It was the darkest night ever. Spring and Summer nights tend to be darker than Winter nights. It's shut, as if velvet curtains are drawn across the horizon and the sky feels lowered down to the earth like a dense ceiling of stars and moons. I can smell darker things in Spring and Summer months. It's full of biting tropical insects and reptiles full of venom. The flowers are poisonous at night here in the valleys and the nocturnal blooms spit acid if you try and touch them. The crocodiles are often out in the warm months too and that means keeping young indoors away from going out. It's dangerous and bitter smelling with fermented fruits and alcoholic puddles, the nasty pong of rapeseed fields that are bad for my nose. Vultures come then to feed off the rotten corpses of the dead. There are leftovers of what we've hunted.
This Spring is darker, because I'm followed by hunters. They've tracked the wolf to my house, and can't find her. They've only encountered me. They think I'm keeping the wolf indoors for safety as they view me as an animal rights activist protecting the rights of a wild animal over their cattle, pigs, sheep and little hens. I know the mean hunters will be laying traps. So I can't let my boys and girls play outside as free as I want them to.
My hair is black with Moroccon elemental conditioner and it makes my yellow eyes turn sparkling gold. I've covered my hair in dark butter and tomorrow I shall be with my new mate, Lord Walden Soren, the handsome one with fiery eyes and red hair.
My two sons Jarl, 12, and Viktor, 9, are adventurous on their bikes. My daughters Sonja, 10, and Tilde, 7, like running through the meadows and playing in the grass. They are creative children. The boys built three dens and two tree houses. My daughters set up a campsite and expanded it into a shop, where they sell toys and sweets to human friends. And only one, my eldest child, Jarl, is a wolf during the full moon times because the others have not matured to reach that stage. Being a werewolf in our tribe comes with puberty. I don't want my wolf children getting caught and killed by the hunters.
I'm devastated to hear that one of my children's friends is the son of one of those evil hunters. That killer butchered innocent regular wolves over the years. He wants to clear the land of wild animals. He thinks they're all petes. He finds hatred wherever he goes. I hate that man.
My beloved doesn't turn up.I'm crying tears. Spring is so dark.
As my children sleep, dreaming of their dead father again perhaps, I weep for the love I've been denied.
Then by morning, my lover, Walden Soren, appears at the door covered in mud and blood. I let him inside and give him soup. Instead he wants whiskey. I don't have this.
"I killed that hunter," he told me. "I killed all of the hunters."
He explained to me that while he turned into a wolf, he slaughtered all three of the hunters one by one. He picked them. He stalked them in the forest.
"Now the world is going to come after us," I reply in sadness.
"The world isn't going to come after us," he replied. "Humans will go after wild animals."
"I hate humans," I said. I'm afraid of humans.
He looked at me. "Humans are not the enemy."
"But you killed them tonight."
"No, I killed the hunters."
"The hunters are humans."
"Yes but the enemy isn't humans."
I don't understand. We're argueing now.
"The enemy is ourselves," he told me.
It's a miserable conversation. I listen to him try and teach me to understand how us werewolves have been behaving for the last few hundred thousand years. Most of it is appalling. He finishes the history lesson and I'm suddenly ashamed to be a werewolf after that.
"You need to read the books in my castle," he says.
We visited his castle that weekend and I found the books in his library. I can't understand the old writing. He does. He translates it. I don't feel ashamed to be a werewolf now. I feel disgusted that werewolves have been so brutal, evil and cruel in the past. Werewolves have slaughtered villages of humans and given large populations the plague. Werewolves invented warfare, and set fire to whole communities, deliberately starving people, drowing them, torturing them, eating them and then sacrificing them. Humans were butchered to death on pyramids for the so-called worship of the sun. Werewolf nobles believed that the sun healed and wanted at extension of sunlight to prevent painful transformations. Also to stop the wolf god swallowing the sun, they had human sacrifices. They killed innocent healthy young humans at alter sites everywhere, from Stonehenge to the Aztec pyramids.
"Be proud to be werewolf," he goes on during dinner of steak and blood wine. "We're also humans but a stronger form with the descent from wolves. Each human contains canine DNA and it's more dominant in werewolves."
"Why do we change into wolves?" I asked.
"Because of a prehistoric curse." Then he smiled "I meant, mutations to be exact."
There were ancient werewolves who tampered with nature. The mutated forms switch from wolf to human, wolf to human, every so often. Humans can produce children with werewolves. But werewolves can't mate with canines species.
"There is a type of wolf that tranforms into a human but those are really mutated humans."
The subject got darker than that. My lord and lover is a former airforce pilot and a scientist. He knows everything but he's just a man of 40 years of age. He's got two beautiful teenage daughters who I've yet to meet. I could tell you of our wedding but that is another story. I wanted to share this with you. I'm Wilone Blackwolf and I'm 35 years old.
((The Fenrir's Daughters fiction stories belong to author Rayne))
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2016 Rayne Herbert.
