The wolf came out of the bushes and the wind came with it, a low push of air that flattened Nathan’s blood-stiff tunic against his chest and dragged the leaves off the ground in a slow spiral around the thing’s paws.
It stood in the open now, head low and shoulders rolling, the pale green light in its eyes never once leaving him.
He didn’t move, because he didn’t have anything left to move with.
[Wind Wolf]
[Apprentice Realm]
The tag hung there beside its skull, patient and unhelpful, and Nathan’s eyes flicked to it for half a second and stuck.
’Apprentice. Same as me.’
Then it lunged.
It crossed the clearing in one stride and a half, faster than anything Nathan had ever seen a living creature do, and he threw himself sideways without any technique at all.
He landed hard on his shoulder in the leaves.
Something raked across his back, high, just under the shoulder blade, and the pain didn’t arrive for a full second before it arrived all at once, white and sharp.
He rolled, scrambled, got a knee under himself just as the wolf finished turning.
It planted one oversized paw, pivoted its whole body around it, and came back at him from a completely different angle before he’d even finished standing.
’Move.’
He got his feet under him and dove again, and this time the claws took him along the ribs, three lines of white heat that opened his side straight through the cloth.
Nathan hit the ground hard, tasted dirt, and kept moving on pure animal panic until his back slammed into the trunk of the wide old tree.
He got a hand against the bark and pushed himself upright, feeling the wetness along his side and his back while he breathed like he’d run the temple stairs twice.
Nine paces away the wolf turned to face him again and lowered its head.
’I can’t outrun it.’
That was the first honest thought he’d had since the thing came out of the bushes, and it arrived with a strange, cold clarity.
He couldn’t outrun it, he couldn’t out-turn it, and it had been playing with him for twenty seconds.
He made himself look at it properly, and that was when he saw it.
The paws were too big, not simply large for a wolf, but oversized and splayed on the ends of legs still too thin to fill them. Its ribs showed under the coat.
When it had planted and pivoted, the back end had swung a little wider than it meant to and corrected with a small, awkward stumble that a full-grown animal would never have made.
Its shoulders came up only to Nathan’s chest when they should have reached his throat.
’It’s young. It’s not even finished growing.’
Nathan pressed his back against the bark and felt something that was not quite relief.
He had seen a Wind Wolf pelt exactly once in his life, hanging in the front window of a shop in the middle district that he’d had no business standing outside of.
A full one, longer than the shop’s counter, and the merchant had wanted more coin for it than his mother earned in two years.
If a grown one had come out of those bushes he would already be inside it.
’One star. Maybe two. And it’s still going to kill me.’
Because Apprentice Realm or not, newborn or not, the thing in front of him was a beast that had been born knowing how to hunt, and Nathan Avenworth had a Strength of two and a Stamina of three and had never been in a real fight in his life.
The wolf’s head dropped another inch. Wind curled off its flanks.
’I need a weapon.’
Nathan’s hand was already flat against the ground beside his hip, scrabbling through wet leaves until his fingers closed on something hard and cold and round, a stone, river-smooth, the size of a fist, half buried in the leaf mould. He dragged it out.
’Death does not care what shape it takes.’
"Blade of Death."
Something answered, not from the screen, but from inside him.
Nathan felt it start under his ribs and pull outward, a slow cold draw down the length of his arm toward his hand, and it did not feel like power arriving. It felt like something leaving.
His vision grayed at the corners. His knees went loose and he had to lock them.
The cut across his back stopped hurting, which was somehow far worse than the pain, and a deep sick chill spread up through his elbow and into his shoulder while the stone in his fist grew cold enough to ache.
It kept pulling.
’That’s me. It’s taking it out of me.’
You’d die the first time you tried to use what you were given.
*Not yet,* Nathan thought through clenched teeth. *You don’t.*
The stone in his hand had not changed.
It was still a river rock, grey and dull and stupid.
But the air around it had gone wrong, bending slightly the way it does over a fire, except everything he could see through it looked older.
