I stared in shock at the back of the wolf that had risen from the darkness.

Its fur was no longer grey or brown like before.

It was pitch black from head to tail, so black that it looked wrong, as if the night itself had been skinned and wrapped around its body.

The glowing purple markings carved into its flesh pulsed faintly, lighting up the curves of its limbs and the ridges of its spine with an eerie, unnatural glow.

It stood between me and the rest of the pack with its head lowered and its body tense, staring at them with an emotionless stillness that was somehow more terrifying than if it had snarled.

The remaining wolves seemed just as unsettled by it as I was.

They circled uneasily, their lips peeled back and their fangs bared, but none of them rushed forward right away.

Their paws shifted against the dirt, their shoulders twitching with tension, and every low growl that rumbled from their throats sounded uncertain now, because the thing standing before them was no longer one of their own.

Then one of them moved.

A wolf from the side suddenly burst into a sprint and lunged past the black wolf, aiming straight for me with its jaws wide open and its body stretched out in a blur of fur and teeth.

I barely had time to flinch before the rune-covered wolf intercepted it.

It moved so fast that my eyes almost couldn’t follow it.

One moment it had been standing still, and the next it was a black streak tearing across the road.

It slammed into the lunging wolf from the side with enough force to send both of them crashing into the dirt, and before the normal wolf could even recover the black one had already clamped its jaws around its neck.

I heard the sound before I properly understood what I was seeing.

It was a wet, ugly crunch, followed by a violent shaking motion as the black wolf whipped its head back and forth with savage force.

The wolf trapped in its jaws let out a shrill, panicked yelp and clawed wildly at the ground, but it didn’t matter.

The black wolf shook harder, its glowing markings flashing faintly across its body, and then there was a horrible snap as the other wolf’s neck gave way.

But it didn’t stop there.

The black wolf kept pulling.

Its body twisted, its jaws tightened, and with one brutal wrench it tore the wolf’s head clean off.

Blood sprayed across the dirt in a hot arc.

The severed head landed a few feet away with a dull thud, while the rest of the body collapsed in a twitching heap beside it, pouring blood from the ragged stump of its neck.

I felt that strange sensation again.

That same unnatural feeling from before.

It was as if something invisible had been ripped out of the dead wolf and pushed straight into me, a dark pulse of energy that sank into my chest and spread through my limbs like cold fire.

My body trembled.

Not from fear this time, but from the overwhelming wrongness of it.

Before I could even process what was happening, the darkness on the ground began to move again.

It slid over the dirt like liquid shadow, spreading away from my feet in a wide black wave until it reached another wolf from the pack.

The moment it touched the beast, the wolf let out a horrible cry.

It stumbled backward and began thrashing violently, rolling across the road and clawing at its own body as the void climbed over its fur like a disease.

The darkness spread up its legs, across its chest, and over its face while the wolf writhed in panic, yelping and snapping at empty air as though it could somehow bite the darkness off.

It twisted so hard that dirt and stones were thrown up around it.

Its claws dug bloody lines into the road.

Its body convulsed and jerked as if every muscle inside it was being torn apart and remade at the same time.

Then, just like before, it collapsed.

Half of its body sank into the darkness beneath it, as though the earth itself had opened and swallowed it partway down.

For a moment it lay there unmoving, half buried in that impossible void, and then a pulse of purple light began to spread from the top of its body.

The glow crawled across its blackened fur in long, intricate lines, carving symbols into it one by one.

They looked ancient and unnatural, like markings from a language no person was ever meant to read, and as they burned into the wolf’s body I could do nothing but watch in horrified silence.

Slowly, the second wolf rose to its feet.

It looked just like the first one now.

Its fur was pitch black, darker than the night around us, and those same glowing purple symbols pulsed across its body like veins of cursed light.

The two of them stood side by side in front of me, silent and still, and I felt my heart pound so hard in my chest that it almost hurt.

The remaining four wolves finally broke.

Whatever instinct had kept them snarling and circling until now vanished the moment the second black wolf stood up.

