Fenrir

Fire. There was fire everywhere I looked. Fire and fighting. The den had erupted into a war zone, and somehow I found myself in a place of command. Wolves who I had been raised with and those who raised us, took orders from me. They stood at attention as I spoke, the crackling hissing fire behind us a background noise as they dutifully carried out my orders.

Orders that I meant as mere suggestions.

I was no leader. I had been raised to fight on the front line of our hints, to charge in at another's command. And yet, the others listened. I could see it in their eye, the way they looked at me. It was how I had looked at our late pack leader. They saw me as a leader and I couldn't figure out why.

It didn't matter, though. What needed to be done still needed to be done. So I gave orders and watched, and hunted, and fought. The spiders were slowly being whittled down one by one. Each of them was tougher than they had any right to be, and if it weren't for our superior numbers we would have lost. I was certain of it.

Because, even now, we were losing more ground than we were gaining. We just had a lot more ground to lose in the first place. The spiders learned that the hard way. Their deaths served as messages, lessons carved in red. Yet, they didn't listen. They charged when they should have ran, throwing themselves at the pack in a mad attempt to do as much damage as they could.

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And it almost worked.

By the time the battle was over, we were bleeding. Good wolves were still dying, and I couldn't tell if I had done a good job. I felt like I hadn't, but the elders said otherwise. They congratulated me, and thanked me. Their tones so genuine that it almost made me sick. We had just experienced a slaughter and they thought it a good job.

Why? The question rang in my mind with no answer. Not one that I liked anyway. Eventually though, I had to move on and I did. I let the question fade into a buzz in the back of my thoughts, hidden by an uproar of other easier questions.

Then I was summoned, not to treat the wounded like normal, but to be appointed the new alpha. It was a short ceremony. The elders gathered around me and howled at the silent moon, hidden from us, and I hoped with them. The pack watched on howling in their hearts - I was sure.

Afterwards things returned to normal. For everyone but me. Instead, I was thrust into a new world. One I didn't recognize. The weight of every wolf in our pack was now on my shoulders and I didn't know what to do. I wasn't even sure if there was anything for me to do.

Except finding out who was responsible. It seemed like the right thing to do. Not only do I could avenge my pack, but so I could learn why. Our pack hadn't done anything of note, least of all something that would bring about an attack like this.

It didn't make any sense, and the corpses yielded no answers. They only offered more questions.