The air in the Grey grasslands tasted of iron and mud.
It was a foul, metallic tang that coated the tongue and filled the lungs with every ragged breath. Jaerian fought not with the graceful precision of a master swordsman but with the grim, efficient brutality of a man drowning in a sea of violence.
long sword was a blur of grey steel, its edge shearing through soldier mail and leather as if they were parchment.
He parried a thrust from a pike, the force of the blow numbing his arm to the shoulder, and lunged forward, driving his sword up under the man's gorget.
A wet, gurgling cry was cut short.
Jaerian yanked long sword free, the body collapsing into the churned, bloody muck. He pivoted, his boot sinking deep into the viscera-soaked ground, and caught another soldier across the temple with his lion's-head pommel.
There was a sickening crack.
He breathed in, a deep, heaving gasp meant to steady his racing heart, and the stench of death flooded him—copper blood, voided bowels, and the sour smell of fear.
It was only then that he noticed the silence.
The cacophony of battle—the clang of steel, the war cries, and the screams of the dying and the mad—had receded. The frantic, localized struggle around him had ended.
He was standing alone.
Again, he sighed heavily, the sound unnaturally loud in the sudden quiet.
The fog of war lifted from his mind, and he took stock.
The ground was littered with the dead, a tapestry of grey and crimson, now uniformly stained brown with mud and blood.
To the east, the heart of the battle still raged; he could hear the distant roar and see the banners still flying, clashing against the golden lion.
Robeyn was there, in the east center, leading the main thrust.
He was winning. He had to be winning.
Then, from his front, from the west, a new sound cut through the din.
A disciplined, rhythmic beating of swords on shields.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
A war cry followed, not the ragged shouts of desperate men, but the unified, terrifying roar of fresh, well-trained soldiers.
Jaerian's blood ran cold.
A reserve force.
Taeron was not a man to leave his flanks unguarded.
A column of men, a hundred strong, perhaps a hundred and twenty, marched toward his position. They were not the weary, bloodied men he had just fought; these were clean, their armor polished, their steps measured. They saw him—a single, black-clad figure standing amidst a field of their dead comrades—and they quickened their pace. He was an obstacle to be cleared, a prize to be taken.
A grim resignation settled over him.
There was no retreat.
To run was to be cut down from behind, to die a coward's death. To fight was to die a hero's death, but to die all the same.
Neither option appealed to the wolf in his blood.
A strange calm descended.
He looked at the fine sword his father had gifted him.
It was a sword for a man.
What was coming required something else entirely. He threw it, point first, where it stood quivering in the body of a fallen soldier.
His fingers, clumsy with adrenaline and fatigue, went to the straps of his armor.
He tore at them, the boiled leather and mail falling away in heavy, discarded chunks. He ripped his tunic over his head, casting it aside.
The cool air hit his sweat-slicked skin, and he stood bare-chested amidst the carnage, his muscles coiled and tense, the scars of his life a pale map upon his skin. His long, dark hair, freed from its leather tie, fluttered in the foul breeze.
He closed his eyes, not in prayer, but in focus.
He reached inward, past the man, past the bastard of Leoneffel, past the brother of the Order.
He reached for the ancient, sleeping thing that lived in the core of him, the gift—or the curse—of his strange blood.
He thought of Leoneffel.
Not the stone and mortar, but the heart of it.
The hot springs that steamed in the woods, the deep, dark crypts, and the sound of the wind howling through the broken towers. He thought of the lion, his sigil, his spirit.
And he called it forth.
It began with a searing, white-hot pain in his bones, a sensation of being remade from the inside out.
A guttural, involuntary groan tore from his throat, deepening into something not human. His hands, clenched into fists, began to stretch, the fingers elongating, the nails thickening into black, razor-sharp claws that tore from his bleeding fingertips. A wave of agony rolled down his spine, bending him double as vertebrae cracked and reshaped, lengthening his torso, and curving his posture into a powerful, forward-leaning crouch.
A thick, grey pelt, darker than a snow wolf's but shot through with streaks of black and white, erupted from his skin, covering his body in a mantle of dense, shaggy fur. His face was the last to change, and it was the most violent transformation. His jaw unhinged with a sound of cracking cartilage, thrusting forward into a monstrous muzzle lined with fangs longer than a man's finger. His senses exploded; the world became a riot of new information. He could smell the fear on the advancing soldiers, the oil on their blades, and the individual scents of the dead around him. His hearing sharpened to a painful degree, picking up the frantic beating of a hundred hearts ahead of him.
Where Jaerian had stood, there now stood a giant direwolf, eight feet tall at the shoulder, a creature of myth and nightmare. Its eyes, no longer grey, burned with a fierce, intelligent red fire. It threw its massive head back, and a roar erupted from its throat, a sound that was neither wolf nor man but something primordial and terrifying. It was a challenge, a promise of annihilation that echoed across the battlefield, momentarily silencing the distant fight.
The enemy soldiers faltered. Their disciplined march broke. The sight of the beast, a creature from Old One's stories made flesh, rooted some to the spot in superstitious terror. Others, braver or more foolish, charged.
Jaerian-the-wolf met them with a fury that was both animal and deeply, strategically human.