They turned all at once and bolted.

No more growling.

No more circling.

Just pure panic.

They sprinted down the road and toward the forest with their tails low and their bodies stretched to their limits, desperate to put as much distance as possible between themselves and the two monsters that had once been part of their pack.

They didn’t make it far.

The two black wolves lunged after them with speed so unnatural that it made my stomach twist.

Wolves were fast.

I knew that.

But this was something else entirely.

Their bodies blurred as they ran, crossing the distance in seconds and tearing into the fleeing pack before the normal wolves had any chance to escape.

The first black wolf caught one from behind and slammed into it hard enough to send it tumbling head over tail across the road.

Before the fallen wolf could even scramble up, the black wolf pounced onto its back and drove its jaws straight through the side of its throat.

The teeth sank deep, and when it tore backward it ripped a huge strip of flesh free along with a fountain of blood.

The wolf shrieked and kicked wildly, but the black wolf only bit down again, this time into its face, crushing its muzzle and jaw beneath the force of its bite until the struggling stopped.

The second black wolf had already reached another one.

It leapt through the air and landed directly on top of it, knocking it flat before dragging it across the dirt with its jaws locked around the wolf’s spine.

I heard vertebrae snap one after another beneath the pressure.

The wolf let out a scream that cut off halfway through when the black wolf planted one paw onto the back of its skull and ripped its body in the opposite direction, tearing the spine apart with such raw violence that the corpse practically folded in half.

The third fleeing wolf made it to the edge of the trees.

For one brief second I thought it might actually escape.

Then the first black wolf shot after it and hit it from the side so hard that both bodies crashed through a patch of brush.

Leaves and dirt exploded upward.

The wolf barely had time to cry out before the black one drove it onto its back and began tearing into its stomach.

I could hear the wet ripping even from where I stood.

The normal wolf thrashed, its legs kicking helplessly as blood soaked into the ground beneath it, but the black wolf kept tearing and tearing until the movement stopped and its insides spilled across the dirt in steaming red coils.

The last wolf turned too late.

It tried to run in another direction, but the second black wolf was already on it.

It lunged forward with terrifying speed, landed on the fleeing wolf’s back, and bit straight through the side of its neck.

Its fangs punched in so deep that I saw them emerge through the flesh on the other side.

Then, with one savage twist of its head, it tore the entire throat open.

Blood gushed down over both of them in a hot red sheet.

The dying wolf stumbled forward a few steps, choking and gurgling, before collapsing onto the road and twitching weakly.

Within moments it was over.

The road was silent again, but it was no longer the same road from before.

The dirt was soaked in blood.

Pieces of flesh and torn fur were scattered everywhere.

The smell of iron hung thick in the night air, and the bodies of the pack lay in broken heaps across the ground, some barely recognizable as wolves anymore after what had been done to them.

I stood there frozen, still clutching the broken branch, while the two black wolves slowly turned away from the slaughter and looked back at me.

Their purple markings glowed softly in the darkness.

Blood dripped from their jaws.

And as they stared at me in complete silence, I felt a cold shiver crawl all the way down my spine, because I knew with sick certainty that they were waiting for me.

I stood there frozen as the two black wolves began to move toward me.

Their paws made almost no sound against the blood-soaked dirt and after the brutality I had just witnessed I felt as though something that quiet had no right to exist.

Blood still dripped from their jaws in thin dark strands.

Their purple markings pulsed faintly beneath their fur like something alive was moving underneath their skin, and as they approached I could only stare at them with wide eyes while my fingers tightened weakly around the broken branch in my hand.

I didn’t know what they were.

I didn’t know if they were even wolves anymore.

All I knew was that they had torn apart the rest of the pack like it was nothing, and now they were walking toward me with those glowing symbols burned into their bodies while the corpses of their former packmates lay ripped to pieces behind them.

My throat felt dry.

Every part of me hurt.

My shoulder was still bleeding, my ankle still throbbed every time I shifted, and my whole body was trembling from exhaustion and pain, so when the two of them came closer I couldn’t even bring myself to properly raise the branch.

