Foras has not shifted, or at least not fully, since the war. Here in this tame world parts of him have only suggested violence and winter. And I have forgotten, as all dead things forget, how grotesque my beloved wolf can become. But I remember now. Oh I remember now.
Perhaps I was wrong to think of us, me and this old thing, as unicorns and wolves. Perhaps I was terribly wrong. For there is nothing like Foras in my snarling mouth full of fangs when the stallion slams into my head. I do not growl when my vision flashes back. I do not froth and foam with rage when he warns me as a million men have tried to warn me before (and when I tore their tongues from their mouth I found that I enjoyed the sounds of their warnings when they turned to bleating lambs).
My vision lingers in the black for longer than it should and I know like all things from war know, that my time to kill him is unspooling like thread.
I recall, as I hear my wolf’s bones snap and shift like a hundred stones rolling down the mountains, the last time a man raised his sword at the curl of my throat. I remember when he told me you are too pretty and young to die in war. I remember the leering way he licked his teeth and straightened a noble’s crown upon his brow.
I remember now how I did not laugh or spit insults. I said nothing at all to him when I smiled like a dainty thing only just realizing that she was knee deep in blood. And I made no sound when I let his sword scrape along my neck just so that I could get closer, and closer, to those leering black eyes.
I let Foras eat his corpse. I let him eat him right there in the middle of the killing field. I did not make him wait.
My vision grows darker still with white flashing warnings spidering across the black. I know that my last thread of this moment has gone from foot to inch. Sometimes I forget that I am a dead but mortal thing. I forget that I can still die.
But I know I’m not dying now, only stumbling through the sheer brutality of his hit. Still I am aware enough, enraged enough, to spit blood out of my mouth where I bit my own cheek. I will not be sorry when I wash the blood from my monster’s fur in the sea. And like before I do not laugh as an old thing tells me what I should be.
My voice is a wavering and terrible sort of clear when I cut my wolf free of the frail leash I hold him with , “Eat him.”
Foras needs no permission though, he did not need it the moment the stallion slammed his skull into mine. He tilts his head, now more sinew than fur, and brays to the moon for blood. His body, now so much larger than mine, is leaping for the stallion’s spine before his howling cry ends. The stallion really should not have hit me so hard, Foras might have forgiven him in the same way he forgives me. Might have.
In the darkness of my clearing vision I watch as Foras becomes the beast of battle, that with a dragon, won a war.
@Amaroq
