Hawking Weres

Hawking Weres

Eruíss touched down on loose sands. Sand sprayed up from her boots as she slid down the steep slope of the dune. Experience, training, and instincts honed to a razor’s edge warned her of incoming danger before it had even been sent her way. Dancing deftly to the right, she dodged a knife thrown her way and dropped into a roll. A crossbow bolt whistled over her. As she came back to her feet, her ears caught the sounds of quaking hands reloading and rearming the weapon.

Leaping to the left, she dodged another bolt, half-bounding, half-leaping down the sand dune. Another bolt came her way, which she twisted past, advancing on her quarry, still, even as the shrouded figure attempted to reload and retreat deeper into the valley between dunes.

The shrouded figure fired a last, desperate shot a moment before Eruíss caught up to them. Eruíss pivoted. She was too close to dodge it, only to mitigate its damage. The bolt pierced her right shoulder. Adrenaline and nerves steeled by pain tolerance training would delay the wound’s bite by several minutes. This was more than she would need to finish the hunt. Training and experience kept her head clear as a cloudless sky.

Blades were drawn. Eruíss met her opponent’s with her forearm, armoured by Minotauri adamantine steel. The blade caught on a hook in the armour and she twisted her arm, disarming her opponent. Steel flashed in the sun, the scimitar spinning away. An open palm strike from her free hand thrust her opponent back. Three steps and they caught their footing in time to watch Eruíss to draw twin daggers from sheaths belted to her breastplate. They, whoever they were, had no time to react. Eruíss’ blades found their mark, plunged into the gaps in her opponent’s armour. A heel kick to the chest sent them into the sand.

Lying on the ground in a bloody heap, the wretched creature attempted to raise their second-hand half-sword. Eruíss kicked the blade away, following it up with a bone-shattering stomp to the figure’s right wrist. Sweeping her leg back, she caught the sheath-strap of her opponent’s hidden dagger on her boot spur. Eruíss whipped her leg back, tearing the dagger from the figure. Their left hand, attempting to snatch her ankle, caught only a fistful of sand.

Grabbing the figure by their breastplate, Eruíss slammed her fist into the side of their face hard enough to kill any mortal man, but daze most Mythica. When they still drew breath, she knew her enemy’s origins. While her enemy was still counting stars, Eruíss wormed her fingers into the eye holes of their helmet and tore off the faceplate, revealing the identity of the vile creature who had betrayed her, the Lodge, and the Sanctuary she and her kin were charged to protect—now to avenge.

“You!” Eruíss growled.

Recoiling, she dropped the foul thing.

It was a Kitsune! One of her brothers of the lesser trinity! Not just any, either. This was one she knew. Or…she used to know.

The deeper she looked into his face, the more she saw. The more she saw, the more it turned her stomach. There was something wrong with him. A darkness had fallen over his face, a necrosis Eruíss had only heard spoken in whispered words far from earshot of the Lodge Elders.

There were truths deep in their beings that all knew, but none spoke aloud. To give such things voice was to make the monsters real, to acknowledge the darkness and to call it by name. For People of the Voice, speaking of these Ignoble Forms brought as much terror as the very beings themselves.

Kitsune, they were a miserly sort. Shrewd merchants and traders all, they handled for the Triune Vitae all matters of commerce. To hawk wares and to hoard bright, shiny things was natural for them, for they were creatures of great desires and greater ambitions. Horizons uncrossed were an affront to their being, questions unanswered a challenge to their pride. They sought knowledge like Valkyries sought ever worthier opponents.

In its natural way, this was not unhealthy. A Kitsune’s lusts and desires, in their noble pursuit, formed a virtuous cycle. As they grew in knowledge, they grew also in wisdom. This would, in turn, become their most valuable ware to market. In fair dealing, a Kitsune would attain all that they desired. With their wealth, they would sate their greatest desire; to lift the fortunes of their kin and kinfolk among the Triune Vitae.

Jealousy and greed, these were poisons to a Kitsune. They rotted the soul and plagued them with insatiable hunger. Wealth and knowledge ceased to become means to noble ends, but selfish obsessions for personal prestige and power. Secrets and fortunes would no longer be shared with kin and kith. What was theirs was theirs, only. No one else’s. Precious personal possessions.

