The following is Part 2 of Episode One, “The Weight of Unfinished Things,” Chapter II: Wolves on the Road. This follows Chapter I: The Negotiation.
Content Warnings: Fantasy violence, monster attacks, blood and injury, peril, death, body horror, frightening creatures, and themes of grief, survival, and psychological unease.
Episode One, Part Two
The first wolf came out of the trees upside down.
Xiomara Lucero saw it reflected in a brass kettle tied to the rear of the merchant wagon, which was not where anyone sensible expected to see a wolf. Sensible expectations, in her experience, were a fine way to die surprised.
“Down!” she shouted.
The kettle reflection split into teeth, pale belly, and six hooked legs scrabbling against empty air. Xiomara shoved the nearest traveler beneath the wagon axle and threw herself backward as the creature landed where his head had been. Its jaws snapped shut on a mouthful of dust. Its body was mostly wolf, if one were feeling generous, but Grim Light had rewritten the creature in an impatient hand. Its shoulders rose too high. Its spine flexed like a whip. Mossy crystal growths jutted along its ribs, and where its eyes should have been, blue-white light burned behind a membrane of smoked glass.
It hissed at her.
Wolves were not supposed to hiss. Xiomara objected to that on scholarly grounds.
“Dimitri!” she called.
“Already hate it!” Dimitri Mastoras shouted from the front wagon.
The wolf inhaled. Its crystal ribs brightened.
Xiomara grinned despite herself. “Oh, that’s new.”
A burst of elemental force spat from the creature’s mouth, not fire exactly, but a compressed lance of heat and gravel and sparkling blue static. Xiomara twisted aside. The blast tore through the wagon canvas behind her and turned a hanging bundle of dried onions into fragrant shrapnel.
A merchant screamed. Someone else shouted for their mother. The lead horses tried to bolt and found Dimitri already there, one hand clamped around the bridle rig, the other slapping a palm-sized device against the wagon tongue.
“Moira, left rise!” he yelled. “Xio, stop admiring the biology and remove it from my road!”
“I am not admiring it,” Xiomara said, drawing Grim Light through her legs until the world sharpened around its edges. “I am forming a professional opinion.”
“Form faster!”
Two more wolves slid from the underbrush. They moved with awful coordination, one low, one high, driving toward the gap between the second and third wagons where three travelers had frozen with the doomed obedience of prey animals hoping stillness might become invisibility.
Moira Yutan reached them first.
She had been riding in the middle of the caravan with a little girl asleep against her side, one small hand tangled in the tawny fur at Moira’s wrist. Now the child was in her mother’s arms, and Moira stood between the wolves and the travelers with her traveling cloak discarded in the dust. Her Mythoteric nature did not announce itself all at once. It gathered. Her shoulders widened beneath her tunic. Dark antler-like ridges pressed up along her brow. Her hands lengthened, nails hardening into curved black claws. Fur rippled across her forearms and vanished again as if her body were deciding which ancestral memory would be most useful.
“Behind the wheels,” she told the travelers. Her voice remained gentle. That made it more frightening, somehow. “Do not run unless I tell you.”
One wolf sprang.
Moira met it in the air.
The impact sounded like a door being kicked open by a larger door. She caught the creature by its throat and shoulder, turned with its momentum, and drove it into the road hard enough to crack the packed earth. Elemental light flared in its jaws. Moira slammed her forehead into its snout. The light went out.
The second wolf darted around her toward the travelers.
Xiomara moved.
Aethernaut speed was not merely quickness. That was how dull people described it when they lacked better verbs. It was a negotiation with distance, a private agreement between sight and intention. Xiomara saw the wolf’s path, saw the scattering pebbles, saw the line of fear pulling the travelers backward, saw the narrow triangle of space where her foot could land if she trusted her body to arrive before doubt did.
She arrived.
Her short blade slid free as she spun, its edge catching the pale shimmer of Grim Light. She did not strike for the throat. Too armored. She cut along the inside of the foreleg, where muscle met the joint wrong. The wolf collapsed mid-lunge, skidding past the travelers in a spray of dust and blood-dark light.
“Under the wagon,” she told them.
They obeyed. Sensible at last.
At the front, Dimitri’s device unfolded with a series of clicks that sounded far too pleased with themselves. Copper prongs stabbed into the road. A spool of wire snapped outward, anchoring between wheel hubs, axle hooks, and three metal stakes Dimitri kicked into place while swearing at a horse, the wolves, and possibly physics.
“Field brace active!” he called. “Probably!”
“Probably?” shouted a merchant.
