Fic: Berserker

[yellow_pomelo]

Title: Berserker
Author: yellow_pomelo
Rating: R
Pairing/Characters: Derek/Stiles, OCs   
Spoilers: None.
Warnings: Violence, gore
Word Count: ~9, 400
Disclaimer: I do not own Teen Wolf or any of it's characters. 
Summary: "He thinks of clansmen long dead and buried, of the grizzled veterans who muttered their testimonies into the night, telling the stars about their victories, their crimes, and all the horrors they've seen at war: aimless ships at sea carrying cargos of dead men; forts filled with the screams of tortured prisoners; men made into monsters, creatures reborn in blood that even the birds and the beasts fear."

Notes: Outsider POV, medieval fantasy AU... sort of.



They found a rabbit, the first time Haward took his son hunting. It was a fine specimen: plump and with glossy fur, but unusual in its colour. Pure white in the heart of summer.

“Leave it,” Haward had told his son.

“Why? It’s just sitting there, Fa. Doesn’t even look like a fast one. The dog could get it, easy.” They were both tired and frustrated after an afternoon of hunting with nothing to show for their effort but a dozen cold trails and three empty stomachs. “Maybe we’ll even get a lucky foot out of this.” His son had urged the dog forward, but it only whined and sat on Haward’s feet.

“Have mercy on it. Some things are better whole,” he’d told his son and ushered them further up the mountain.

His son had grumbled until they stumbled upon a huge stag and brought it down, a single arrow in its side and the dog eagerly tripping up its feet. It should have taken a dozen more arrows and a whole pack of dogs to bring down such a large beast, but his son laughed away Haward’s amazement, voice cracking with youth. “Seems you’re right, old man. Bless that rabbit’s beating heart.”

That was a long time ago though, and that rabbit must be long dead, torn to pieces in the talons of a hawk, lost like so many of his clansmen.

Haward is no stranger to violence and death. He has served as a soldier to many armies in many battles in many wars. He has seen conflicts between tribes and between nations. He has seen good men die for their gods, and evil men die for their demons. He has seen civil men descend to barbarism, and he has seen vagrants rise to kings. Still, it is different when he is not a hired sword, when he is not a conscript marching alongside farmers, when he is not on some far and distant shore. The violence is that much sharper, that much thicker in the air and in his lungs when it descends on his land, his village.

Haward remembers violence every night he shuts his eyes, but his body does not. He is no longer the young man who marched bravely, naively, into battle. His sword sticks in its sheath, reluctant to be drawn again. It is as brittle with age as its master, rusted and chipped and dulled by time. Haward’s hand does not remember the heft of forged metal, his skin has forgotten the grip of an embellished pommel, his hand is clumsy with the tool of his abandoned trade, the gift of a pleased patron, but Haward tugs his old friend free from its tomb and stands ready by the gate, his stiff leg be damned.

He can see the smoke on the horizon, the miasma that preludes death. The threat draws near and the only defence his village can muster is a line of scraggily old men and boys barely weaned from the breast.

“They’re fools to mount the ridge,” Rowan says from Haward’s left, hardly audible over the horrible barking of the village dogs. “Their horses will tire and then they’ll - they’ll be done. They’ll be pigs on spits, they will.” Rowan speaks with false confidence and Haward can see how the boy shivers beneath a patched coat that is too thin for the weather. The simple spear in Rowan’s hand looks foreign and awkward in his white-knuckled grip. His frail wrist rotates uncertainly, pale fingers strumming the splintered wood, seeking a comfortable grip they haven’t learned to recognize. Rowan wears the tall leather boots Haward’s son died in, the worn leather too loose around his coltish legs.

“They may be fools, but they’re the fools with the pointiest sticks,” Calder sneers from Haward’s right, his yellow teeth peeking out from behind his coarse grey beard. “Only idiots would want to claim a shit village nestled in a shit valley, and here they come!” He yells to be clearly heard over the wailing dogs.

Fools and idiots and men driven by a meaningless hunger, Haward thinks, but he does not say. He saves his breath, thinking instead about the village he must protect. He thinks about the babes curled obliviously in their mother’s arms, about the frightened children that clutch at their mother’s skirts, about those mothers that hide knives in their woollen tunics.

Haward watches Rowan squeeze his eyes tightly shut before opening them again, the brown of his irises looking almost golden in his dry and bloodshot eyes.

“Do you think it is true? What they say about the horde,” Rowan says and bites his lips, as if he hadn’t meant to let his nervous thoughts slip into the winter air alongside the dog’s yips and growls.

“They’re men. Plain an’ simple,” Calder scowls. “Ugly bastards, I’ll bet, but men nonetheless.”

“If so, why do their numbers never shrink?” Rowan shakes his head and pulls his skullcap lower, trying to ward off the biting cold his short hair does not. “How many villages have they hollowed? Towns? Castles, even?” Perhaps my village, my town, my castle, Rowan doesn’t say, but Haward hears it anyway, the uncertain sorrow of a soul without a past.

“You saw the wanderer. You heard his talk,” Rowan goes on to say, scratching circles in the dirt with the butt of his spear.

Calder snorts. “I heard cow shit falling from a coward’s mouth.”

“Now Calder,” Haward admonishes, “that wanderer is a lad who’s lived through what we might not.”

“Hah! We’re all lads to your foggy eyes, Haward, but he was a grown man! Just older than your stray, here - and snivelling from barely a scratch.”

“You forget yourself, Calder. You have not seen what I have seen. Not even what that lad saw.”

Calder spits angrily at Haward’s feet. “Damn what you’ve seen and what the coward saw! And damn those filthy mongrels and their endless howling!” Calder twists on his heel to bellow the last at the village dogs. The only answer is more barking.