The wolf charged.
Nathan threw. He had no arm for it, Strength of two, a bad shoulder, and a rock thrown by a sixteen-year-old who’d never been much good at throwing anything.
It went low and slow and should have skipped off that thick hide into the dirt.
It struck the wolf high on the left shoulder.
CRACK.
The shoulder died.
It happened in a heartbeat and Nathan’s brain refused to keep up with it.
The fur at the point of impact went grey. Then the grey ran outward in every direction like water finding cracks, and the hide under it wrinkled, split, and pulled back from itself and it’s lesh sank.
Muscle shrank in on the bone with a dry crackling sound, greying and blackening, the whole shoulder collapsing inward in the space of two seconds.
A patch the size of a dinner plate rotted straight down to the bone while the animal was still running.
The wolf’s front leg folded.
It went down on its face and plowed a furrow through the leaves, and the sound that came out of it was nothing like a howl, high and ragged and terrified, an animal noise about a thing animals don’t have a category for.
Its hide had turned a full-grown boar’s tusks in the past. It had never had to be thick against this.
It thrashed upright, biting at its own shoulder and snapping at the rot like it could pull the decay out with its teeth, jaws coming away with grey flakes of what had been meat that morning.
Nathan stood against the tree with his empty hand still open.
’It worked. It actually worked.c
The wolf stopped thrashing.
It turned its head and looked at him, and there was nothing in its eyes now.
The pale green light had gone flat. It came at him with three legs and a dead shoulder and every bit of speed it had left.
Nathan dove, slower now.
The skill had taken something out of him and hadn’t given it back, and his legs went half a beat behind his intention. He got clear of the jaws.
He didn’t get clear of the shoulder.
Two hundred pounds of panicked animal caught him across the hip and threw him.
Nathan’s feet left the ground entirely.
He came down flat on his back in the leaves with all the air punched out of his lungs, and before he could roll, before he could even understand which way was up, the weight came down on top of him.
A paw landed on his chest and pinned him flat. He was looking straight up into an open mouth. Hot breath, thick with rot now, poured over his face.
A string of saliva swung down and landed on his cheek. The teeth were the length of his fingers and there were so many more of them than he’d thought.
Nathan’s right hand slapped at the ground beside him, leaves, dirt, leaves.
’Where is it! Where is it.! Where is it!’
His fingers hit something cold and round.
The stone had landed less than an arm’s length from where the wolf had thrown him. He grabbed it.
The jaws came down and Nathan brought his left forearm up into them.
The teeth closed through the meat of it and he screamed and did not care, because the wolf’s head was low now, low and turned, and the rotted shoulder was right there in front of his face.
Nathan drove the stone into it. It went in like a spade into wet ash.
He felt the dead flesh give around his knuckles, felt the stone punch through into the hollow where a shoulder joint used to be, and the cold in his arm surged and poured out of him and into the wound. The rot spread.
He pulled the stone back and drove it in again, and again.
The grey ran down the wolf’s leg and up its neck. It let go of his forearm and tried to pull away, and Nathan came with it, half dragged across the ground, his fist and the stone buried to the wrist in a hole that kept getting wider. He stabbed again.
The animal’s ribs sank in on themselves. Its coat went dull, then grey, then powdery.
The wind that had been curling off its flanks since it stepped out of the bushes guttered, thinned, and stopped entirely.
Nathan hit it one more time, the wolf’s back legs gave out. It came down half on top of him and he shoved at it with everything he had left until the body rolled off into the leaves and did not move again.
Grey dust drifted up off it and settled on his face.
Nathan lay on his back in the wet leaves and breathed, his chest aching in a way that felt both distant and immediate, staring up through the branches at a sky he could barely see.
His left forearm was a ruin. His side was open. Something warm was running down his back and his whole right arm felt like it belonged to somebody who had been dead a while.
He turned his head and looked at the thing beside him, grey and caved and still. Then he let his head fall back and let out one long, shaking breath.
Ding!