Dimitri adjusted his goggles with the back of one wrist. “Would you prefer confidently false?”
The fourth wolf burst from the trees directly behind him.
A small object flew from Dimitri’s sleeve, struck the creature’s chest, and bloomed into a net of crackling orange lines. The wolf dropped, convulsing. Dimitri turned, looked at it, and blinked.
“Huh,” he said. “That one worked.”
Xiomara laughed. She could not help it. Battle always brought her senses too near the surface. The world became detail and danger, every moment bright enough to cut herself on. She saw everything: Dimitri’s relieved surprise, Moira’s grim focus, the horses’ rolling eyes, the places where tree shadows bent against the wrong direction of wind.
That last detail stole her laughter.
“Something is herding them,” she said.
Moira glanced up. “The wolves?”
“Yes. No. Maybe. Look at the trees.”
“I am holding a monster, Xiomara.”
“You can multitask.”
Moira’s pinned wolf thrashed. She shifted her grip, muscles cording beneath her skin, and spoke through her teeth. “I am choosing not to dignify that.”
Xiomara looked toward the forest. The altered wolves had not attacked like hungry animals. They had struck at the caravan’s weak points: rear reflection blind spot, middle passenger gap, front horses. Pack intelligence explained some of it. Grim Light mutation explained more. But the tree line tugged at her eyes. Broken branches. Scraped bark. Tracks crossing and recrossing in patterns too clean to be panic. Something had driven the wolves onto the road, and whatever it was had not followed.
She wanted five minutes with the trail. Ten would be better. An hour would be paradise.
A fifth wolf answered by launching itself from the roof of the second wagon.
“All right,” Xiomara said. “Rude.”
It landed on the canvas, claws punching through, and spat a burst of force downward into the wagon bed. A crate exploded. Metal cookware clanged into the road. The little girl who had slept against Moira screamed from beneath the neighboring wagon.
Moira heard the scream.
The gentleness went out of her face.
Her transformation surged. Not monstrous, never that, but powerful enough to remind everyone watching that humanity had survived Hiraeth by becoming more than one thing. Fur swept along her arms. Her jaw sharpened. Her eyes darkened to warm amber. She lifted the wolf she had pinned and threw it into the one on the wagon roof.
Both creatures crashed through the canvas in a ruin of splinters and flour dust.
Dimitri whooped. “Efficient!”
“Check the passengers,” Moira said.
“Also efficient,” he said, already moving.
Xiomara leapt onto a wagon wheel, then the driver’s bench, then the torn roof frame. The wolves inside tangled in sacks and broken crate slats, snarling as Grim Light pulsed along their crystal ribs. One snapped at her ankle. She danced back, gathered air in her palm until it tightened into a bright crescent, and cut downward. The force struck between them, not deep enough to kill, but sharp enough to separate. Moira seized one through the torn canvas and dragged it out backward. Xiomara drove the other toward the rear, where Dimitri’s field brace still hummed.
“Dimitri,” she called, “does your probably-device catch things?”
“If they are conductive, metallic, or emotionally supportive.”
“Wolf!”
“Wolf is not on the list!”
The creature lunged. Xiomara dropped flat. It sailed over her and landed in the web of copper lines.
Dimitri slapped a second device against the nearest stake. “But I am flexible.”
The field brace flashed. Copper wires snapped tight around the wolf, pinning it in a vibrating cage of amber sparks. The creature howled, the sound scraping against the underside of the sky. The remaining wolves answered from the road, from the wagon bed, from the ditch.
And then, beneath the howls, Moira heard a voice.
She was standing over a wounded guard, one hand pressed to a gash in his thigh while her Grim Light encouraged blood and flesh to remember their proper arrangement. Healing was not a simple gift. It was a conversation with pain, and pain rarely spoke politely. The guard sobbed once and bit down on his glove. Moira murmured to him, steady and low, keeping him anchored.
Then the world went quiet in the wrong way.
Not silent. The battle continued. Dimitri shouted. Xiomara cursed cheerfully. Horses screamed. Wolves snarled. But beneath all that, beneath the sound of life trying very hard not to become death, a pocket of absence opened.
In it, a voice called from far away.
Not her name.
Not words she could understand.
A human voice, or the memory of one, swallowed between syllables.
Moira went cold.
Her Seeker sense had always come through hearing. Omens found her in the bend of a song, the wrongness of a pause, the echo in a room no one had entered. This was different. This voice sounded as though someone had been buried under layers of earth and grief, still calling because stopping would mean admitting no one was coming.
The wounded guard gripped her wrist. “Seeker?”
