Ares stumbled into the clearing.
He looked drained to his absolute limit, yet the expression in his eyes remained terrifyingly calm.
"Ares!"
Elowyn shrieked, waving her hand as his head tilted skyward toward the canopy. For one suspended heartbeat, the sheer relief of seeing each other alive surged between them in a silent, shared breath.
Then danger reasserted itself.
The pack moved like a single, lethal organism. The dire wolves spread wide in the snow, cunningly encircling Ares to seal off any escape routes. Their deep, wet growls resonated through his chest, sending sharp spikes of pain through his broken ribs. But he did not yield. Digging his heels into the ice, his fingers instinctively clamped around the rough timber stick until his knuckles turned white.
High in the branches, terror squeezed the breath from Elowyn’s throat. He could barely stand, let alone challenge three dire wolves by himself. If she sat by and did nothing, they would paint the snow red with his blood.
But what choice did she have? What could she possibly do against beasts like this?
She was no beast-wrestler!
The alpha wolf broke the standoff first, coiling its massive hind legs and launching its heavy body into the air in a lethal arc designed to pin Ares down and crush him ruthlessly beneath its weight.
Ares never even backed up.
He remained rooted to the spot, his eyes narrowing into two sharp slits of golden fire as they locked onto the leaping beast with absolute, terrifying precision.
"ARES! LOOK OUT!"
Elowyn was already starting to scramble down the trunk in a frantic effort to draw their attention to her, but she never made it halfway.
Mid-air, the wolf’s trajectory violently snapped. The heavy wolf was hurled sideways into the drift with a sickening thud, its body kicking once before it went limp. Elowyn hung suspended from the tree branch, her chest heaving as she stared at the blood pooling around the currently dead wolf in the snow. It all happened so fast she had to blink her eyes twice to confirm she wasn’t seeing things.
Her mind struggled to process what had just happened, until she caught the splintered top of Ares’s walking stick, now dripping hot blood onto his boots. Despite his broken body, his strike had been so blazingly fast that the killing blow occurred in the blank space between her heartbeat.
H-how did he do that?!
Shaken to her core, she hauled herself back up.
Completely unfazed by his own brutal display, Ares shifted his weight with dangerous grace, twirling the splintered stick between his fingers like a grand duelist’s rapier. He tilted his head, a cold invitation in his eyes as he waited for the next beast to move. Get faster updates on novelping . com.
The two surviving dire wolves instinctively backed away, their snouts twitching as the warm, iron tang of their alpha’s fresh blood hit the air.
In an instant, the balance of power in the clearing violently inverted. To the remaining beasts, the broken, limping human had vanished entirely. Ares drew his tall frame upright. He didn’t just look dangerous, he radiated an absolute, undisputed aura of a predator at the peak of the food chain, and the wolves could feel the suffocating pressure of it down to their bones.
Realizing they were outmatched by a monster far more lethal than themselves, the wolves flattened their ears and let out pathetic, high-pitched whines, fleeing wildly into the shadows of the thick tree lines.
Ares stood like a statue, watching them flee until the sound of crunching snow faded into the distance. Then, the illusion broke.
Overcome by the brutal toll of that single, explosive strike, a choked groan escaped his throat. He collapsed to his knees, clutching his torn side as the bloodied wooden stick tumbled from his numb grasp.
Elowyn hung from the tree branch in shocked silence, but the sight of him dropping to his knees broke her paralysis. Ignoring the bite of the cold in her joints, she dropped down from the lower limb and threw herself through the drift to reach him.
"Ares!"
He forced his chin up as she dropped into the snow beside him, his golden eyes searching her face. But Elowyn was too terrified by the blood spreading through his bandages to notice the profound relief pooling in his eyes before fatigue and agony pulled a veil over his vision.
"You’re bleeding through your clothes... your stitches must have torn open," she panicked, her hands trembling as she grabbed his arm. "We need to get you back to the shelter, okay?"
Without giving him a chance to speak, she ducked her small shoulders under his heavy arm, bracing her feet into the crusted ice to lever his towering frame to his feet.
"D-don’t pass out," she stammered, her heart hammering against her ribs as she felt his weight slump heavily against her side. "Stay with me."
Ares leaned into her warmth, his dark lashes casting long shadows over his cheekbones as he met her desperate gaze. "Why?"
"Because I can’t carry you," she blurted plainly, her tone practical and devoid of any subtext.
A soft, breathless sound escaped from his lips despite the blinding agony tearing through his ribs.He turned his head away, burying the quiet disappointment that he had somehow expected a far more sentimental answer.
[•]
Ares suffered an intense fever that night.
Elowyn kept watch by his side in the dim firelight, dipping a crude towel into a bowl of steaming water laced with crushed medicinal herbs, then pressing it softly over his pale, sweating brows.
When she brought him back to the shelter, she had worked frantically to clean up his reopened wounds and wrapped fresh linen tightly over his side. He had seemed stoic through the entire ordeal— until tonight.
Without the healer’s calm guidance, a suffocating helplessness settled over her chest.
He was suffering like this because he had come looking for her.
She bit her lip, filled with a sharp pang of regret. She should have been smarter. It was her own carelessness that almost led them to lose their lives. But she would never allow herself to be a defenseless prey again.
"Just... Please stay alive," she pleaded silently into the night. "Please.."
He couldn’t leave her now, not when he carried so many unnatural secrets. He still owed her an explanation for how he had felled a massive dire wolf with a single strike, whilst possessing a stick and no beastly instincts.
Throughout the tribal territories, generating that kind of raw, crushing force demanded the primal power of a high-tier spirit beast. Had he not been hairless like her, she would have sworn he was a powerful beastman from the capital.
The legends always spoke about capital beastpeople possessing dense, terrifying bloodlines that made ordinary tribesfolk look frail in comparison. But if a man like him had washed up all the way here, would protecting him not paint a target on her back?
Who was he, really?
Is it really possible that he’s no shiftless like her?
What if the fog in his mind cleared, and his true self woke up only to despise these primitive mountain lands? What if he ended up despising her?
She gripped the damp cloth tightly, forcing the cold panic back down her throat.
None of that mattered.
It wouldn’t make a bit of difference what he thought of her in the end. As soon as he’s feeling a lot better, he would leave, and they would never see one another again.
Reaching into the wooden bowl, she wrung out the cloth once more and placed it gently back onto his burning forehead, brushing a strand of silver hair away from his face.
As time drifted on, her eyelids grew impossibly heavy, the sheer physical and mental exhaustion of the night finally dragging her under. Before she could fight it, she sank into a fitful, restless sleep.
Then the darkness twisted.
Suddenly, the warm shelter vanished, replaced by the biting wind of the IronFang tribal grounds. Elowyn was back on her knees in the dirt, left bruised and shivering, while Nysa stood towering over her with a venomous, triumphant sneer curling her lips.
"Well, look who came crawling back with her tail tucked between her legs," Nysa sneered, her eyes gleaming with cruel satisfaction. "Didn’t I already warn you never to set foot here again without a mate?!"