Such selfish, callous, and reckless desire, left to fester, would become a Kitsune’s Ravenings. Their Ravenings would consume them inside and out, polluting their soul and defiling them beyond the point of no return.

The face staring back at her only dimly resembled the Kitsune that Eruíss once called Æþihjeimrkenn. She had seen a darkness brewing in him years ago, one which had forced her hand in recent days. The signs of his Ignoble Ravenings should have been obvious, but she could not see it.

No…this lie she had told herself could no be maintained no longer.

In her misplaced loyalty, she would not see it. He was her friend. Even after he had departed the circle of Kithings, she still would have been the first to fly to his aid in his hour of need. Whatever was left of that Kitsune was all but gone. In the aftermath of his treason, barely anything of the man she once knew remained.

Though this creature wore the face of the Kitsune named Keiichi, betrayal left scars on the Triune Vitae that could not be healed. Even the hands of the Valkyrie’s great healer Sunbeam, long-absent cleansing the soot-stains of Mjölnirim, were not powerful enough to erase the marring touch of treachery. Such rot dug so deep and polluted so complete the souls of the Lesser Trinity that it could only purged from the midst of those who remained.

Looking into his face, Eruíss saw this as clear as the noonday sun beating down upon them. Veins of black and yellow and putrid green had webbed across Keiichi’s face, painting the roadmap of his treason, avarice, and envy. His eyes, bloodshot, yellow, and leaking tears stained with the taint of gangrene revealed a soul beyond hope of return. Blood from the side of his face where Eruíss had struck him ran down his cheek in thin, watery rivulets, no longer red, but a ruddy brown flecked with colours of decay. He grimaced, and she saw rotten, crooked, and cracked teeth coated in something resembling saliva, but of a colour and thickness she had seen only place before.

Looking into him, Eruíss recalled her early days, when she flew with her elders in the last Great Hunts—to purge Miðgarðr of the last remnants of the Frost Court’s vilings. Foul creatures, the lot of them, consumers of the final vestiges of polluted wastes the Old Sapiens left in the wake of their own self-destruction. Their mouths dripped with black slime, they bled rust, their sickly eyes leaked viscous tears of pollution.

Keiichi spat at her. Eruíss leapt out of the way, something warning her to let no part of this Ravening creature touch her. Then came a low chuckle.

“Fitting, isn’t it?” Keiichi mused. “That you should be the one.”

“Why?” Eruíss asked, coming enough to her senses to speak.

“You know,” Keiichi coughed, pushing himself up with his good arm.

“You betrayed us!” Eruíss exclaimed. “Why!?”

“You know why!” Keiichi barked, erupting into another fit of coughing.

Spittle flew from Keiichi’s mouth and Eruíss retreated farther back, the thick liquid beginning to smoke on the sand.

“You brought ruin to all three of our houses, for the sake of a human!?” Eruíss challenged. “You sold our secrets to a tribe of barbarian savages for her!?”

“No,” Keiichi said, grinning menacingly.

In his twisted smile, Eruíss watched The Ravenings eat away at his gums. One of his teeth broke in half, splintering into shards. Keiichi spat them away without concern.

“Then why!? Why, Keiichi!?”

“I did this for you!”

The words stopped Eruíss dead. That didn’t make sense. For her!? No! That couldn’t be! Why!?

“You what!?” Eruíss blurted out.

“I did this for you!” Keiichi shouted, another of his teeth breaking from the force of his rage.

Eruíss took another step back. Keiichi was gone. It wouldn’t be long now before his Ravenings turned him.

“Oh, but you only had eyes for that fucking bovine!” Keiichi shouted, more teeth and black liquid spraying from his mouth. “Taxái! That whore!”

Eruíss clenched her fists, rage swelling up in her. Taxái, her dear friend, the one to whom she’d given a son, he was a tender soul, even among Minotauri. Images of him flashed across her mind, his back porcupined with spears, arrows, and swords as he attempted to shield Kiaros, his young son, from the raiders rampaging across the Holyfields.

“He stole you away from me!” Keiichi shrieked, his eyes turning red.

The sickening sounds of bones crunching reached Eruíss’ ears. Dread came over her, the realisation dawning on her that this was the moment myth was to become real. Keiichi’s greed and lust had consumed him, polluted him to the core of his being.

