Last Fables: Fraudewolf - Volume One

By Jonathan M. Congdon, Ivan Griscenko and Alex S. Laflamme

An anthropomorphic high fantasy, where a hero single-handedly brought an end to an age of horrors and monsters, and the animal world has recovered from the devastation since. But a rising storm threatens to consume the divided realms of the carnivores and herbivores once again. Amidst the rising turmoil, a female jackrabbit

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Fablists
• Release date: Jun 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798890743862

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Copyright © 2023 J.M. Congdon, Ivan Griscenko and Alex Savoie-Laflamme.

Third edition published March 2023

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

Certain illustrations contain non-sexual nudity. Reader discretion is advised.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, excepting the use of brief quotations in a book review.

thelastfables.com

TO OUR WIZARDS

CONTENTS

MAP

PREFACE

CHAPTER ONE: THE WATCHRABBIT

CHAPTER TWO: SIREN

CHAPTER THREE: HOUND AND HARE

CHAPTER FOUR: COZENING

CHAPTER FIVE: OPENING THE MIRROR

CHAPTER SIX: PSEUDOKINESIS

CHAPTER SEVEN: DIVULGENCE

CHAPTER EIGHT: WE, THE UNBROKEN

CHAPTER NINE: MASTER OF MAGIC

CHAPTER TEN: WOLVEN WISHES

CHAPTER ELEVEN: PRINCE OF PREDATORS

CHAPTER TWELVE: THE TOWER OF THE WIND

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: AUSTERITY AND REVELRY

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: THE GENTEEL

CHAPTER FIFTEEN: THEATER OF TAUNTS

CHAPTER SIXTEEN: CURTAILMENT

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: STATECRAFT

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: THE DIAMOND RING

CHAPTER NINETEEN: MILDEUS

CHAPTER TWENTY: THE WOEMAKER

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: THE MALKIN DRESS

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: INGLENOOK

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: ALL FLESH IS GRASS

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: HAMMER OF WITCHES

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: PRACTICE WORDPLAY

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: OF THE BROKEN

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: VALEDICTORY

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: SPELLBOUND

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: THE HAUNTING OF THE HELLCAT

CHAPTER THIRTY: THE DYING LIGHT

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: PERDITION

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: THE ABJECTED

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: WHERE THE RIVER BENDS

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: KATABASIS

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: THE UNVANQUISHED

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: THE FINAL WORD

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN: STORMROAR

ART CREDIT

PREFACE

Every story is a journey, and this novel is one I didn’t take alone. Last Fables is a book that wouldn’t exist without either of my co-creators; everything from the setting to the plot was shaped in ways I couldn’t do if I was working by myself. It was a path we walked together, cutting our way through the wilds of our imaginations until at last arriving at the volume that you currently hold. I hope—we all hope—that you’ll enjoy the trip.

- J.M.

And in evanesce, he withdrew from all accolades,

all adoration, and the glory of the ages thereon.

The Slayer departed this world, never to return.

- The Seven Labors

by Rengard Mithrideirn

CHAPTER ONE: THE WATCHRABBIT

The hare stalked the wolf.

His trail had grown alternately warm and cold over the years, his passage never anything more than whispers. Rumors filled Eni’s ears and journal, mutterings heard only when the nights grew long and cups grew empty, but they were enough. They had brought her to Ctesiphon, where the air felt almost galvanic with potential, and to a small tavern where she knew the other patrons felt the same.

The voices of mammals were just a little too loud, a little too cheery, with a desperate edge to every word that passed from one set of lips to another. All conversation stopped as the door banged open, an ash-choked wind blowing in grit and making the lanterns hung from the rafters overhead sway drunkenly. The floorboards vibrated with the passage of a massive bull making his way to the bar, the mournful breeze dying in an instant as a waitress slammed the door shut.

Mammals began talking again as the bull sat down heavily, wordlessly ordering a beer, and for a moment Eni could almost tell herself she was imagining the heavy atmosphere.

Almost.

Just outside the inn’s cozy confines Ctesiphon was dying by inches, the stench of burning crops impossible to banish no matter how many sweet-smelling herbs dangled from the smoke-blackened rafters. The Blight was implacable, an enemy that couldn’t be fought by any normal means, but Eni wasn’t searching for someone normal.