Haward does not acknowledge the glob of wetted dirt or Calder’s loss of control. He knows as well as Calder does that now is not the time to fight amongst their selves. Though Calder may not recognize the fear that fuels his anger, Haward has weathered enough turmoil to understand, and so he lets the slight pass, as unconcerned about it as a stag is of a mouse.

They fall into a quiet that is only disturbed by the cries of the dogs fighting against their ropes, trying to wrest free of their posts. Listening to the frenzy of the dogs in the village behind him, Haward looks to his left, to his right; he looks up and down the short front line and despairs. They are so few, so untrained, so inexperienced, and so ill equipped. They are a dozen barely-men that are accustomed to working the land, now wielding spades and sickles and hastily sharpened sticks. Besides himself, the closest things to fighters that the village has are Calder and Rowan: the aging brute for his drunken fist fights, and Haward’s ward for guarding the livestock. Only Haward is blooded, and one old man cannot tip the scales against the enemy that will soon pour into their valley.

Haward can feel the frozen earth shuddering beneath his feet, shaking from the pounding hooves of a hundred approaching horses. Louder than the dogs, he thinks he can hear the clamour of swords and shields and inhuman screams from beyond the vale, or perhaps only the sounds conjured by the rumours passed from the wanderer’s tongue to Haward’s ear.

He thinks back to that wounded lad, that lost boy with eyes as blue as the clear sky and hair the gold of harvest. The wanderer had been too pretty to be anything less than noble, but his clothes had been too torn and dirtied for confirmation. He had been found by Calder’s niece, wandering blearily in the woods, uninjured and unmarked save for a knot of red scars at the base of his skull, the ghost of a wound that looked to have been inflicted by a hooked blade, and a dirty one at that.

The lad had lain in fever for three days and three nights. Even after the sickness broke, he had looked no better. His eyes were glazed with waking terrors and though the villagers prodded both his body and his mind in search of answers, he would offer few details to flesh his story. Most of Haward’s knowledge was gleaned from the shudders that rolled through the lad’s body as he whispered his tale; from the way his gaze trembled and dropped and his voice weakened and waned.

“They think they have it leashed,” the wanderer chanted, face flushed and strained with illness. “They think they have it leashed.”

Haward dismissed most of the wanderer’s fevered ramblings, but tales of a barbaric horde united under the banner of a madman had trickled into the valley for many seasons and no one doubted that this lad was just one more victim. However, they had always been a distant danger the villagers worried little over. It was just hearsay of a plague that ravaged the land, seeking to build a selfish kingdom from the ashes of a healthy nation, and they had little effect on such a secluded village.

Until now. Until last night when Rowan went to tend the still weak wanderer, only to find an empty pallet and a bloody spiral smeared onto the wooden wall.

While the wanderer’s presence had been enough to set the village on edge, that ominous whorl tipped them over. Suddenly the rumours had become reality, and when that morning the dogs began to bay, reality became a nightmare.

Haward is not afraid of death. He is no glory-drunk sheep, bleating after the honour of war, and he does not seek to have his name sung throughout the ages, but he would welcome death, were it his death alone. He is old and his time is long past ripe, but what he fears is the death of those he now seeks to defend. His blood may have fallen dead long ago, and his wife may have passed on in the quiet of her grief, but the village is no less his family; the makeshift soldiers he stands with are no less his brothers, his sons. They are all his to protect and that is not something he can do if he is struck down within two heartbeats of the first battle cry, so Haward widens his stance, careless of his stiff leg as the tension thickens into iron shackles that weigh down their limbs.

“Fa,” Rowan whispers, fear finally edging his voice.

“Be calm, child,” Haward says. He keeps his eyes squinting to the west where the sun has begun to set. He notes a flock of birds that fly eastward, their number greater than Haward has ever seen. Their cries are a bizarre mixture of caws and chirps, their bodies of various shapes and sizes. Haward thinks he sees hawks alongside sparrows as they pass overhead like a river through the sky. Then they are gone and he shrugs away the shivers that crawl down his spine, straining his faded senses forward to find the enemy on the horizon.

“Fa,” Rowan whispers again and Haward can feel Rowan’s tension like wires woven over his skin.

“Shut up, boy!” Calder snaps, but before Haward can scold them, Rowan’s hand is on his, urging him to lower his sword with an impatient tug. “Do you hear?”

“Hear what?” Haward asks, irritated and confused.

“The dogs,” Rowan says, eyes round and frightened. “They’ve stopped barking.”

Haward startles at the realization. He lets his sword hand drop and turns his head to the village behind him, just in time to see short wooden posts dragging behind fleeing dogs, squeezing through the narrow gaps between timber and dirt as they retreat into the houses. The little houses look strangely empty in the orange light of the setting sun, like little ships capsized under the waves of rolling hillocks. The small square windows are shuttered, dark and empty despite the life Haward knows they harbour. Nothing else stirs in the yellowed grass growing from earth covered roofs or over the frosted dirt of each threshold.

The dogs are all gone now - hidden inside the houses - with nothing but pockmarks in the dirt to show where their wooden posts had once been planted.

“What does it mean?” Rowan asks, his hand an anxious claw on Haward’s wrist.

Haward is old and he has seen many things and he has lived through much violence, but this is something he has rarely encountered. This is something else. This is something more than the petty battles between men for gold, land, and power. This is beyond men.

Haward thinks now of the stories soldiers share around fires, of those endless nights he spent waiting for a bloodstained morning. He thinks of clansmen long dead and buried, of the grizzled veterans who muttered their testimonies into the night, telling the stars about their victories, their crimes, and all the horrors they’ve seen at war: aimless ships at sea carrying cargos of dead men; forts filled with the screams of tortured prisoners; men made into monsters, creatures reborn in blood that even the birds and the beasts fear.