Eruíss jumped backwards, a stroke of her wings bringing her halfway up the dune to her rear. She drew her two swords in a reverse grip, settling into a defensive stance. There was no stopping what was about to happen, no preventing the violence to come. The only thing to be done was prepare herself.

Keiichi let out a long, terrible scream, a flood of vile, black fluid pouring from his mouth. Keiichi turned over, writhing in agony as his body fully succumbed to his Ravenings. Bones snapped and cracked, some elongating, some twisting into new, horrific shapes. His armour splintered from the force of his transformation, some pieces fell away, others were subsumed into his flesh, becoming a part of him. His robes tore away, fully exposing what grotesque shapes were coming to form beneath.

Flesh rippled, boiled, and contorted around his frame rearranging. Skin stretched horrendously, turning from a deep bronze to a sickly grey, covered in sparse hair. Spines and horns burst through his skin, a foul ichor seeping up around them, before burning and searing his skin, leaving ugly, sucking burns all over.

The worst was his face. His skull became a lopsided thing, bulging with cysts and pulsing growths. A distorted snout crowded with crooked, misshapen teeth dripped saliva saturated with venom and decay. This mouth of malice dominated a face of broken proportions. One enormous eye, black, the pupil glowing red, sat, lidless, in an eyesocket framed by exposed bone. The other remained as it had been, now brown with sickness, silhouetted on the edges by creeping veins of black, the iris blood red. His hair was almost gone. Only a few strands, sickly and covered in filth, hung limply from his head like the crown of a Wrath.

As he rose from the ground and uttered a thunderous howl to the skies, Eruíss saw that he had become in form what he was in constitution: a shambling, ugly, wolfen thing. Keiichi was no longer Kitsune. He had become the horror spoken of in whispered words, the foul thing sleeping in the hearts of both trinities—a Lycan.

Standing there, blades drawn, Eruíss’ mind sought guidance from her rites of passage. She remembered the potion she was made to drink, and the vision quest that followed. Down into the darkness of Helheim, in the fighting pits of Hæla’s deepest hollows, she saw herself reflected not in light, but in the darkest desires gnawing at her heart.

Emerging from across the ring she faced her Ignoble self. A harpy, thrice or four times her size, syrinx screeching, she burst into the ring. Four monstrous wings extended, arms of scales, hands of claws black and edged like razors opened. Her torso was a contorted parody of something resembling a raven’s, half Valkyrie, half bird, one breast sagging to her navel with the weight of gluttony and excess, the other missing entirely, an open, ragged wound left in its place as if she had torn it off herself. Her belly was hollow. Strips of sickly, dried-out skin dangled from her ribcage. Only a length of spine, fused into a pillar of steel, connected a skin-clad chest to hips covered in greasy down. The legs on which she walked were distortions, something akin to an eagle’s. Her feet were partly scaled, four monstrous toes sprouting in opposition. With each step her reflection took, she raked the arena’s flagstones with talons as long as swords. A middle toe split the forefoot, raised up for a raptor’s talon as long as her torso and sharp enough to cleave her in two.

This was the shadow, the darkness in her soul revealed and reflected back to her. This was her monster to face. To become Valkyrie was to acknowledge the evil within, to wrestle with it, and to bring it into submission. Even under the datura delirium, Eruíss understood this as her task. She was not to kill the beast, but to break it and bind it to her will.

A Lycan, Eruíss reminded herself, was a beast of selfsame vanities, of equal weakness. This was a battle she had had fought before. Though a Kitsune’s shadow was a different beast than was Eruíss’ Harpy, she knew what had to be done. The strength and will to do it was with her, and she readied herself. A clear head and a focused mind were the greatest weapons she could have against this threat, for the Ignoble preyed on fear and panic. Without that, their strength and poison, against a trained warrior, would come to no effect.

“If I couldn’t have you!” the lycan roared, lashing out with one of his long, spine-covered arms.

Eruíss deflected the blow, but the strength of it sent her stumbling back, hand, wrist, and forearm stinging.

“THEN NO ONE COULD!” the lycan screamed, leaping at Eruíss.

Eruíss lunged forward, ducking under his attack, swords held at an angle behind her. She felt a tug as the blades caught flesh and cut through it. A quick pivot and a dance of steps brought her clear of his severed member and the spray of ichor to follow. Having already seen its effects on the lycan, she knew not to let it touch her.

