Chapter Twenty-Eight
The witch’s words froze him to the bone.
All the memories that eluded him, slipping through his mind like oil through water, solidified into one macabre picture.
Flayed and broken bodies, stretched out on tanning frames, backs splayed open.
He’d seen such horrors before, a long, long time ago, but it hadn’t been wolves subjected to such evil. It had been people.
Reaching under his sleeping pallet, he withdrew the circular amulet he found in the ashes of the fire, the one etched with a crude visage of himself. He shuddered as he swiped a claw over its stone face, now remembering how very, very hard he’d worked to perfect the art of forgetting. For a time, he had succeeded as only one with thousands of years to spare can do.
He didn’t want to believe that the amulet’s progenitors could be involved. But truthfully, there wasn’t a historic record of the village that had once resided in this corner of the forest. That had once worshipped him.
There was nothing of them left behind for neophytes to copy in the modern age, and it was a mercy to the world.
The abject suffering they had caused...
Hot tears rolled down his bony cheeks. He hastily swiped them away before Astrid could see.
Somehow, they’d returned. He didn’t want to think about the sheer amount of power they must have amassed through sacrifice to accomplish the feat.
“Gudarīks?” The witch trembled with uncertainty, fear even.
His silence must have been unsettling.
When he handed her the stone disc, her eyes widened. “How old is this?”
“Two thousand or so years. I found it last night at the campsite. They must have carved up the wolves after I left.”
“So, you know who’s responsible.”
“I do now. Although I couldn’t even begin to tell you how it’s possible.”
She placed a cool hand upon his heated skin. “Tell me everything you do know.”
For most of his life—twelve thousand years, by his estimation—he lived alongside humans, but never with them, roaming from group to group. Watching. Learning. The way they crafted and used tools fascinated him; their sense of community and use of language did, too. He spent thousands of years doing this, watching this species’ evolution unfold without meddling in their day-to-day affairs.
But then curiosity no longer sustained him; a slow, crushing monotony and loneliness seeped in. He wanted, no, needed more.
And he meddled.
There was a human village, smaller than the neighboring ones and of fewer means, which made it an easy target for raids.
It had been so long ago, he forgot what exactly the inciting incident was that spurred him into action, that demanded he intercede on their behalf, but he adopted the little village and its people as his own, protecting them from invaders. Chasing off some, devouring others. It became something he did every day, year after year, receiving food and gifts as tokens of gratitude. A routine that had become as natural as breathing as generations of these villagers lived and died.
One hundred, two hundred, then three hundred years ticked by.
The change into something more was so gradual he hadn’t noticed it, but what were once presented as gifts became offerings, and what was once a display of gratitude became worship.
Gudarīks wasn’t born a god, but these ancient humans made him into one.
With time, the village grew and prospered, and its people forged themselves into a force to be reckoned with, apart from their antlered protector. But oral tradition was strong, so they never forgot their humble beginnings, or what it felt like to be at the mercy of others.
The raided became the raiders, bringing their enemies to heel. An ebb and flow of power that seemed to be the way of their species. The weak became the strong. And vice versa.
“Around that time, I began noticing that their offerings were fewer and far between. They no longer needed me, so I distanced myself. I don’t recall being bitter about it, but no doubt it stung after the centuries I’d spent watching over them. You’d think I’d remember that better, but time dulls memories and old hurts.”
Astrid crossed her arms over her propped knees, brow furrowed. “But you saved them, protected generations of their families. Without you, they would’ve been wiped out. How could they so easily forget that?”
“I wanted to give them a fighting chance, nothing more. They wrought their strength and prosperity with their own hands.”
It wasn’t a cold break. He worried and paced about the forest like an anxious mother hen, trying to give them space. Yet every few weeks, he’d return to observe them from the shadows of the night, just to make sure they were okay. Even though the humans had grown to become plenty capable, it eased his conscience.
The more he stayed away, the less they spoke of him, the less they wondered where he had gone. He visited less and less. It could be months before he crossed their paths again.
“But one night I heard screaming. It was such a horrendous, agonized sound my blood iced over. I ran to the village, certain it was under attack, tearing myself apart for being absent when my people needed me...” He fell silent. He’d put so much effort into forgetting all this for his sanity’s sake.
“They weren’t the victims, were they?”
He shook his head.
“What was done to the wolves, that is what they did to the families of their enemies. Young, old, and everything in between. No one was spared. People I knew—people I loved since they were children, had held as babies, whispered blessings of good health to—danced to screams, showered themselves in blood, and howled into the night sky. Extolling their dominance, their conquest, invoking my name as if I’d ever condone such cruelty. That was the first time I’d ever seen such unfettered evil, and I wish I could say it had been the last. My people had not only done that, they also celebrated the butchery . ”
Living sacrifices. Torture. The fortunate died quickly from shock and rapid blood loss, but those with stronger constitutions suffered unspeakably.
“I should’ve put an end to it at that very moment. But I froze, unable to believe what I saw.” He never made that mistake again, the lesson learned in the hardest way possible. Evil needed to be snuffed out swiftly and without mercy. “If I hadn’t guarded these people for centuries—hadn’t known their foreparents, hadn’t watched them grow up, fall in love, start families of their own, and fight for survival—I don’t think I would’ve struggled. But since I loved them, I waited until the next morning to see if they’d sober, realize what they’d done, and attempt atonement. I hoped they’d been put under some sort of spell, a temporary madness, but they laughed and joked and reminisced as if it had been the greatest revelry of their lives and not an unspeakable, unforgivable evil.”
He knew then there was no saving them, that no amount of love would allow him to ignore what happened. What would continue to happen. Rabid creatures, no matter how beloved, had to be put down.
In protecting them from others, he failed to foresee that he might need to protect them from themselves.
“What did you do?”
He stared at his hands, the memory of blood dripping from them, glinting firelight as the village burned to the ground around him. A fire he set to erase all trace.
“Wisdom says children shouldn’t be allowed to grow up to avenge their parents, but I couldn’t do it. I found a troupe of traveling fae willing to adopt them. It didn’t take much convincing. Fae are always looking to adopt human children. They altered their memories and took them far away from der Schwarzwald.”
“And the rest?”
The question was asked gently, with a cool palm pressed to his arm. She knew the answer. How could she not, knowing who and what he was? But she had a reason for asking, for prompting him to say it out loud. Maybe she believed in the catharsis of confession like some humans did. They seemed to find value in such things.
Eradicating evil shouldn’t have felt like an act of betrayal, a stain on the soul, but guilt and grief knifed through his chest, giving his heart no quarter.
“I devoured them, every last one.”