“They think they have it leashed,” the wanderer had said, fever-bright eyes locked with Haward’s, “but it bathes in blood. It lives for red.”

A drum sounds in Haward’s veins, pulsing through his ears, beating like cloven feet against his skull. The tip of his sword scrapes through the dirt, clicking like talons across half-buried pebbles, like bones dashed against the mountain rocks. Haward can sense it, deep in his gut, his heart, in the way his stiff leg is no longer stiff, the pain of an old wound banished as it only ever is when his body throbs with the other-sense, when his arteries pump with liquid fire, readying him to fight. To flee. To hide.

“Heed the dogs,” Haward whispers. “Heed the dogs!” He cries out, sweeping his arm forward in a wide gesture to the old-men and the boy-men at his sides.

Haward grabs Rowan by the collar of his tunic, tugging him forward with such unexpected force that the boy drops his spear in surprise. Haward doesn’t pause to let Rowan retrieve the poorly made weapon, instead dragging him back through the gates. Rowan, always quick of mind and feet, soon hurries to match pace with Haward and disentangles his collar from Haward’s hand. Rowan runs back to the younger boys who remain idle in their confusion and herds them into the village, mirroring Haward who corrals the older men.

“Quick! To your houses; bar the doors and shut your mouths!” Haward commands.

“What are you doing?” Calder exclaims, stubbornly resisting Haward’s shove.

“Can you not feel it?”

“What?”

“Whatever is coming, it is nothing we can fight. Not even if we had the finest swords and the heaviest battle axes. Pray that we outlive the night, now go!” Haward strikes Calder’s arse with the flat of his blade, but doesn’t pause to watch the heavyset man stagger forward to join his wife and niece in a house.

Haward’s barked orders replace the dogs’ and his voice sounds too loud in the sudden and unnatural silence of the land. Not even the wind blows, and Haward swears that the sinking sun looks like an eye sliding shut, leaving them to drown in the dark of the night. The gods have abandoned them, imagined or real, and the pearl of the moon peers down at them, cold, distant, and without mercy. There is only the panicked shuffle of feet and the low pound of advancing horses, the hoof beats a pulse that Haward can no longer discern from the fearful thunder of his heart.

“Rowan!” Haward calls once the last man has stumbled into his house. He circles restlessly at the center of the village, “Rowan!”

He hears a reply, and spins around to see Rowan running towards him, carrying one of the boys on his back. “He fell,” Rowan explains. His breaths come heavily, his cheeks flushed and eyes wide, darting about as if the danger lies in every shadow and not in the approaching horde.

“Quickly,” Haward drives them forward, “inside, inside.” They stumble into the nearest house. Bera’s widow - Sunhild - and his two young girls are already huddled in the corner with one of the village dogs, their eyes briefly shining in the full moon’s light before Haward shuts the door, sealing it as best as he can and locking them into darkness.

While Haward presses his eye to a thin crack in the shuttered window of the house, Rowan pushes the boy - Garik - towards Sunhild, squeezing his arms in reassurance and taking the sickle from his trembling hands. “You’ll hurt yourself like that,” Haward hears Rowan whisper to Garik. “Take this. Maybe one day you’ll trade it in for a bow.” Haward doesn’t need to look to know that Rowan hands Garik his old flax sling, the constant companion in all his youthful mischief. Indeed, maybe one day Garik could wield a bow - maybe his sons, maybe his daughters, maybe all his descendents to follow - but the night is long and there are killers in their vale. Haward hopes it will be enough that tonight a child holds a sling and feels safe, and a boy sheds his youth to be strong.

Haward’s wishful thinking is interrupted by the sound of a slap. “Stay back, witch,” Sunhild snarls, dragging Garik to her side. Sunhild holds Garik close alongside her daughters and retreats to the corner, watching Rowan with a wary eye. Her fear magnifies her guarded and suspicious nature, but Rowan says nothing and he doesn’t even press a hand to his reddened cheek.

Haward knows Sunhild isn’t the only one who never took a shine to Rowan and it incenses him that even know the grudge holds. Rowan had been so confused when he first arrived: smearing doorframes with his own blood, chanting unintelligibly. Rowan almost bled himself dry trying to encircle the village before they stopped him, and while Rowan’s actions were frightening, his mind had been a child’s, simple as an empty pot. Undoubtedly, if Haward hadn’t vouched for Rowan, the boy would’ve been stoned, but they gave him a chance and everyone’s lives have benefitted from that mercy. The seasons have been gentle, the crops plentiful, and not a single animal has been lost since Rowan stepped foot inside the village.

If only good deeds could wash away old fears.

Rowan’s a good boy, and as if to confirm that, he crouches down by Haward’s side, pressing their shoulders together in solidarity. “What do you see?”

Haward shakes his head, signalling for silence. Sunhild and the children immediately fall quiet, but the dog whines low in its throat, a continuous sound that only stops when Rowan makes as if to approach the animal, and once it’s fallen silent Haward turns back to the window. The vantage allows him a view of the clearing in the center of the village and under the light of the moon Haward can see the spaces between houses lined in silver, the yellow grass made white, and the shadows dark as squid ink. Nothing moves and nothing breathes, and then he hears it: the sudden crash of horses’ hooves breaking down the flimsy wooden fences that mark the village border.

