Chapter Text
"Even a man who is pure of heart,
and says his prayers by night,
may become a wolf when the wolfsbane blooms,
and the moon is full and bright."
-Sir John Talbot, The Wolfman
1356 – 50 MILES EAST OF SOFIA, BULGARIA
It didn’t take very long for the screaming to start. Perhaps it had begun well before it woke her from her slumber, but even decades on she’d never have a full memory of that night; merely a blurred veneer of red-tinged flasges, tainted as they were by terror and blood and fur and claws. What she did know is that every person in her camp—her entire family—was taken from her.
Father. Mother. Derrin and Willem and Tatyana. All gone in the span of minutes. The old blacksmith, Jorrel. The entire fishing troupe, and she remembered how proud they all were when they’d found a natural estuary of salmon and trout and pike not two leagues from their campground. The new lumberjack, Harwin, all corded muscle and tanned skin and bright, kind eyes. The seamtresses and servant girls and the guard that patrolled the camp at night. Three hundred people, every person she’d ever known, gone like the flickering light of a candle, extinguished with as little as a whisper.
She’d known all of their names, their faces. They haunted her now, as they were in their last moments, caked in mud and blood and viscera. And the sounds—they made her retch when she remembered them—of beasts of death and moonlight feasted upon her family and friends. Her clan.
Ysilla’s death bought her escape. Bought her a precious few moments of life, though it lasted merely seconds before that sacrifice was wasted. The true agony, the torture that forced her to abandon sleep in favor of restless consciousness, was that when the wolves began to tear into her body, to feast, she had to watch her love die. Her final moments of mortality were spent forced to witness her wife eaten alive.
Only to not follow her to the grave afterward, as she wished. The gods would not allow it, it seemed. As she bled out onto pale, dewy grass, a monster lashing into her bosom, the men came upon them. A cavalry sent from Sofia, warriors of faith beholden to the church, ordered to fight unholy beasts in the name of their crucified god. The horses stampeded the pack, the wolves caught unawares, and the men brought down holy fire and tempered steel on their heads. The great beasts that looked like wolves but stood as men were prepared for an unarmed and pacifistic people—sheep to slaughter—not the lions of men in steel plate and armed with lance and sword. For every five men they killed, at least twenty of the beasts died. Father had once told her of the horrors of war, the stench of blood and shit and death, the screams of men as they were forced to live their final moments alone and without god. This was not war.
It was a slaughter.
Or, so she was told. In truth, she’d barely stayed awake long enough for the attack to begin. What was left of the tale was regaled to her after she’d awoken.
“One of the men brought you here,” the old crone croaked, the needle and twine still settled between her gnarled teeth. “Suppose they couldn’t be arsed to handle your care themselves.” She stayed silent after that, focusing instead on stitching wounds that should have been fatal. By all rights, she should’ve died out there in the valley.
Instead, she lay atop a mattress of straw and feathers, drenched in the cold sweat of pain, while an old maid stitched bites and scratches that would forever mar her beauty. The cottage—more of a hut, really—was stifling warm. The rotted wood and eroded stone that surrounded her would do little by way of protection, and yet she felt safe somehow. Sprigs of holly and aconite and herbs of all shapes and sizes hung to dry beside a cracked window. It felt homely, lived in, and the scent of mint and lavender forced her to relax. Perhaps this witch knew what incenses to burn for healing to be effective, or perhaps she simply liked the smell. It didn’t really matter.
Every breath was agony. The crone told her that it would be a miracle if she ever walked straight again. She disagreed; the real miracle would’ve been for her to die out there with her family. This scarified existence—and make no mistake, the scars were extensive—was not truly a life.
In the days and weeks that passed, her emotions were at their highest highs and lowest lows, a manic paranoia setting in that evoked hysteria. She knew those monstrous demons were sure to follow the scent of her blood, to find her and finish their feast. And again, she would be the cause of another death, to an innocent. The old crone was named Myra, the widow of an herbalist who once went to court with the bolyar himself. Her husband had been a kind, gentle man. One who would lift a hand to guide and support rather than strike. Throughout her convalescence she never spoke a word, her mind too shattered to do much more than eat and sleep and heal. It took more than eight moons for the scars on her chest and back to heal, and three more for the range of her motion to return. But by then, she’d realized that something much worse had happened to her.
She began to dream of the moon.
The dreams were so sweet, at first. She would dream of being out in the open air once more. Deep in the valley her people had hoped to call their home one day, she would sing and dance, flitting her skirts in joy and carelessness. The men would play their lyres and harps and drums, laughing along as she and Ysilla entranced one another by the campfire. Truthfully, her village was one of acceptance. The church called their union an abomination in the eyes of their god, but her gods were older—fiercer—and yet, they cared not for how people loved one another. Love was love, and it was as easy as that.