All I could do was stare at them and speak in a frightened voice that barely sounded like my own.

"G-go away..."

The words left my mouth quietly and without any strength behind them.

I had expected them to keep coming.

I had expected them to pounce.

I had expected them to finish what the other wolves had started and tear me apart beside the rest of the corpses on the road.

Instead, both wolves stopped.

They stood there for a moment, those unnatural purple markings glowing dimly in the dark while they looked at me with still, unreadable eyes, and then without so much as a growl they turned around.

The first one stepped back toward the trees.

The second followed after it a moment later.

And just like that, the two monsters disappeared into the forest, slipping between the trunks as silently as they had come until the darkness swallowed them completely and I was left alone on the road again.

For a while I didn’t move.

I just stood there staring at the spot where they had vanished, half expecting them to come rushing back out of the trees at any moment.

But they didn’t.

The forest remained still.

Only the smell of blood and the scattered corpses on the road remained to prove any of it had happened at all.

My eyes slowly drifted back to the body the wolves had been feeding on when I first arrived.

Now that the pack was gone, there was nothing blocking my view of it anymore.

I limped forward, every step still painful, and stopped a short distance away before looking down.

It was Charles.

There was no doubt about it.

His face was untouched.

That was somehow the worst part, because everything from the neck up still looked unmistakably like him.

His eyes were closed.

His hair was dirty with mud and blood, but it was still the same hair I had seen when he smiled at me, the same face that had laughed with me while we played in the garden and the forest and the same mouth that had told me he would come back tomorrow.

But everything below that face was a ruin.

His torso had been ripped open so badly that I could barely understand what I was looking at at first.

The front of his body was torn apart, his stomach and chest opened up by claws and teeth until blood, organs and shredded flesh were strewn across the road around him in a wet, horrific mess.

Part of his clothes were still clinging to him, but most of them had been torn apart and soaked so heavily in blood that they hardly looked like cloth anymore.

There were pieces of him scattered nearby.

Dark splatters of gore stained the dirt.

One of his arms was twisted at a horrible angle.

The smell was sickening.

I stood over him in silence, staring at what was left of the boy who had smiled at me and asked me to play.

At first I didn’t feel anything.

I just looked.

My face was wet with tears, my shoulder was bleeding, and my whole body hurt so badly that even breathing felt exhausting, but I simply stared at Charles’s corpse without moving.

Then, very slowly, something twisted inside me.

It started as a little breath that escaped my mouth.

A tiny, broken sound.

Then another followed it.

And then suddenly I realized I was laughing.

The sound was ugly and unsteady at first, more like a wounded girl trying to breathe through pain than anything joyful, but once it started it just kept coming.

I laughed hysterically while staring at the ruined corpse in front of me.

I laughed so hard my injured body actually hurt more from it, and tears kept slipping down my face as though my body couldn’t decide whether it wanted to cry or laugh and had simply given up trying to choose.

"You... idiot..." I muttered between breaths.

My voice came out shaky and hoarse, but the laughter was still there underneath it.

"You stupid idiot..."

I lifted my foot and kicked his corpse.

It wasn’t a strong kick.

I didn’t have the strength for that anymore, and my body hurt too much to put much force behind it, but I still struck him hard enough to make the ruined remains of his torso shift wetly against the dirt.

"You wanted me to die?" I spat, my lips trembling as I stared down at him.

"You pushed me off a cliff... and then you died to wolves anyway?"

I laughed again, more bitterly this time, and kicked him once more.

"What was all that for?"

"What was the point?"

"You hated me that much, and this is how you ended up?"

I was crying openly now.

The tears wouldn’t stop, and they mixed horribly with the laughter and the rage until I probably looked insane standing over that corpse with blood on my clothes and mud on my legs while I kicked at him and insulted him.

But I couldn’t stop.

Something about seeing him like that, dead and ruined and unable to say another cruel word to me, made all the pain and humiliation and heartbreak boil over into something ugly.

I wanted to hurt him back even if it meant kicking a corpse.