Horses neigh and men roar, swords clanging shields and fists thumping chests. Mounted men stream between houses and over the sloped backs of the hills the houses are recessed in. Some carry torches, rushing into the center of the village like a filthy tide. Haward catches only fleeting glimpses of them as they pass, but Howard knows the type. In his mind’s eye, they are as varied and incongruent as the birds that fled their path, pilfered armour mismatched and ill-fitting, some wearing boiled leather, others wearing metal scraps of gear. Their horses are no better, starved and riddled with parasites, coats balding and hooves chipping like shale upon the hard-packed earth. Their foul odour is compounded by their jeers and malicious cries and Haward imagines the taint of their disease seeps into the houses like the dirt raining from the roof, shaken loose by the stomp of hooves.

“Come out, little flowers. See that the moon shines bright as the sun!” one of the horde shouts. The speaker’s voice is strangely smooth and teasing.

“What’s this?” Another invader yells. “An empty village?”

Someone guffaws. “A village empty o’ men.”

“Let us ol’ travellers rest our bones.”

“Yeah, give us a pretty place ta stick ‘r swords.” The horde laughs as one and Haward shuts his eyes in disgust, Rowan shaking with silent anger beside him.

“Git out ‘ere!” a man yells, clearly losing patience.

“Come now, friends,” the first voice reprimands. Haward thinks he must be the leader of this band. “We have time... though I can’t say the same for our dear valley folk.” He chuckles. It’s a shockingly pleasant sound that makes Rowan bare his teeth. “Listen, little warren. Either you save us all the trouble and come out of your hiding-holes, or we drag you out. I tell you, the first is much more pleasant. Perhaps half of you will survive. The second... well, I hope your hounds aren’t hungry. I know mine is.”

The speaker must give some sort of signal, because two horses come charging between the houses, their passage shaking the walls. Haward was so focused on the happenings in the center of the village that he had not heard the approaching beasts, and their sudden appearance alarms him. While just as unhealthy as the horde’s mounts, these stallions are massive, great black horses like two arms of the night reaching forward, running abreast and barely fitting through a wide alley. They bear no riders, but Haward can see something stretched between them.

At first he thinks it’s a yoke, but then the stallions are coming to a crashing halt at the center of the horde’s torch light, stumbling over something and falling to their knees with unholy screams that are intensified by the cheers of the men. The horses collapse in a mess of tangled limbs, tongues lolling, eyes white with madness and lips spitting a thick froth onto the earth. They thrash on the ground, trying and failing to rise to their feet, pulling away from each other but snapping back together, forced by the strange yoke that binds them. Haward has never seen anything like it, the horses so desperate to escape their bondage that they begin to bite at each other, tearing chunks from each other’s throats and plunging hooves into each other’s flanks.

At last the horses go still, their struggles ceasing with a sick gurgle that dyes the earth dark. The cheering fades and the circle of men tighten, but Haward’s view remains unobstructed and he can finally begin to comprehend the scene before him. It seems that there was a rider after all, but the man’s body is now a trampled mess slumped against the horse carcasses. Presumably, it was the rider that the horses somehow tripped on. The body is so badly mangled now that Haward would not have detected him among the spilled innards if not for the scraps of bright tunic.

Then something twitches in the gore, a disturbing occurrence that Haward is used to seeing from the freshly dead on a battlefield. However, this is different. Something twitches and then something rises. A wolf - a man draped with the skin of a wolf - but no, not a man. Haward would be a fool to think it a man.

The creature rises from the gore, two strong legs bent at the knees, back bowed and arms spread to either side, wrists chained with one to each horse carcass. It glows wetly in the fire light, wolf skin hugging its back like the animal died with its claws sunk around the creature’s neck, its head upon the creature’s head. Red glistens and drips from the creature’s muscled limbs like hot tallow from a melting candle, and Haward can see how it trembles with barely contained violence. This is what Haward mistook for the horses’ yoke. This is what the horde keeps leashed.

“Ah, another two horses wasted,” the leader sighs. “He really is hungry tonight, I see. So make your choice, little warren, before we make it for you.”

Haward shudders, sinking the rest of the way to the ground, dragged by his feelings of impotence. He had known that with no shelter in the wide expanses around the village, there was nowhere to go and no time to escape from the horde. He had listened to his instinct, to his other-sense and to the omens, and now they were cornered rats, cowards in hiding who would not even die with the illusion of dignity.

He wants to apologize to the village he has failed, to Sunhild and her two daughters, to Garik, and even to the dog who stands petrified in the farthest corner. Most of all he wants to apologize to Rowan, to the boy turned man, the gift the mountain gave him whom he had sworn to protect.

Haward remembers that day so clearly, when the sharpness of grief had dulled and he was accustomed to a house empty of his wife and son. He had gone looking for a lost lamb among the cliffs, stubbornly trekking further and further up the hills - towards the mountains - despite a thickening blizzard. He never found the lamb; instead he found a child in the snow. The waif had lain sprawled in the white dust and black stones, thin limbs twisted in the blood-red of his cloak, arms spread to his sides like wings that had failed to catch the sky.

Haward had feared that the boy had tumbled from a precipice, but when he lifted the boy up in his arms, he had been undamaged, without a single scratch on his cold pale skin though he was so frail that Haward thought he might slip from his hands like a passing ray of light. Haward brushed the frost from the downy fuzz of his short brown hair and wiped the ice from the dark spikes of his eyelashes. Haward took him home, nursed him to health, and fanned the faint flame of life until he bloomed and blazed, full of energy and mischief and sharp wit. Little Red One, Haward had called him. Rowan.

While Rowan’s first waking had been a disaster that brought the village to arms, Rowan gradually came to his senses, regaining the faculties held by all boys his age though sometimes Haward would swear it was like Rowan had never seen the world before; even his first words had been strange and garbled, his manner efficient but weirdly unfamiliar. Fortunately, while Rowan was muddled with the fog of missing memories, his tongue soon turned silver and his hands as capable as any villager’s.