As the moon turned, however, the dreams would become more unsettling.
At first, she would see Ysilla drenched in blood as she danced, laughing a harsh, cold laugh that seemed wrong bursting from her lips. Her golden hair and radiant blue eyes deadened by pain and savagery. And then her mother would scream and scream and scream until her throat tore and she drowned in her own blood. Her father would take his sword in hand and rage against her, screaming at her to die. To bleed. To cease.
Every dream, the moon would widen and descend closer to the earth. What was once a sliver of pale milky light had, by the end, transformed into the wide disc of luminescence that had cursed her that night. Like the eye of some enormous, apathetic giant, it glared at her in her nightmares, taunting her. Pleading with her. Like an eldritch god, older even than the gods of her people, it demanded fealty and sacrifice. It was her captor and savior in equal measure, and it would have its due. So much was not said in words—no, no god would ever deign to speak with its worshippers in something as mundane as language. But the feeling was there, omnipresent and oppressive.
At the turn of the season, she left Myra’s home. She could no longer stomach the guilt gnawing on her bones for surviving. With each passing day, the hunger in her gut worsened, and no matter how long she gorged on rabbits and berries and the stale, brown bread Myra baked, it was not sated. She feared for what it meant – the hunger in addition to the moon dreams – and prayed to her gods that what she felt was false. But when the horse she rode skittered at her touch, when the forests fell silent as she rode toward the city, she knew it to be true.
The countryside was long and rough for a lone rider. The horse Myra loaned her was old and used to tilling land, not riding, and it was a slow venture toward civilization. A deep autumn wind blew southward as she rode north, slowing the destrier’s stride. The leaves began to shift from verdant green to hues of orange and yellow and red, and the grass around her died slowly. It was as if the landscape was reflecting how she felt inside, and it made her sick to think about anything other than the road ahead.
The full moon rose as she was three days outside Târgoviște. The destrier began to holler and kick right as the sun finally dipped beneath the mountains to the west and the pinks and blues and oranges of the sky descended into an indigo portrait. But she did not notice it. When the first rays of moonlight hit her body, the change began.
To describe the change is something impossible. How does one explain the feeling of every bone breaking, shattering beyond repair, and then remolding itself? To see skin stretch and split and bleed black blood whilst every pore sprouts coarse fur? For the eyes do not see the change as it happens, the ears do not hear it, the skin does not feel as it does while human. No, the eyes burst and reform into ones sharper and clearer, the ear drums burst open and bleed while the ears lengthen and taper. The skin grows and recedes in the right places, teeth fall out and are replaced with fangs, with incisors made for ripping, for tearing, for reaping. Nails crack and burst, taken over by claws as black as midnight. It is hellish, for it is of hell.
But it ended as quickly as it began. Where once stood a girl, a monster emerged.
At first, the feeling was euphoric. The sensation of becoming, of transcending the reality of man, it was a rush. The body she beheld was glorious, the product of the moonlit goddess’ favor. Strong, corded muscles, thick fur, powerful limbs and claws and teeth. At least seven foot tall she stood, the pinnacle of everything that had ever lived and ever would. Before the gnawing pain of hunger set in once more, and then all thought became secondary.
A three-day ride to the city became a run that took merely hours, and the first of her victims were of the city guard. Their leathers might as well have been parchment for the protection they bore, and her hunger was sated. If only for a moment. Morality had been abandoned, thrown to the wayside in favor of receiving what she was owed. Blood and death.
Seven more men died that night, felled by her claws and fangs. Seven men devoured blood and bone all. Four soldiers, a metallurgist, a priest of the crucified god, and a baker. Their blood was sweet as the honeyed wine father had once given her, their hearts and livers richer than any morsel she’d swallowed back home. She felt their blood matte her fur, licked at the flesh stuck between her teeth. No one rang the bells in warning of an attack, not a soul found her as she dined like a queen, and by morning, all that remained of the men who would be food was small splatters of blood on the stones and dirt lining the city streets. A demon of night and shadow, she’d become.
She awoke the morning after, naked as her name day, lying prone in the wood outside the city. For the first week, she damned herself, her gods, the men and beasts who made her a monster. She cursed her own weakness, that she allowed the beast to take over so easily. She’d always been so thick-headed, father always said so, and yet when the wolf took over she’d rolled over and shown her belly like a dog. She’d allowed it free reign of her body and mind, and the faces of the men she’d killed plagued her mind for days afterwards. She dared not enter the city as she was, and so she remained still in the wood, waiting for something. For anything to help her, to kill her. Either at this point would’ve done.