Overcommitment sent the lycan face first into the ground, spraying sand into the air. Eruíss pivoted around to face him. The lycan whipped back into a crouched position, snarling and snapping his distorted snout as he struggled to clear sand from his lidless, oversized eye. As the lycan was hopping and scrabbling about, his other eye noticed the severed hunk of flesh lying on the sand between them. He grabbed at his groin, and then his face contorted with rage.

“YOU BITCH!” the lycan screamed, pulling his hand away from the wound.

Eruíss spat on the severed penis and kicked it and the gangrenous scrotum leaking stinking, caustic liquid away. This was his pressure point. His lust for her was the reason for everything he had done.

“You will never have me!” she shouted, lifting the point of one of her swords to him.

Staring the lycan dead in the eyes, Eruíss readied her weapons. Despite his rage, he hadn’t much fight left in him. His pride was laying in the sand, and that was a fatal blow to a lycan. He lashed out in fury, but to no effect. The lycan’s long arm swung wide. Eruíss shifted back, angling one of her swords, the flat of the other held to support. Six clawed fingers struck the edge of her blade, and she twirled right, evading another spray of ichor.

The lycan lashed out with his right arm. Eruíss ducked under the strike and took his arm off at the elbow. Dancing between his legs, she sliced open the back of one knee, sending him to the ground. Ichor sprayed from the wound and splattered over Eruíss’ left arm while she hacked at the lycan’s right heel.

Swearing profusely, Eruíss left her right sword in the lycan’s heel, left arm burning like a Purging Flame. She tore off the vambrace and gauntlet covering her left forearm, flinging the armour away as quickly as she could. Drawing a clean dagger, Eruíss placed the blade to her upper arm and cut an ugly trough of flesh from her arm, the ichor already eating into her muscle. She threw away the hunk of flesh before any more defiling ichor could drip onto her skin. Behind her, the lycan collapsed into a heap on the sands, unconscious.

Viscous ichor dripped onto the surface of the sand all around him. Too thick to be absorbed, the ichor pooled around him like droplets of mercury. Smoke and vapours rose from his wounds, cauterising them before he could bleed any more. Any part of his body unfortunate enough to be touched by his own black, malevolent blood smoked and burned.

Eruíss glanced down and saw the same caustic ichor eating away at the enchanted steel of her blades. Without a thought, she threw them away. There was no saving them and the lycan was finished. It had passed out and she had immobilised him.

Retreating to a safe distance, atop the dune she looked back on the lycan. A stinging in her shoulder rose to a full-throated shriek, bringing her attention to the crossbow bolt still lodged in her shoulder.

“Þórr’s beard!” Eruíss swore.

She pulled her left gauntlet off with her teeth, leaving the heavy leather in her mouth. A few fumbles of the straps on the right side of her breastplate, and quick work with the left, and she had it off. Drawing her last knife, she cut away her gambeson and undershirt. Flecks of ichor had contaminated the fabric. There was no salvaging them.

Her shoulder bare, Eruíss gripped the crossbow bolt in her left hand, under the fletching. She bit down on her gauntlet and pushed the arrow through her shoulder until the head burst from her back. Eruíss growled through the gauntlet in her mouth, lines of fire arcing through her body with each beat of her hearts. Arm shaking, she broke the shaft off before jamming her middle finger into the wound to push the remaining section out of her. Reaching over her shoulder, she grabbed the bloody shaft and pulled it from her back. The moment it was out, her fingers reflexively released the arrow.

The gauntlet fell from her mouth and she fell to her knees, curling over, panting and clutching her shoulder. Eruíss’ opened her eyes to flecks and drops of ichor chewing away at her tassets, skirt, and greaves.

In a flurry, she tore everything off. Ignoble ichor had defiled everything. Only the cloth she wore over her nethers was spared this defiling taint. This too, she removed, realising it was all she had left for bandages.

She tore the loincloth into two long strips and set about wrapping up her wounds. The lycan came to just as she finished tying off the bandage on her left arm. She spat out the end of the knot and spat out the saliva in her mouth. The acrid taste of her own loincloth would not be so easily dislodged from her mouth. Until she returned to last night’s oasis, it seemed she would have to endure it.