Once, Haward had asked Rowan if he could remember anything, if he knew why he’d been in those mountains, so far from any settlement. He was met with a sharp intake of breath as Rowan paused in his task, setting the knife and butchered venison down.

“Sometimes, I feel... maybe... I could,” Rowan had said, fishing for words and speaking with the lilt of a slowly fading accent. Rowan’s brows furrowed in concentration, “I feel... I could, but... It is as if I stand at a chasm.” He shook his head, cleaning his hands on a rag. “I don’t know... What I need - is on the other side, or in the night at the bottom?”

Rowan had chuckled and licked his lips, embarrassed. “Sometimes, I feel... unlike me. This is not my body. I am too young. I feel old. I should be old, yeah.” Rowan sighed and started to rub a hand over his scalp before remembering the blood still caked beneath his fingernails. He grimaced and picked at the dried flakes. He was always weirdly fastidious, bathing in the river every day. Ever superstitious, Sunhild said that the snow stole Rowan’s soul; that the snow melted to water and drowned him, and so Rowan searched the river every day.

“I think, already, I fell. And look now. I am lost. I am pieces.” Rowan had shrugged his shoulders helplessly and returned to his work, salting the venison. “I am unlike me.”

Despite his strangeness, Rowan became almost a son to Haward, though Haward never said as much, ashamed to think he might replace his dead blood in such a way. Still, he could not help but love the boy who was at once so innocent and so ancient, who was as clumsy as the pups that fled from his blundering path, as cunning as a fox, and who - unfortunately - sometimes acted as dumb as the sheep he herded.

Now Rowan crouches next to Haward, his eyes wide and fixed unblinkingly on the monster hunched at the heart of their village, and Haward wishes that the ground would open up, that Rowan’s chasm would swallow him once again; send him somewhere safe and far away.

“Very well,” the leader finally calls out, “then we’ll do this one by one. It’s more work, but it’s worth a good show, I’m sure my men agree.”

There’s the bang of doors being kicked in around the village, women and children screaming, and then their own comes down with a splintered crash. Haward reacts quickly, springing up out of his crouch with a roar like he’s twenty winters younger, and stabbing the man who comes in, blade sliding straight through his gut and piercing a second man behind the first. Haward almost buckles under the sudden weight of two speared bodies and he is neither strong nor fast enough to free his blade from the sucking flesh before a third man charges forward, sword raised. It is fortunate that the only sharp thing about the invaders is their weaponry, so the man’s sword catches on the doorframe when he brings it down in what would have been a vicious swing at Haward’s skull.

Haward takes the opportunity to struggle with his own trapped sword, but he needn’t worry, because the third man falls to the ground screaming, blood spurting from his neck, his hands releasing the sword still embedded in the wood of the doorframe. Rowan stands on the other side of the new stack of bodies piled on the threshold, chest heaving and hands wrapped around the sickle still buried in the third man’s neck. His eyes are huge and dark in the flickering light of the horde’s torches, his lip bitten bloody and face pale, making the flecks of red on his skin stand out like newly painted freckles.

“The - the window. Use the window,” Rowan stutters out. Haward tugs one last time at his sword and feels the blade snap, caught between the ribs of one of the bodies. Most of it manages to slide out, and while the length is halved, the sword is now sharper and easier for Haward’s old arms to handle.

Rowan pulls the sickle free and abandons the blocked doorway to circle back to the now open window. He gestures jerkily for Haward to crawl through, also reaching in to help Sunhild and the children out, ignoring how Sunhild slaps his hands away.

As soon as their feet hit the cold earth outside, they take off at a run, heading for the forest on the skirts of the mountain despite knowing that it’s impossibly far. Sunhild clutches one daughter to her chest and drags the other by the hand, Garik close behind. Rowan leads the front while Haward holds the rear, though the reason Haward lags has more to do with his old age than anything.

They dart between houses, somehow managing to thread their way through the chaos without being stopped and then they’re out, standing in the dark beyond the fallen fence posts that once marked the border of their village. They’re all panting for breath and Haward feels the winter air like burning ice water on each inhale, his blood like iron shavings running through his veins.

“Go. Don’t stop,” Haward gasps as he slows to a stop himself, waving his sword towards the distant forest, so far away that he can’t even distinguish a tree covered hill from a grassy one in the moonlight.

Sunhild doesn’t need to be told, but Garik balks, stumbling on loose gravel as he spins around. “What about you?”

“I have to save them,” Rowan says, and Haward’s head jerks in his direction. He had thought the question was directed at him, but it’s Rowan who continues. “You have to guard Sunhild and the girls. Help anyone else who gets out, yeah?”

“Rowan, you’re staying with them!”

Rowan frowns, turning to face Haward. “I know you’re going to go back. But not alone.”

“Yes alone. If I can save any others: good. If I fail, then I’m no great loss-”

“Shut up!” Rowan snaps. “Fa- Haward, you’re - you - they need help! And I can do that. I can help.”

Haward wants to argue - he can feel the fearful anger bubbling up like it hasn’t in years - but he can still hear the cries of the village. He bites his tongue and squeezes his eyes shut.

Rowan takes it for the acceptance it is and as soon as Garik turns to follow Sunhild and the girls, Haward and Rowan race back to the village.

Though the horizon is lit orange with torches, Haward can see that no houses have been set ablaze and he’s not sure what that means. With the smoke that preceded their arrival, Haward had the impression that the horde destroyed everything in its path and the closer Haward gets to the village, the more confused he becomes.

