, before he kissed her fully on the lips.

Fenris changed beside a road called the Peasant’s Pass. The clothes they gave him fit well, and they even made him feel better as he continued along, warm against the cold morning breeze that smelled of autumn. The hood was snug over his head.

He felt just a little safer with his hand on the hilt of his dagger, tucked into his belt.

As the day turned to evening, Fenris contemplated why his mother had kept him so close to home. He’d seen only a single party of others so far—two Moon-elves, one woman, a farmer and his son—while traveling on the roads. As far as he could surmise, it was a peaceful country.

He had been fortunate enough to live in the Moonlands. The continent across Morros’ Division was the Runelands, once inhabited by both the Moon and Sun-elves. But after centuries of restless disputes in the frosted lands, the War of the Eclipse erupted in a fury of iron, steel, and wood, during a time when trolls still shook the ground and magick was still in the hands of children. The two races were inevitably split, and the Sun-elves kept the Runelands while those of the moon were exiled to the lands across the Division, only to find it more temperate and habitable than the cold climate across the sea. Any of the Sun-elves that lingered—the peacekeepers—were pushed further to the Withering Plains, above the Scorched Lands, to endure searing summers and warm winds in the days of winter.

And that was as much as Fenris had come to learn in his childhood of tilling fields.

Standing at a crossroads in front of the Duskenwood Forest, Fenris wondered where the gods would lead him now. He hoped it was not beneath the ground.

That night, Fenris found respite at a shrine atop a mountain with a path nearly hidden view. While he went up the worn stones overrun by weeds, he felt a strange, ancient presence, sensing that no one had touched this pathway for years.

The shrine was half the size of his cottage, and what was left of the broken altar was a statuette of Calan, whose right leg was little more than a pile of grey ash at his feet. She was no longer than his arm, and when he looked at her, he felt strange being reverent to a crippled goddess. An aura of the divine still lingered here, but the boy was not inspired enough to do anything with it.

Above him was a half moon. Its silvery light shone down eerily on the shrine, casting small shadows on Calan’s face that made her seem half alive.

Fenris felt as if the wind was going right through him. The darkness of the evening enveloped the lands surrounding the small mountain. He lifted his shirt to find the wound festering, staring up at him. The werewolf’s nail was still in his rucksack, so he took it out, and placed it on the altar. “Here is my Curse, Calan. Please, cleanse me. And if I must live with this burden, help me shoulder it. Show me a way to carry it with dignity.”

It seemed fruitless, especially when Fenris imagined that the altar’s dust that had piled in the shrine had crumbled from all the knees that had bent on it in desperation.

A fire like the burning of a candle started at his stomach. Then it was an ember. Then a smoldering poker digging into his side. Fenris gripped the corner of the altar, and it crumbled under his weight.

He breathed through the pain and removed his clothes, throwing them on his rucksack and then standing bare in the cold wind that did little to soothe the fire in his body.

When he looked down again, the wound seemed to beat like his own heart, and he realized the muscles in his body were starting to flex and strain without his control.

“Goddess, I beg of you,” Fenris said through a gasp. I’ve heard some say a single day, others, a whole year, Fenris remembered Deidre’s words as the pain doubled him over, and he went to the ground, his writhing body bathed in moonlight. At least Crowshead will be safe … he thought sadly.

When he opened his eyes, which had shut from the pain, he saw black hair sprouting from his hands. Little pores being ripped opened to make way for larger, thicker tufts of fur. And beneath that, a new layer of skin as dark as the night sky.

Fenris scrambled to a corner of the shrine as if to hide from himself while he let the transformation consume him. He felt the prickly hairs coming through his naked body, and he screamed as he tried to pull them off, resisting every movement.

The more he screamed, the more he felt his vocal chords changing, the more his voice turned to wolfish yelps and howls. His ears were filled with the sounds popping, snapping, and tearing as his bones shifted the way the dawn shifts to dusk.

Fenris started clawing at the ground while the skin of his hands peeled away, his hair and flesh fell off in bloody clumps, and his vision became bloodshot and construed.

There was a moment of relief—when the lower half of his body consisted of hind legs and paws the size of his forearm—and he breathed ragged breaths with one lung the size of a human’s and the other like a wolf’s. One of Fenris’ eyes was the same, dull green and human in the darkness, and the other was ablaze, doubled in size. Half of his torso had sprouted its hair and the tough flesh of the Cursed, while the other was light and human.

There was silence.

Until his ribcage expanded, and every white protrusion cracked to make way for the new organs, the insides, the murderous blood that pumped twice as fast in new veins.

Fenris stared at his shadow, and watched the last of the transformation through what remained of his human vision—until that, too, was altered, and the rest of the world seemed much smaller, more insignificant.

Uncontrollably, he bent down and ate his flesh, only to finish and lap up the blood and forget he’d ever been human to begin with, stretching himself tall and observing his surroundings.

The nail fragment still remained on the altar, now much lower than Fenris remembered. He made something of a snort, heavy steam came from his snout.

There was a smell, something burning in the far distance, that made him sprint from the shrine towards it.