I wanted to scream at him for lying to me, for making me believe for even a few days that I had found something precious, only to reveal that every smile and every game had just been leading up to him throwing me off a cliff.

I kicked him again.

Then again.

Eventually my leg hurt too much to keep doing it.

My breathing had become ragged, and the laughter had faded into uneven little gasps while I stood over him trembling.

The anger was still there, but it was quieter now, drained out of me by pain and exhaustion. 𝐟𝕣𝗲𝕖𝕨𝗲𝐛𝗻𝗼𝐯𝗲𝚕.𝗰𝚘𝐦

I stared at his corpse one last time, then wiped my wet face with the back of my hand and turned away.

There was nothing left for me there.

So I started walking down the road.

I didn’t know where it led.

I didn’t know how far away the city was or whether I would find help before my body finally gave out.

All I knew was that I needed to keep moving.

The road stretched on through the dark, and I dragged myself along it one limping step at a time while my branch scraped against the dirt and my shoulder continued to bleed down my side.

Time became difficult to measure after that.

The pain made everything feel slow and blurred.

Sometimes I thought I heard things in the forest beside me, rustling branches or distant animal cries, and every time it happened my body would tense in fear that the wolves had come back, but nothing emerged from the darkness.

The road remained empty.

I just kept walking.

Or rather, I kept forcing my body forward long after it had already begun to give up.

Eventually I heard wheels.

At first the sound was faint enough that I thought I was imagining it.

Then it grew louder, accompanied by the clop of horses and the rattle of wood over dirt, and I turned my head just enough to see a merchant wagon approaching from behind me.

The horses slowed the moment the driver noticed me.

A man quickly climbed down from the front of the wagon and stared at me in alarm, his eyes darting over my twisted ankle, bloodied shoulder and filthy clothes before looking past me at the road behind.

"Gods..." he muttered.

"Were you caught in the attack down the road?"

I looked at him, but I didn’t answer.

I don’t think I could have even if I wanted to.

My body had finally reached its limit.

The moment the last of the tension left me, my legs gave out completely.

I pitched forward, and if the merchant hadn’t caught me I would have collapsed face-first into the dirt.

I was still conscious.

I could still hear him speaking in a panicked voice.

I could still feel the roughness of his clothes and the way my body sagged uselessly against him.

But I couldn’t make myself stand anymore.

My body was simply done.

The merchant carefully lifted me and brought me onto the wagon.

I remember being laid down against sacks and crates while the wagon started moving again.

I remember the jolting motion of the wheels making my injuries throb.

I remember the merchant glancing back at me over and over with a nervous expression, as if he couldn’t decide whether he was more frightened by my condition or by whatever he had found further down the road.

The journey back to the NightBane capital passed in fragments after that.

Sometimes I drifted in and out of awareness.

Sometimes I stared blankly at the dark sky above me while the wagon rolled onward and tried not to think about anything at all.

I don’t know how much time passed before the city gates finally came into view.

But the moment the wagon approached the capital and the NightBane knights saw me lying in the back, everything around me suddenly became loud.

Voices started shouting.

Boots struck the ground.

The wagon came to a sharp stop, and then several knights were at its side at once, their expressions changing the instant they recognized me.

I heard one of them say my name in disbelief.

Another swore under his breath when he saw the state I was in.

The merchant immediately began explaining himself, speaking quickly and nervously about how he had found me injured on the road after what looked like some kind of attack further down, but I barely listened because one of the knights had already climbed into the wagon and was lifting me into his arms as carefully as he could.

Even through the haze of pain and exhaustion, I could feel how gentle he was being.

He held me like I was something fragile.

Something that absolutely should not have been found half-dead on the side of a road.

As he carried me away, I saw more knights surround the merchant and begin questioning him on the spot.

Others were already shouting orders, likely sending people down the road to investigate whatever had happened out there.

The city lights blurred in my vision.

The voices around me became muffled and distant.

I saw the capital walls above me.

I saw the dark sky beyond them.

And then, finally, my body gave in completely and the world went black.