He did not simply lash out. He moved with a predator's terrifying grace and a soldier's tactical mind. A massive paw, tipped with those black claws, swiped horizontally, catching two men in plate armor and sending them flying as if they were dolls, their chests caved in. He moved through their ranks like a scythe through wheat. A soldier thrust a spear at his flank; Jaerian sensed the movement, pivoted with impossible speed, and closed his jaws around the man's head and shoulder, crushing metal, bone, and flesh in one brutal bite.
He was a whirlwind of tooth and claw. His thick fur turned aside glancing blows from swords, though a well-placed axe bite drew a line of fire across his haunch. The pain only enraged him further. He used his weight, bowling men over, trampling them under paws the size of dinner plates. He used his environment, backing into a knot of soldiers to send them stumbling over their dead comrades.
The enemy soldier's courage broke. It was one thing to fight a man, even a skilled one. It was another to face a force of nature that felt no fear, that bled but did not slow, that killed with a casual, effortless brutality. Their formation shattered into a panicked rout, but there was no escape. The wolf was faster. It hunted them down, a red-eyed shadow in the fading light, until the field around him was still once more, this time adorned with a new tapestry of the dead.
He stood panting, his massive chest heaving, steam rising from his hot breath in the cool air. The red haze of battle began to recede from his mind. The man within the beast reasserted itself, feeling the aches, the wounds, and the profound exhaustion.
Then, a new sound.
Clear and high and triumphant.
A horn.
Not an enemy trumpet, but the deep, booming note of a leoneffel warhorn. It came from the east. From Robeyn's position.
Victory.
The great wolf's head lifted, ears swiveling.
The urge to howl, to answer that call with his own, rose in his throat, but he suppressed it. The man was in control now. The transformation reversed itself, the process just as painful but quicker, a contraction into his human form. He stood naked and shivering, covered in blood, both his and that of his enemies, the wounds on his haunch now mirrored by a deep, bleeding gash on his thigh. He found his discarded clothes, pulling the torn tunic over his head, ignoring the armor. He wrenched the long sword free from the corpse and used it as a crutch, limping toward the sound of the horn.
The main camp was a scene of controlled chaos—wounded being tended to, prisoners being rounded up, men cheering with the raw, desperate joy of those who have survived.
The leoneffel banner flew high. But at the center of it all, there was a circle of silence, a crowd of lords and soldiers with heads bowed.
A cold dread, colder than any winter, gripped Jaerian's heart. He pushed his way through the crowd, his leg screaming in protest, his strength failing.
"Make way!" he croaked, his voice rough from the wolf's roar.
"Let me through!"
The men parted, and he saw.
Robeyn lay on a makeshift stretcher, his armor removed.
The Young Wolf. His chest was a ruin of broken mail and a deep, fatal wound. His face was pale as milk, but his eyes were open, clear, and blue.
Jaerian fell to his knees beside his brother, his crutch forgotten. He caught Robeyn's cold, trembling hand in his own.
"Jaerian," Robeyn whispered, his voice a thin breath. A trickle of blood escaped the corner of his mouth.
"I'm here, brother," Jaerian said, his own voice thick with tears he would not let fall. "You won. The field is yours."
A ghost of a smile touched Robeyn's lips.
"The King… of the mountains…" he breathed.
Then his grip tightened with a surprising strength. His eyes locked onto Jaerian's, and the fading light in them burned with a final, urgent fire.
"The wolf… I saw it… from the hill. I knew it was you."
Jaerian could only nod, squeezing his hand.
"Jaerian…" Robeyn gasped, struggling for air.
"The dream… the old power… it must not die with me. It cannot." He swallowed with immense effort. "You are… a Leoneffel. You have always been… more than my brother. You are… my heir."
Jaerian's breath hitched. "Robeyn, no… your mother…"
"Sarena is a Larduard's puppet," Robeyn rasped, his voice gaining a final, commanding strength. "You are the last of us." He pulled Jaerian closer, his words a dying man's fervent wish.
"Promise me, Jaerian. Promise me you will become Lord of Kreevaria. Promise me you will lead our people. Promise…"
The light in his brilliant blue eyes flickered, dimmed, and went out.
The silence in the circle was absolute. All eyes were on Jaerian—the bastard, the brother of the Order, the man who had just emerged from a slaughter naked and bleeding. And the last person their king had spoken to.
Jaerian did not weep. He gently laid his brother's hand upon his chest. He looked up, his grey eyes sweeping over the gathered lords.
He saw the expectation.
The need.
He rose to his feet, ignoring the agony in his leg, standing tall amidst the legacy of the slain. The weight of a dying wish, of a kingdom, of a direwolf's secret, settled upon his shoulders. It was a weight he had never asked for, a destiny he had spent his life running from.
But the wolf in his blood did not run. It protected its pack.
And now, the pack was his.
"My lords," he said, his voice low but carrying across the silent field, no longer a croak but the clear, cold tone of command. "The king is dead."
He let the words hang in the air, a final, mournful epitaph for the Young Wolf. Then he took a breath, and the words that followed were not just a statement but a vow, sworn in the sight of gods and men and the ancient magic of the First Men.
"Long live the King."