From atop the dune, safely away from the lycan, the disgust, betrayal, and fury Eruíss had clamped down for the sake of survival finally came forward. In the whirlwind of emotions, words she thought she would lob the lycan’s way as insult to injury did not come. There were no oaths foul enough for this creature; only silence and a disdainful glare.

This was, perhaps, all the more he deserved. Declawed, neutered, and left to reap the harvest of treason in abject silence. All this ruin he had wrought over a Ravening need to possess her like some kind of bound housewife, ever bowed to his desires.

“Why don’t you just kill me!?” the lycan roared, from his pitious heap.

At this, Eruíss found words worth saying.

“This is what you deserve,” she spat.

The lycan roared in pain, writhing on the ground. Each motion caught him in puddles and pools of his own ichor scattered around him. The foul liquid burned and bit at his skin, causing him to scream and cry even more pitifully. Eruíss remained unmoved by his shameful tantrum.

“If you ever loved me, then just end me!” the lycan cried out.

“I once considered you a friend,” Eruíss retorted, “Æþihjeimrkenn. Even as you fell deeper into the darkness that has consumed you, I would have come to your aid had you called for it.”

“Am I not calling, now!?” the lycan challenged.

“No,” Eruíss spat, “you wear the face of a man I once called a brother and a friend. He was someone I respected, I trusted, whose counsel I sought. But that man is dead. Keiichi is dead, and you wield the bloody stone of his murder!”

“I AM RIGHT HERE!” the lycan roared.

“I do not know who you are,” Eruíss denied, “what lays before me stirs only scorn in my heart.”

“YOU TRAITOR!” the lycan shrieked.

“Me!?” Eruíss snapped back, her rage boiling over. “I am the traitor!? No! It is you! You betrayed your kin! You betrayed your companions, your friends, your community! You killed everyone! Everyone I loved and cared for! My friends, my maþrblúð, they lay dead by your hand! I watched the men you unleashed on us rape my mother and sisters before burning them alive! The last thing the young boy I bore into this world heard were the cries of his father as he tried to shield his son from the violence you brought upon us! All of this you did because you could not possess me!? You are the traitor! This is all your doing!”

“THIS IS WHAT YOU MADE ME DO!” the lycan raged.

“What I made you do?” Eruíss scoffed. “Listen to yourself! I never loved you! I don’t even know who you are! But for what you did, I have only hate for you! To the hollow of my bones, I hate you!”

“Make it stop!” the lycan pleaded.

“NO!” shouted Eruíss. “Death is a mercy too good for a worm like you! I piss on your existence! You are hærki! May the curse of Mjölnirim follow you wherever you go!”

The lycan wailed on, his oaths strengthening with each hoarse word, but Eruíss was no longer listening. She turned away, gaze falling on the broken bolt lying bloody on the sands where it had fallen.

Something about the broken shaft and arrowhead, still wet with her blood, laying there on the sands, it called to her. She knelt down and picked the broken arrow up, cradling it in the palm of her hand like a sacred object. Eruíss did not know why, but she knew she had to keep this, to wear it like a talisman.

Pulling a lock of hair over her shoulder, Eruíss cut it for twine. She wiped her bloody fingers dry on her belly and plucked a crown feather from her scalp. Trained fingers lashed the end of the lock of hair and the crown feather to the shaft of the broken arrow. Then she split and wove the strands of hair into two thin plaits, tying the ends together with a square knot at the back of her neck. When she lowered the talisman to her chest, the arrowhead and crown feather came to rest against her sternum, in the place between her hearts.

Having taken her trophy, a symbol of deaths avenged, Eruíss unfurled her wings and took once more to the skies. Below her, she heard a long and mournful howl. It was the sound of the lycan’s fate settling upon him. She did not look back.

In the defeat and descration of the lycan, the deaths of her kin and kinfolk of all three nations had been avenged. In the lycan’s sorry state, a caravan of human traders crossing the desert would be more than able to put down the hollow beast that remained. Eruíss’ duty was complete.

With sun setting over her left shoulder, it dawned on Eruíss a dreadful thing. There was nothing left in this desert for her. Though avenged, her Lodge was in ruins, her people dead, her lands ravaged and occupied by her enemies. Her home was gone and there was nowhere for her return to.

Looking to the horizon, she came to realise she did not only have nowhere to return to. There was nowhere for her to go.