While some houses have their doors flattened and have had their residents forcibly removed the other houses look untouched. They remain unmolested, even as the shadows of men dance around them, dragging prisoners to the center of the village. It’s like the men don’t even see the wooden faces tucked into the knolls, but before Haward can voice his thoughts, Rowan is sprinting ahead, his sickle raised inexpertly over his head like an idiot with absolutely no forethought.

“No, you stupid child!” Haward has no choice but to run after Rowan, cursing his impulsive nature. Haward should have expected something like this, even if Rowan seemed steady-minded only moments earlier.

Haward only wonders if the action is truly impulsive when he sees Rowan silently bury the sickle in an unguarded back.

Attackers fall upon Haward as soon as he breaks the cover of darkness and he counts on years of experience and training to cut a path through the bodies until he stands with his idiot boy.

There is no chance that they will survive the fighting, but they have to try. Every moment that they remain in battle is an opportunity they give to the villagers to escape.

Haward doesn’t know how long they fight for, but it is for far longer than he thinks should be possible considering their meagre defence. He doesn’t question the good fortune. The rhythm of attack and defence, swipe and parry takes hold of him and even after his limbs have gone numb with exertion his body carries on. He is only faintly aware of the few villagers who manage to find shelter in the strangely ignored houses, his eyes catching on the reddish stains on these doors - old stains, old blood - but the only thing he diligently tracks is Rowan’s position nearby.

That is how he knows when a pommel clips the side of Rowan’s head.

Rowan stumbles, sickle slipping out of his hands with a grunt, legs tangling as he goes down. Haward immediately dispatches his opponent and closes the small distance between them, just in time to deflect a second blow, a cutting sweep aimed at the exposed nape of Rowan’s bowed head.

The sudden burst of speed and strength costs him dearly, but they were never going to outlast the seemingly endless number of invaders. It is only a few more beats before his broken sword is finally knocked away like a toy and his feet are swept out from under him. He lands painfully on his back next to Rowan’s hunched form.

Rowan is still clutching his head, peeling his skullcap away and trying and failing to lift into a crouch, using his sickle to prop himself up before it is kicked out of his reach by an invader’s foot.

The fighting is done and they have lost, but a little pride blooms alongside his grief when he sees that there are quite a few invaders lying dead alongside his fallen clansmen. Well done for some farming old-men and boy-men.

Someone grabs him, wrenching him roughly to his feet and dragging him towards the center of the village. Rowan and the other surviving villagers are given the same treatment and they are thrown together in a huddled group just outside the reach of the still-snarling creature. Haward thanks whatever grace spares those in the protected houses, but there is no luck left for the rest of them.

“Valiant effort,” the leader says once the horde has settled around their prisoners. The man is surprisingly slight to be riding in a crowd of burly savages, but otherwise unremarkable. He appears to be the leader of this arm of the horde, but it is clear to Haward that his status is only loosely held, granted by his sharper tongue. He is only a slightly bigger rat in a greater plague.

“What purpose does this serve?” Haward croaks out, fuelled by a quiet anger, the burn of which drowns out the ache in his lamed leg and the sting of fresh cuts.

“Does it matter?” the leader says, pacing his horse in front of his kneeling prisoners like a captain before his men. “If I may be honest, this serves no purpose at all. This little warren is only a rest stop along our campaign. The greater war is not of your concern. You will never see the fruit of it.” The leader smiles knowingly. “Old man, you aren’t the first to think us mere ruffians. A ‘horde,’ but there is nothing so deadly as numbers. Except perhaps a good pet, which you’ll understand soon enough. I did promise my men a good time.”

At this the men hoot, then they begin calling out to each other. They place bets and Haward’s gut rolls sickly when the leader finally points out several men and women. The chosen are pulled to their feet and lined up in a cue like cattle for the slaughter, and Haward does not have the strength for this.

He can barely meet the eye of the woman at the head of the cue, Siv. Her handsome features are distorted by terror and her face is blotchy from crying. Her sobs seem to stutter in her throat like she means to hold them back, and though Haward can’t hear her over the excited roar of the horde, the imagined sound is worse than anything the air can carry.

Haward can’t count the number of times he and Rowan relied on Siv to mend their clothes. Her husband is gone like most others and she has a young daughter and two sons. Haward has already seen the body of one of her boys. Younger than Rowan. Cleaved nearly in two, just outside his house where Haward used to see the child throwing scraps to the dogs.

A choked noise escapes Rowan as he leans forward on his knees, as if he can reach out of the crowd and into the cue to pluck Siv to safety, but Rowan can barely manage kneeling at the moment.

Siv is looking at Haward, pleading as if he can do something, but there is nothing. Blood trickles into one of Siv’s eyes, dying the whites red and turning the iris into a copper disc. Haward looks away.

He does not watch as one by one the men and women of his village are thrown to the creature for the horde’s entertainment. It is enough to hear the creature’s bellowed rage, the wet sound of flesh parting from bone, the shrill screams of the dying. It is enough to see the red stain that creeps slowly across the earth like a shadow reaching for the waiting villagers. It is enough to feel Rowan shuddering next to him, yelling abuse at the horde until he slumps down, exhausted in every way.

Haward feels like he may be a ghost already, until Rowan is suddenly jerked away from his side. Then life comes rushing back in all its brutal pain. “No!”

Their end is inevitable, but acceptance has not sunk so deep into Haward that he can lie down and let Rowan be torn apart. “No! Rowan!”

Haward surges to his feet and he doesn’t notice the hands restraining him until he sees the distance growing between Rowan’s dragged body and his own reaching hands. He doesn’t understand why they won’t let him die alongside Rowan if their end will be the same regardless.

“No, let him go! No please! No!” He cannot witness this. He cannot even look at the thing in the centre of the village beyond flashes of gleaming white fangs, the bristle of wolf’s fur and the shiny dark of a wide red pool. The glimpse of a pale mangled foot burns into his mind and he cannot help but think of white rabbits and all the dead things littered through his life.

