Her Wolf King

{rememmoration}

THE MEMORY

Everett paced the forest floor in front of his house and felt lonelier than he ever had in the past half-century. Twigs crunched beneath his paws, the smell of the crisp leaves reaching him through his more sensitive sense of smell as an animal. The forest was enchanted to include three seasons: autumn, spring, summer, but not winter. A parting gift from his former wife, who knew that winter was his favourite season...even as a wolf.

But he was alone now. No wife. Not even a bitter enemy.

How was it that being alone all these years had never had such a mark on him as it did now when she was gone? How could it be that he had so easily fallen into the habit of her company--the wit of her banter, the gentle teasing, the keen inquisitiveness that shone in her eyes? It was impossible to think now, that he had spent a day with her, that he could ever go back to his life before. Monotonous. Bland. Empty, endless days of the past stretched out like a yawning abyss, and they threatened to swallow him whole if he did not get her back.

This girl was only a girl. Only human. Surely it was better that she left. Surely it was better that she ran away from him instead of binding her life to his. She would go and marry a nice man, a baker or a farmer, and lead an ordinary existence. There was no need for her to suffer with him, to wallow in the broken mess that he had made of himself.

He had no one to blame but himself, after all, for who he was now.

Everett recalled the night it had happened. The night his body, as Marya had put it, had come to match his soul, his heart.

He had returned from a hunting trip, crawled into bed next to his sound-asleep wife, and when he had woken, it was to a wolf's head staring back at him in the mirror. Thinking himself attacked, he'd struck the mirror and found that only glass shattered, cracks splintering out from his fist.

A true irony. Marya had a devilish sense of humour, he would admit. The night before, he had killed a wolf. He'd thought that was mounted on the wall, yet it made no sense. He reached up to touch his face; it was prickly with shaggy fur, his sense of vision keener than it ought to have been, letting him see in the dark the monster he had become...

Claws had poked through his fingertips, a painful sensation that left the sheets shredded and gouged scars into the walls and bedposts when he righted himself. He'd let out a cry, meaning to talk, but it had been nothing more than a great and terrible howl, blood-chilling. His body and torso were still mostly that of a man, but his head, his hands, his feet... all of them bore animalistic features.

A growl escaped his throat, echoing through the small hut that he shared with his wife, Marya. At that time, he'd thought her nothing more than a widow, whose husband had been lost to a tragic farming accident.

Now? Well, now, he had other suspicions about his wife's origins.

Her name was a strangled cry in her throat. He called, and she stepped into the bedroom like the answer to a prayer or the beginning of a curse.

"Are you enjoying the fruits of your actions, dear husband?" she said. "You do, after all, have the soul of a wolf. Cold. Unfeeling. Heartless."

Everett lunged at her. She sideswiped him with a blow of magic that was like the strongest wind or the heaviest wave, knocking him to the ground.

"I'm afraid, dear husband, that you chose the wrong wife," Marya said, her voice like the calm before a storm, the deadly silence in the forest before the hunter closed in on its prey. "You wished for one who would be soft, obedient, pliant to your wishes, no?"

Even now, in the faint rays of done that bled through the window, her face was changing. She had been pretty before, brown-haired and dark-eyed, slim, with a pleasant smile. Now, she was something else, all her features sharpened into deadly beauty: her hair like curtains of silk, her eyes hooded, darkening, her mouth cherry-red, her skin alabaster. She was not the woman he might have loved once. She was a witch.