Moira forced herself back into the road. Back into blood under her palm. Back into breath and dust and the weight of her own body.
“I have you,” she said.
But the voice came again.
Fainter. Farther.
Hungry silence closed around it.
Moira looked toward the trees. Not the nearby trees where the wolves had emerged, but beyond them, toward the hidden valley and the roads that curved west through settlements whose names she only half knew.
Greywake, she thought, though no one had spoken the name.
The thought did not feel like hers.
A wolf broke free from the ruined wagon.
Xiomara landed on its back with a bright laugh that had too much edge in it. “Moira, whenever you’re done contemplating the meaning of existence!”
Moira’s body moved before thought finished returning. She sealed the guard’s wound enough to keep him alive, pressed his hands over the binding, and rose. The wolf bucked under Xiomara. Dimitri threw something that unfolded into a spinning hoop, missed the wolf entirely, and decapitated a roadside thistle with magnificent confidence.
“I meant to do that,” he said.
“No one believed you,” Xiomara replied.
Moira crossed the road in three strides. Her hearing still strained toward the impossible voice, but battle demanded its due. She caught the wolf’s tail, planted one foot, and pulled. Xiomara sprang clear as the creature lost balance. Moira slammed it sideways into the sparking field brace, where Dimitri’s wires embraced it with mechanical enthusiasm.
The last wolf saw the others trapped or broken and chose survival. It backed toward the trees, crystal ribs dimming, lips peeled from too many teeth.
Xiomara raised her blade.
Moira lifted a hand. “Let it go.”
“It may come back.”
“It was driven here.”
Xiomara hesitated. That was something. A year ago, perhaps even months ago, she would have needed the answer badly enough to chase it through the forest with no plan beyond the conviction that questions disliked being abandoned. Now she looked from the wolf to Moira’s face and saw enough there to lower her blade.
The wolf vanished into the trees.
For a few heartbeats, no one moved. Then the road remembered how to breathe. Merchants crawled from beneath wagons. Someone began laughing with the high, brittle sound of terror having nowhere else to go. A horse tried to sit down and was gently persuaded not to by Dimitri, who spoke to it as though negotiating with a temperamental boiler.
Moira’s transformation receded by degrees. The antler ridges softened. Her claws shortened. Fur withdrew beneath skin. She was left standing in the road with blood on her sleeves and a distant voice still lodged somewhere behind her ears.
Xiomara approached her carefully. That was how Moira knew her expression had betrayed too much.
“You heard something,” Xiomara said.
Moira looked toward the west.
Dimitri, kneeling beside his field device, glanced up. “Something besides my beautiful apparatus saving everyone’s lives?”
“One of your beautiful apparatuses nearly murdered a weed,” Xiomara said.
“A threatening weed.”
Moira did not smile. “A voice.”
Both of them changed at once. Dimitri’s humor did not vanish, exactly, but it banked itself behind attention. Xiomara’s eyes sharpened with that dangerous brightness that meant the world had just become a puzzle and she wanted to put her hands inside it.
“An Omen?” Xiomara asked.
Moira listened. The ordinary sounds returned: groaning wheels, frightened prayers, the clink of harness, the wet breathing of injured wolves pinned in copper wire. No voice. No silence. Only the afterimage of being called from somewhere dark.
“I think so,” she said.
Dimitri stood slowly. “Direction?”
“West. Past the trade road.” Moira closed her eyes, not because it helped her hear, but because it stopped the world from offering too much else. “There was a name.”
Xiomara leaned closer. “What name?”
Moira opened her eyes.
The travelers watched them now. People often did after a fight. Before danger, Seekers were convenient rumors. During danger, they were shields. After danger, they became something stranger. Proof, perhaps, that the world was larger and more terrible than one had hoped, but also that terror could be met by people who bled and joked and looked tired afterward.
“Greywake,” Moira said.
Dimitri rubbed both hands over his face, leaving a streak of soot across one cheek. “Of course. I was hoping for somewhere with baths.”
Xiomara looked toward the forest, where the escaped wolf had disappeared. Her smile returned, smaller this time and far less amused. “The wolves were running from that direction.”
“Driven from it,” Moira said.
“Or drawn away from something worse.” Xiomara looked delighted by the horror of the possibility, then caught Moira’s expression and tempered herself. “Sorry. Not delighted. Concerned. Professionally concerned.”
Dimitri began gathering his devices from the road. “We need Revulo and Amira.”
Moira nodded. The voice had faded, but its absence had shape. Like a missing tooth the tongue could not stop finding.
“Yes,” she said. “We need to find them.”