She wanted what everyone left in the city did, from the farmers with orchards of once-sweet fruit trees gone soft and gray to the merchants with pockets as empty as the markets and streets. Perhaps it was a foolish hope; it had been abandoned by those with the means to flee Ctesiphon and the Blight that licked hungrily at its crops, but it was a hope nonetheless.

Their perdition would end, just as the Scourge had, if only they kept their faith. At the thought Eni’s paw ran across her latest treasure, taking solace from the feeling of the hard cover underneath the thick cotton wrappings that entombed it. She had nothing else to show for her tenacity, nothing else to bring forth for the Archivist’s judgement and prove her mettle as an antiquarian, but more than anything the heavy tome felt like a sign.

It might have only been wishful thinking, something to avoid considering the Archivist’s subtle but crushing disappointment if she returned from her latest journey with nothing else, but to Eni it seemed undeniably right. A cheaply printed eighth edition copy of The Seven Labors had been the book that ignited her imagination with tales of the Aberrant who had pushed back the darkness and brought the world into a new golden age of peace and prosperity, and her discovery of a first edition copy of the same volume seemed undeniably portentous.

The stories it held were old friends, staunchly loyal to Eni no matter how far she traveled and comforting in the strength of their hero’s example. Prior to his disappearance decades before her birth he had always shown up where the mammals of the world had needed him most, and it was why Eni had stayed.

If there was anywhere else in the world where a hero was more desperately needed, Eni couldn’t think of it. And so, as the weeks had dragged past and the citizens of Ctesiphon torched one field after another in a hopeless attempt at slowing the Blight, Eni had kept going through her list.

She had started it years ago, when she first began to search, and although it had spanned dozens of different journals and hundreds of pages it was still so clear in her mind she barely needed to look at her notes. Her time in Ctesiphon had narrowed the prospects, each failure another harsh line through a name, but all of those failures had brought her to the Three Apples Inn. The wolf sitting quietly at the bar might have been the next name to check, but the light in the tavern was just ever so slightly too dim to really get a good look at him. Resisting the urge to squint, just in case someone got the wrong idea and thought she was trying to be alluring, she could barely see his lips move as he addressed the bartender. Eni strained to make out the words as best as she could with her ears covered, trying to focus solely on what he was saying.

You hear about those things?

The words hadn’t been meant for Eni, but she couldn’t help how her neck straightened and went rigid as she snapped reflexively away from the wolf toward the source. At one of the small tables near where she had set herself up, two grizzled old badgers who might have been brothers or cousins were getting stupendously drunk. The thinner and somewhat less gray of the two was the one who had spoken, his mug spilling cider as he gestured theatrically.

I hear from Limm his barn got ripped apart by something bigger’n a house, with more legs than his entire family. May the Mother blind me if I lie.

The other badger snorted so expressively that Eni watched in fascinated horror as the spray from his nose landed in his mug. If the badger noticed, he gave no sign of it, drinking deeply before replying.

Limm’s so full of shit his eyes are brown. Probably just talking big so you’d buy him a round.

But— the first badger began to protest, but his drinking partner cut him off.

But nothing, Nale, he said, You really think something’d attack Ctesiphon? The Eighth Sovereign? No. Limm’s a drunk and a fool, and so are you if you listen to his stories.

The badgers’ talk drifted back to less interesting territory—Nale’s wife apparently had an abscess on the back of her neck he half-feared and half-hoped would kill her—and Eni repressed a sigh as she looked back down at her notes.

Staring at the pages, she felt an immediate shame with herself. He would come. He would. Despite every objection or sly insult from her colleagues, despite every setback and disappointment Eni had faced in the past ten years, despite even the complete lack of any definitive proof, her desire to find him had never lessened. She could feel how close she was, all the signs pointing to Ctesiphon no matter what a tipsy badger thought. He would return, called away from whatever noble deeds had consumed his attention to deliver the world from evil, and she would be there to see it.

That was the theory, anyway.