The horde laughs as Haward roars for them to stop. He begs. Mercy, mercy, mercy-

“Please, not my son!”

He fights like the dogs did against their ropes, trying to tear his arms free from the hands that restrain him. His struggle only dislocates his shoulder, the fiery pain like shears snipping through the chords of his muscles, but he remains in their grip. They ignore him in favour of the bloody spectacle that Rowan promises to become.

“Rowan!”

To his shame, Haward can feel tears gathering in his eyes, blurring his already dull vision. It feels like he is ripping his own arm from his body, but he continues to pull and wrench and twist, digging his feet into the hard earth and trying to drag him, and every man holding him, forward.

“Rowan!” Haward calls again, but Rowan doesn’t reply.

The two men hauling Rowan towards the beast pause to rearrange their hold so that one man grasps Rowan’s wrists and the other holds Rowan’s feet. Rowan doesn’t even struggle, his limbs pliant in their perfunctory manoeuvring, dazed from blood loss and the blow to his head. Then the two men begin to swing Rowan between them, building the slightest momentum, and Haward can’t close his eyes this time, part of him believing that if he just doesn’t blink the next bloody scene will be held at bay.

Everything feels frozen in time, like the winter has sealed them beneath the river and Haward watches through a thick sheet of ice: Rowan suspended in the air as the two men release his body, swinging him forward, launching him towards his end.

Everything is so cold and Haward doesn’t understand how Rowan could bear to bathe in winter when it feels like this.

Again, Haward stands in the snow. Haward kneels in the snow. All around him is an endless carpet of bitter white, broken by the jagged rocks shed from the mountain, black teeth knocked from its maw. It is endless and from the white sky there only falls more white, more snow. It’s in his lungs and in his nose; it sits on his tongue and fills the canals of his ears, and his wife is not there to kiss the frost from his lips and his son is not there to laugh the icicles from his ears.

There is only the whiteness, and he drowns in it, flounders forward in search of something lost until colour blooms before his eyes, a wash of red fabric bled like crushed berries. At the center there is the boy again, but he does not lie prone and weakened as before and he is not a boy anymore, no.

He sits tall, the long lines of his unclothed body twisting heavenward like a fine-branched tree, rivulets of water chasing lean curves and spilling from his upturned palms like spring water.

Haward calls to him, but the blizzard steals his breath and the boy’s eyes remain closed. His face is turned up like a mirror for the moon.

Haward calls to him, but he is drowned by the snow and he is drowned by the baying of the dogs; the wolves.

Haward blinks.

The thud of Rowan’s body on the ground is made wet with the squelch of drying blood, the earth overwhelmed by its volume. The joyful roar of the horde peaks with breaking anticipation, but Haward doesn’t make a noise, just falls to his knees in the slack grip of his keepers, waiting for the killing roar of the creature.

It doesn’t come.

The horde doesn’t notice at first and it takes some time for their cheers to die down to a confused murmur. By then Rowan has managed to push himself upright, legs curled beneath him and his weight propped on shaking arms. Rowan tilts his head up to face the creature in what Haward would like to call defiance, but he knows it’s not. Rowan tilts his head up as if drawn, inevitable as the rising of the sun. Rowan sits in the gore of dead villagers, in a welling spring of red which trickles and runs from its origin in little tributaries, little fingers that claw through the frost like spreading light. Rowan sits and lifts his head. He opens his eyes.

“What’s goin’ on ‘ere?” one of the invaders yells. His voice quavers. “What’s wrong with ‘em?”

The creature stands still, seemingly transfixed with its new prey, but its stillness is almost peaceful, like an ocean finally calmed after a storm or a wind finally settled on a plain. Its back is bowed, pushing its face closer to Rowan’s, shape hunched but at ease. Haward can see the tension melt out of its limbs like the ragged edges of a sword soothed by the heat of the tempering flame. Its arms hang loosely at its sides, its fingers relaxed and its claws suddenly blunt and harmless.

The greatest shock is when Haward glances back up at the creature’s twisted face and sees that its eyes have lost their red shine. They are just eyes now, their colour hidden in the night’s darkness like any human’s should be.

The creature - it - he - slowly reaches one hand, one trembling hand out towards Rowan’s upturned face, chains clinking softly in his trance. The movement is so slow and careful that Haward aches at the sight.

It is a kind hand.

“Kill ‘im already!”

From where the stone comes, Haward doesn’t know, but the rock connects with Rowan’s skull with a quiet crack. It strikes where Rowan had already received a blow and he slumps to the ground. He doesn’t move.

Haward can’t breathe. Perhaps no one can, because the night is dead quiet. The hand of the man - the creature - remains suspended, cradling empty air. Then the hand drops. The fingers turn to claws, the hands to fists, the bowed back snaps straight.

The creature’s eyes flash red, burning with such cold intensity that Haward can’t look at its face. Its hands take hold of the chains that hang from the manacles on its wrists and it twists the lengths of metal around its forearms. Then it pulls and in two vicious tugs - so quick that it turns the chain links into serrated teeth - it tears the chains free from where they were wrapped around the torsos of the horse carcases, ripping straight through the bodies, cutting straight through the spines.

When the free ends of the chain hit the ground, chaos erupts. The horde abandons their prisoners and run screaming for their horses, trampling over each other in their panic. Riders are thrown to the ground by their frightened mounts; invaders clamber to escape, stabbing each other to steal each other’s horses and getting kicked in the ribs by the very mounts they try to steal. The tide has turned on the horde, but there is no civility and no organization. It is a melee for survival and it is brutal. The men have turned into animals; the animal into pure killing intent.

