“It was 1943 and things were looking bad for the Axis. A large part of their forces was stuck in the middle of Stalingrad, hurting for every meter that they took from a handful of Russian madmen; Italy had upped and abandoned their alliance and the Chinese were bleeding the Japanese dry in Changde. Things weren’t looking good for uncle Adolf, not when he knew that it was only a matter of time before the Americans came knocking at his door.
“Now, the Nazis knew that their coffers were almost empty and that they were stretched so thin that they could not hope to mount a powerful enough counter-offensive in time. They needed results and they needed them right then and there, if they ever wanted to have a chance at winning this. In desperation, Adolf Hitler turned to his personal occultists, a shady little bunch that called themselves the Thule Society. Those people jumped at the chance. They had been kept out of the war in anything but in an experimental capacity. Now, they had the opportunity to provide a means to win it. All they had to do, was give Hitler a weapon. And oh, what a weapon they found for good old Uncle Adolf!
“Their reports, from what we pieced together as we sifted through the ashes of the Reichstag, claimed that these weapons were called Kriegswolfs. According to the most potent mysticists in service to the Reich, they were magically created creatures who descended from Fenris himself, the Big Bad Wolf of Norse Legend. ‘Fierce warriors’ one report said ‘capable of withstanding any wound’ a field officer wrote ‘able to blend with the troops behind enemy lines with incomparable ease’ the SS field report said after the Kriegswolfs very first deployment. It happened in Kharkiv, in Russia. In front of the officers’ own eyes, those slavering monstrosities just shed their fur and their teeth, turned into simple, frail men and women, crossed the crossfire and surrendered themselves to the commissars. Two hours later, the screams began. By noon that day, the Germans managed to infiltrate the Russian lines, their soldiers wading ankle-deep in red grue.
“This, of course, opened up a whole horizon of possibilities for Uncle Adolf and his advisors: it was abundantly clear that the Kriegswolfs were not enough to win the war and that in the event of a full-scale deployment the Allies would not take long before they set up a counter-measure. The only option they had to make full use of their new weapon was through assassination and sabotage. I saw the files where they’d written the roughdrafts of the project: covert insertion of the Kriegswolf operatives into enemy soil, each of them tasked with killing one head of the Allied forces, someone whose loss would severely hinder our adavance. After that, the Kriegswolfs would be allowed to wreak as mush havoc behind the enemy lines as possible, to demoralize the population before their extraction. The people in charge of Axis intelligence had their doubts about the success of the project but the brass was confident in the capabilities of their unkillable, undetectable assassins.
“They sent out exactly two dozen of their Kriegswolf assassins. They sent four to the United States, tasked with assassinating the President. Of those four, one was found and killed during wartime, gunned down in the Oval Office and then stabbed to death with a silver knife by the first lady. The other was captured in Orsonville in 1951. It died in a secret facility in Nevada, its death deemed a suicide. The rest slipped into the shadows. As for the other Kriegswolfs, they very nearly pulled it off. They killed a lot of good men, caused too much havoc behind enemy lines; anywhere they went, disaster and disease would follow in their wake. Legends of hidden, creeping horrors that wore the skin of men and women surfaced everywhere and it wasn’t long before your average Tommy would stay up at night, looking for some lumbering shape that might lunge at him in the darkness to sink its teeth in his heart. Paranoia set in; took root in the minds of the men.
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“The Kriegswolfs weren’t as powerful as an atom bomb could be, but if they were allowed to continue unchecked then we might have lost every significant battle that we won over the Axis, through applied terror alone. It was then that the Allies successfully made contact with the Wanderers and offered them advance intelligence in exchange for the elimination of the Kriegswolfs. And wouldn’t you know it, it worked. I had read the extensive reports, of course but they all seemed like fiction. How quickly they moved, their strange weapons and their coordination. How easily they dispatched things that could put themselves back together after being flattened by a howitzer and still muster the strength to tear apart two dozen men. When I saw them with my own eyes in Berlin, that’s when I believed them.
“In his last effort to maintain his wavering line of defense, Uncle Adolf taksed the Thule Society to release their Kriegswolfs, let them loose in Berlin to pick off the Soviets and the Allies. They let out a few other things, too; creatures that they had captured and analyzed, brought in from every corner of the world. They were terrible, slithering horrors that reached out from the shadows and killed friend and foes alike. Contagious swarms of locusts that would creep into the deceased and animate their dead bodies. There was this creature that was made out of living fire. It reduced two Soviet tanks to piles of molten slag before they doused it with the fire extinguishers.
“We killed them all, in good time. Burned them to ash or riddled them with bullets. But the Kriegswolfs, they fought us tooth and nail, struck at us from the shadows. I daren’t even think what would have become of us if it had not been for your grandfather and your great-grandmother. She was the one that challenged their Alpha when it decided to hold Stalauer Strasse by himself. They fought atop a pile of our own dead, the foolhardy few that had tried to storm the beast. It was over in seconds. When the dust settled he was missing a hand, severed by a silver axe. She had lost her eye. He ran and we charged across the city, all the way to Hitler’s bunker. History knows about that, of course. Adolf’s suicide, the surrender of the Axis. We made sure that they didn’t know about the rest.
“Like for example, how there was a roentgen burst from inside the bunker. Or how, of all the documented members of the Kriegswolf special forces teams, only half of them were killed in the field or later found out by Soviet and Allied spies. About the strange machine that a very determined member of the Thule Society blew up so we couldn’t get to it. How the machine had been mentioned in a half-burned document as a ‘Zeitformer’. That’s German for ‘time shaper’. Apparently, the Thule Society had been fiddling with time experiments but their test results seemed inconclusive, flakey. The machine apparently had the capacity to send someone back in certain moments in time in a very specific, very limited fashion: through events deemed ‘historically unstable’. Whatever that is supposed to mean.
“I looked into it, of course. Devoted a good ten years of my life looking for a way to divine the meaning of it, the use of this ‘time shaper’. And it was all so strange, how that one werewolf was found in this little mountain town, how he made allusions during his interrogation that there could have been something here in this unimportant little dot on the map of the world. How strange is it that he would be in Orsonville, a place with such a rich, strange history of events. Cults and revolts and a massacre and tunnels going down deep, deep into the bowels of the Earth. A pack of werewolves, running things. An old folks’ home that no one ever visits or seems to leave.
“You’re putting it together, aren’t you? I did, too. That’s why I came here. That’s why I chose to fortify myself in a nothing little town like this. You probably felt it, when you came here; this tension, this strange power in the air. A mesh of light and shadow, hanging over everything, enveloping every inch of this place.
“I have reason to think that the time shaper is here, Finn. Hidden somewhere in Orsonville, put together and just waiting for its switch to be thrown and let all those…things spill out all the way from the dawn of time. Can you even imagine this? A werewolf invasion of unprecedented numbers, spilling out from this place out into the world. A tide of nightmares, let loose on humanity.
“Now more than ever, Finn, we need a Wanderer.”