Necromancer: Kingdom Building with My Legion of Undead Knights-Chapter 25: Wild Wolf

Was this how dangerous the woods was?

A sound so soon? They hadn’t even executed their plan and here they were were, being interrupted by some noise.

The growl came from behind them.

Not from the northeastern approach they had planned earlier, not from the direction they had planned to draw the Bogoart in from either.

But behind them.

Back the way they had come, somewhere in the trees they had already walked through.

Darion turned his horse around slowly.

The knights had already done the same, the column reorganising itself with urgency.

Thier weapons came up. The archers had arrows on strings without being told. Nobody spoke.

Darion looked at the tree line behind them and then, briefly, at the forest around them in general.

They were deep enough in now that the town was completely gone, no sound of it, no sight of it, just trees in every direction.

He thought about the road Ralf and Nigel had used to bring him to Percvale, the proper road, the one that ran outside the forest entirely, connecting the barony to the wider imperial network of routes.

That road existed and people used it. Which meant the forest wasn’t the only way in or out of Percvale. Because if it was then they were cooked.

The footsteps were getting closer now and it was heavy, deliberate and moving through undergrowth without any attempt at quiet. Whatever it was, it wasn’t hiding.

The knights were frightened. He could see it without having to look directly at any of them, it was evident in the way they held their weapons, the slight forward lean of men bracing for impact, the faces that had been reasonably composed ten minutes ago now doing something considerably less composed.

They had all been in these woods before and they all knew this was a sign of death.

"Improvise," Darion said, keeping his voice level. He raised one finger. "Stay in formation. Whatever comes out of those trees, we face it together. Nobody breaks off alone."

The footsteps slowed.

Every eye in the group was fixed on the same point, a gap between two large oaks about thirty feet back along the path, where the undergrowth was thickest and the shadow deepest. The growl had faded but the footsteps were still there, slower now and more careful.

Then it stopped.

A long second of nothing.

Then the creature stepped into the light.

It was a wolf. But calling it that the way you’d call a normal wolf a wolf felt like a significant understatement.

This one was enormous. Its shoulders were level with the middle of a grown man’s chest. The fur was dark, not quite black, more the colour of deep shadow in the forest, with lighter streaks running along the flanks that caught the filtered light and made the animal seem to shift slightly even when it was standing still.

The head was broad, the jaw heavy, and the eyes were a pale amber-yellow that caught the light differently from the rest of it, almost reflective. One ear had an old scar through it, healed long ago into a notch. The paws left visible impressions in the soft ground where it stood.

It looked at them.

The relief that moved through the group was almost audible, a collective exhale, shoulders dropping, grips on weapons loosening by about half.

Not a Bogoart. Just a wolf. A very large wolf, yes, but a wolf nonetheless, which was a creature with a known set of behaviours and a known set of weaknesses, neither of which included the ability to smell you from three hundred feet away and ambush you from behind a tree.

"Finally, something we can actually kill," someone behind Darion muttered.

"Good eating on something that size," another voice added.

The wolf hadn’t moved. It stood at the edge of the path and looked at the group with the amber eyes, its tail low but not tucked, ears forward rather than flat.

It was not aggressive and it was not retreating either. Just there, standing and staring at them, unhurried.

Darion stared at it.

There was something happening that he didn’t have immediate words for. Not fear, he had felt fear yesterday when the Bogoart had come through the trees and that had been a very specific and physical sensation.

This was different. This was a pull, almost. Like the animal was familiar in a way that made no sense given that he had never seen it before in his life.

An arrow creaked, someone drawing back.

"Wait." He said it quietly, but firmly enough that it was audible. The drawing sound stopped.

He didn’t look back at whoever had the arrow. He kept his eyes on the wolf.

"M’lord," Garren said carefully, from just behind his left shoulder. "It’s meat. Good meat, that size."

"I said wait."

Darion dismounted slowly, keeping his movements unhurried. The horse shifted under him as he swung down, ears back, clearly less comfortable with the proximity than Darion was. He handed the reins to the nearest knight without looking and took a few steps forward, away from the group.

"M’lord—" Garren started again.

Darion raised his free hand behind him, palm out. The universal signal for stop talking.

He took another step toward the wolf.

It watched him. The amber eyes tracked his movement without the animal itself moving, just the eyes and the slight adjustment of the ears, rotating forward to follow him.

The tail lifted slightly from where it had been hanging low.

Darion crouched down, which put him roughly at eye level with the animal, and extended his right hand forward. His palm up, fingers loosely open. The way you approached something you wanted to know rather than something you wanted to kill.

Behind him he could feel the collective tension of a hundred and twenty-one knights watching their Baron crouch in front of a wolf the size of a pony with his hand out.

The wolf lowered its head slightly, nostrils sniffing. Then it began moving, not directly toward him but in a wide, slow movement, circling, keeping distance while it worked through whatever information its nose was providing.

It moved without urgency, each step placed deliberately, the heavy paws quiet on the ground despite the animal’s size.

The circle tightened on each pass.

On the third pass it slowed, and on the fourth it stopped, directly in front of him, close enough that Darion could see the individual hairs of its muzzle and the slight movement of its chest with each breath.

It looked at his outstretched hand.

Then it stepped forward and pressed its nose into his palm.

Darion let it smell him. He didn’t move, he didn’t speak either, he just stayed crouched with his hand out while the wolf worked its way from his palm to his wrist to the back of his hand.

Then it lifted its head and looked at him directly, and something in the set of its face shifted: the ears came fully forward, the tail moved in a slow single sweep.

He reached up and put his hand on the side of its neck.

The wolf leaned into it.

He stayed there for a long moment, running his hand through the thick fur along the neck and shoulder, and the animal stood completely still and let him, eyes half closed, occasionally turning its head to sniff at his sleeve or his hair with a thoroughness that suggested it was building a very complete picture of who he was.

Then the system screen appeared in front of his eyes.

[Loyalty: 70]

Darion stared at it for a second. Then he stood up slowly, one hand still resting briefly on the wolf’s broad head before he stepped back.

He turned to face the knights, who were looking at him with a range of expressions that covered most of the available options between confusion and complete bewilderment.

They were probably like:

’What DA FUCK!’

Garren had sheathed his sword at some point during the last few minutes without apparently deciding to.

Darion almost smiled.

"Time to revise the plan," he said.