The creature doesn’t roar or posture or swipe haphazardly at the bodies around it as it did when it was held in bondage. The creature stalks through the crowd of terrified men like a farmer threshing wheat, methodically whipping the lengths of chain out in precise and deadly strikes. It brushes men off their feet, cracks the teeth from their mouths and winds the metal snakes around their necks, constricting slowly, slowly- snap. It peels flesh from tendon, leaving great flaps of it to dangle and jiggle in the breeze. Bones break under the thwack of the chain, spilling juice like splintered branches. Skeletons distort and muscles twist under a force they were not built to withstand.

It’s a lurid display of horror that only drives the men into further madness. The chains which held the creature prisoner for so long are now extensions of its body, two great tails that coil around the men who try to flee, that beat those who lay on the ground into a putrid slop.

Even as a veteran, it’s almost too much for Haward. He can close his eyes, but he can’t block his ears from the screaming, the single continuous wail born from their collective throats. He can’t stifle the scent of blood, so thick it feels as if he’s swallowing his own life, and he thinks he’ll be coated with the stench of shit and bile, viscera and human fat even when he passes into the next world.

It’s an effort to steel himself against the hellish bombardment on his senses and he almost adds his own vomit to the miasma, but he manages. Haward focuses and crawls through the mess of running feet, tripping invaders where he can and directing stray villagers to hide in the houses when he stumbles into them, until finally his knees are stained in the blood of the dead and he is by his son’s side.

“Rowan,” Haward says, shaking him gently.

Rowan’s head tips to the side with the jostling, but that’s it, and it is every nightmare that has already passed, come to haunt Haward again.

Haward runs his fingers lightly over Rowan’s scalp, but they are both covered in too much blood and flayed flesh, he can’t tell what belongs to whom. Haward tries to listen for Rowan’s breath but when he puts his ear by Rowan’s slack mouth he hears nothing. It is only when Haward lays a shaking hand on Rowan’s chest that he can feel the minute rise and fall; the flutter of the heart.

Haward could cry with his relief and he wastes no more time, wedging his hands under Rowan’s unconscious body so they can find cover. He’s so focused on the dead weight in his arms that he doesn’t even register the change in atmosphere until a shrill scream pierces the night, different from those preceding it. It is higher, younger: a child’s.

Rowan leaps out of Haward’s hold like a man struck by lightning, landing on the ground in a graceless pile at the same time Haward spins around to see a little girl pressing herself into a wall, cowering back from the creature advancing on her.

At once it becomes clear that all the invaders are dead. The village is littered with their carcasses and the only screams now are the villagers’ as the creature continues with its killing spree, mindless as a storm.

Without thinking, Haward dives forward and manages to get between the girl and the creature just as it whips a chain towards her. Haward isn’t aware of the chain connecting with his body. All he knows is the scrape of gravel against his palms and a pain like a flaming rafter falling on his back.

He gasps and drops the rest of the way to the ground, the crying girl hugged protectively to his chest, his burning back turned towards the creature like a bale of hay posing as a castle wall. He prepares himself for worse, but the roar of pain in his ears is interrupted by Rowan’s panicked yelling.

Haward doesn’t recognize Rowan’s babble, but the foreign sound is punctuated again and again with a single word - a name, Haward thinks - and just like that the creature stops, tumbling to the ground like a felled tree. Haward turns his head and watches as Rowan stumbles to the creature’s side, one hand reaching out and the other clutching his bleeding head.

The creature pants loudly in the quiet, great rattling breaths like a drowned soul pulled from the sea and Rowan continues to babble in his strange lilting tongue, a nonsensical music that seems to sooth the creature-who-is-a-man as effectively as the uncertain hands Rowan lays upon his skin.

Haward releases the sobbing girl from his protective hold, pushing her towards one of the terrified women before crawling gingerly towards Rowan and the man, ignoring the pain in his back and the cramp in his leg. He is almost afraid to interrupt Rowan’s babble, some part of him wondering if the words are a spell. Some part of him wonders if Sunhild is right. “Rowan, what..?”

Rowan shakes his head, eyes wide and shockingly pale in his bloodied face, but just as uncomprehending as Haward’s. Tremors run through him but he doesn’t let go of the man he’s crouched over. His voice is so thin and young. “Haward - Fa, I don’t - I don’t. I don’t know, Fa, Dad. Der-“ and his words dissolve again into that other tongue.

Haward doesn’t understand what’s happening, but he can tell now that Rowan doesn’t understand either. Haward doesn’t think Rowan even knows the meaning of his own words, but the man does. The man knows.

The man’s gaze is sharp, fiercely intelligent and so different from the blank killer’s stare of before. He looks out at the world from under the wolf’s head and from under a heavy brow, but he is no barbarian and no simple weapon anymore. He is other, and Haward does not doubt that the man knows exactly what is happening, that the man knows exactly what Rowan is saying.

There are so many questions Haward needs answered, but there is only one that makes it past his lips. “Who is he to you?” Haward asks, but he is not asking the boy. “Who is he?”

The man does not answer, he only curls a large hand - a kind hand - around Rowan’s thin wrist, smearing spirals into his blooded flesh, and as Rowan’s breaths begin to calm and his words begin to taper, Haward grows cold. He can feel the heavy stare of the villagers around him and he can feel the knife that hangs in the air. There is fear and there is violence, but for the first time in a very long time Haward does not know where each lies.

The night is quiet, but Haward hears a howling as he meets the man’s steely eyes and he thinks back to the wanderer, the lad who had rolled in fever, flinching away from Rowan’s touch.

“They think they have it leashed,” the wanderer had said, “but it bathes in blood. It lives for Red.”