Curious, then, how it was a young man who came upon her.
It was as if he simply came into existence before her, for she hadn’t seen him arrive. She was curled up into herself, cradling her knees to her chest in the meadow she’d found deep in the forest, and then there stood he. He was so pale, his skin looked bloodless. He dressed in all black, a tunic and gambeson that seemed to dwarf his lithe frame. His hair was so blonde it was almost white, and yet that stood out the least.
What stood out most were his eyes: a deep, violent red like the color of blood. She’d learned how to read men’s eyes. This one’s were cruel, harsh, and seemed to cut into her like blade. The other thing that stood out was how his skin glistened in the pale sunlight. Like fractured glass, it refracted the sun’s light all around her. It blinded her eyes and glared god rays around the meadow. At the loss of vision she hissed, and when she opened her eyes once more he was sitting cross-legged across from her, his head cocked to the side.
“Who are you?” she croaked, her throat hoarse from disuse.
“A friend,” he replied, sneering. “If you wish it.”
She almost laughed. “I have no friends, stranger. No family. None would take me as I am now.”
“What are you now?” the boy asked. He seemed genuinely curious, but she would not be swayed. Men like this one always wanted something. Always had their self-interests at the forefront of their minds.
“Nothing that need concern you, sir,” she scoffed. Her pride was still intact somehow, despite how far she’d seemed to have fallen. “I have simply lost my way. I will find it again on my own, as I always have.”
“That sounds dreadfully boring,” the boy said dismissively. “And lonely. I do not believe creatures as we were meant to be alone.”
“I doubt very much you are anything like me,” she replied.
“Oh, perish the thought,” the boy laughed. With every word she liked him less and less, and yet she did not tell him to leave. “I am of the old blood, miss. Grecia is my home, but I do not think you know of it.”
“I do,” she denied vehemently. “My family traveled from Thessaloniki to Rome to Chtimi and beyond. You say you are of the old blood, but those of my blood walked these lands before yours took up arms against their brothers.”
“A woman who knows her history,” the boy concluded. He looked impressed. “I did not think the savage nomads would lessen themselves to teach their women.”
“A woman’s station in this world is the least of my concern,” she muttered.
“Yes, I can see that,” he said, gesturing toward her nudeness. It was the strangest thing, to be unbothered by it. And yet, she was. The guilt of murder, the stain of cannibalism was in her blood. Being naked in front of another seemed little and less of consequence in comparison. “Would you like some clothes?”
“What purpose would it serve you?” she asked.
“It need not have purpose aside from seeing you dressed,” he replied with some heat. He stood quickly and whistled high. From the east a pair of palfreys trotted over, the one on the right burdened with bags and sacks aplenty. From one of the saddlebags, the boy drew out a pair of breeches and a linen tunic, as well as a band to tie her long, sable curls back. He handed them over without a word.
“Thank you,” she mumbled, quickly clothing herself. The breeches were loose, the tunic a little overlong, but they fit well enough.
“There was some trouble in the city last night,” the boy called out, seemingly offhand. She froze then, her mind racing. She forced herself to turn back and look at him in confusion, cursing as he looked at her knowingly.
“I do not know how you did it,” he said, “nor do I judge. You can see the truth of me in the light of the sun, yes? I am no more human now than you.”
“Why do you say it that way?” she asked. “You still look human to me, as do I.”
“Men do not eat one another,” he said simply. “And yet, we do.”
“It was not me,” she pleaded with him. “The moon—I do not understand it. I was changed under its light, no more myself but a beast. I could not control it.”
“Nor could I, when I was first made,” he said. He seemed to lose himself then, as if beseeching a memory long lost. She remained silent as she stood, waiting for whatever was to come next. “I said I do not know how you did what you did, and I do not know what you are. But I do know what it is to fear yourself. It took many years for me to learn to control my thirst, my hunger, but I did so alone. If you wish it, I would see that you are not so during these harsh years.”
She stood in silence, stunned by the offer. This was a boy she did not know, who knew her even less, and yet he gave her clothes of his own and offered companionship while she suffered. If she could see the future, know what was to come from this offer, she would have turned the opposite direction and run as far and fast as she could. But she could not have known, and so she did what she could at the time.
She took his offered hand, marveling at the frigid skin, so very cold it was like ice.
“Ah!” he said suddenly as they mounted the horses. “My manners are lost somehow. My name is Caius.”
She smiled hesitantly at him, still unsettled by his gleaming skin. “Isabella. My name is Isabella.”