Oath of Steel

7 |Wherewolf gone Wrong|

The rules were simple, too simply for Rosalynde's taste, that's probably why an unsettling feeling of dread had started climbing on her back. All she had to do was win once against him, just once, at a game of wherewolf.

Five tries, and all she had to do was win once and rub the perpetual smile he had with her from his face.

"I believe you know the rules of Wherewolf right?" Rosalynde nodded, noticing the other members of the poker games coming back to their seats, the break slowly coming to its end.

"For those who don't know, Wherewolf is a child's play that originated in the Detrian Republic, the game rules are fairly easy too," Grey was quick in explaining the few that still didn't know how to play.

The origins that led to the creation of the game still hadn't been confirmed, the locals had always told the same thing, the same little fable to every outsider that even to this very day passed though the village.

Over fifty years ago a wolf came into a village that had been strategically built between the ocean and the forest, first devouring the cattle, then passing on to the children of the village. After discovering the remains of the children that had been torn apart, the village mayor decided to start a hunt to find the wolf and kill him for revenge.

But he was even quick in discovering that the wolf had not come from the woods, but from the village within. It'd been one of them that at night crept from the windows and into the rooms where the children slept tight, sweeping them from their beds in a frightening howl, and leaving what was left of them on the threshold of their family home - leaving them there so that the family could mourn.

Chaos broke out, nights turning into days as the village was filled with burning torches at all hours of the day.

But that didn't stop the wolf from claiming new lives, all it did was make him more restless, more brazen, more thirsty for the young lives of the innocent children dozing off to sleep into the night.

In the end, a solution to corner the assailant was found. Each night the people would have burned on a stake one of their own.

If the wolf would have continued killing, then the village had chosen the wrong man. If the killings would have stopped, then justice had, at long last, been administered.

It worked, and after a month of hunting within the village walls, the wolf's identity came to life.

It had been the mayor's wife all along, it'd been her that with her claws had torn the hearts of the youth before leaving what remained of the children in front of their family homes.

But she wasn't the last death that the village had to take into account, for even her children had been marked as sons of wolves and deemed too dangerous to keep around.

"Everyone will receive a card that will tell you what you're going to play. Because we're in nine, there will be one wolf only, the rest will play the role of a normal villager," Grey said, the dealer behind him getting out an unpacked set of werewolf cards.

"The rules are simple: don't cheat, don't say what you are, don't bribe our dear narrator here to give you the role of the wolf." He gestured to the dealer who by now had mixed the cards, waiting only for Grey to give her the approval to start dealing the cards.

Rosalynde first shifted her legs, then overlapped them, clamming her hands together as her card was dealt backwards.

"We'll turn our cards together once everyone has theirs under the palm of the hand," Grey said.

Once everyone had their cards under their hand, Rosalynde took a peek at her card.

She was the wolf, and the last that she would have killed would have been without a doubt, Hector Grey for sure.