In reality, it had been two weeks of nothing as Eni’s purse rapidly emptied, the cost of food seeming to go up every time she went to what was left of the market. All that happened was that more of the farmland surrounding the city was burned, more mammals left, and Eni herself edged closer to the point where she’d have to give up. To earn a little money and stave off the inevitable she had tried offering her services as a scrivener, but there just weren’t enough mammals left who needed something written for them or read to them. Her tankard of cider and plate of wilted vegetables was only the third payment she had received so far, and it might be the last one.

But the cider warmed her insides pleasantly against the cool fall weather, and Eni drank slowly as she looked from her neatly organized journal of notes and sketches of wolf Aberrants—far too many of which she had crossed out—to where the mammal at the bar had been. He had vanished while she listened in on the badgers, and Eni didn’t manage to swallow her disappointment; she finally let out her sigh as she looked back down at her table to the carefully wrapped book. She had glanced through it once, when she had been negotiating its purchase, and it had stayed securely bound in its cotton shroud ever since. She knew that she shouldn’t open it, and certainly not anywhere as far away from the controlled environment of Terregor’s university as an inn, particularly when there were still so many Aberrants in Ctesiphon to research, but…

She had barely even examined the book, after all, and surely it deserved a second look. She hadn’t had nearly enough time to truly appreciate the craftsmanship that had gone into its making. Still, she was as careful as she could be, making sure the book didn’t touch the surface of her table directly and wiping her paws against a corner of the cotton before delicately turning the pages to the story of her favorite labor.

The illustrations were far more beautiful than the ones in the copy held in the archives; whatever long-dead noble who had commissioned the manuscript to be copied had employed the services of a masterful artist with a bold eye for color. That the hero in this tome barely resembled the one in the other was hardly surprising; it felt as though no one agreed on any part of his appearance besides the fact that he had been a wolf Aberrant with a thick tail.

The version she saw on the page had a curiously reptilian cast to his features, with a long and wide muzzle filled with needle-like teeth and feet almost like a raptor’s. The illustration of him wielding Nidhogg, his legendary flaming whip sword, to defeat the Wyrmerian Wyvern at what would become the Glass Plains following their duel was the best of its kind Eni had ever seen, the painted flames weaving complex patterns around the terrible beast.

Eni looked up with a grimace of annoyance at the sudden cackling laugh of a hyena telling a ribald joke a few tables away to an almost manically cheerful crowd of eight or ten mammals. She shook her head and looked back down at the book, at the words that she could have recited by heart, and it pulled her in as it always did. The irritating laughter became the crackling of a fire, the clink of mugs becoming the sound of armor moving. The dim light of the inn seemed to burst into the terrible brightness of battle as Eni lost herself in the story.

There was an earth-quaking roar as the great beast bellowed its fury, and a mighty gout of flames followed the sound. The very ground melted into a pool of slag, burning white-hot and throwing off a shimmering haze of heat that brought glowing embers soaring upwards. The wyvern was a monster beyond any other, for it was not just as large as a castle but was also possessed of a ruthless low cunning. A different monster, a lesser monster, would have simply eaten Princess Almara, the greatest beauty of the Volkis Kingdom.

But the wyvern had not.

The fearsome monster had the she-wolf clutched in its mighty grasp, each talon larger than her entire body. The beast kept the princess positioned between them as it turned its great bulk, never allowing an opening. Even as it moved, the beast swiveled a head the size of a gatehouse to track its quarry. The hero of heroes was but a mote compared to the wyvern’s bulk, and surely must have seemed no larger than one of the cinders rising from the pools of molten glass it had formed. But the monster was right to be watchful, because the grim wolf had dodged and eluded each and every one of its bursts of fire, any one of which could have burned up a normal mammal so completely that not even bones would remain.

But the mammal it fought was far from normal.

The fire of the wyvern was as feeble as a match is compared to the sun, so intense was the fire that Nidhogg burned with. The mighty whip-sword made dazzling patterns like lightning across the night sky as its master wielded it, there and gone in an instant. Princess Almara cried out as the tip of the whip-sword came within a hairsbreadth of one of her ears, but such was the—

Hey! an uneven voice called, breaking her focus, You there.

Eni looked up from the book at the mammal who had dared interrupt her, feeling the first tingles building in the tips of her fingers and toes. Eni gasped, trying to reel it back, to force it down, but the drunk seemed to read something in her face that wasn’t there. He was a deer, his movements overly precise with alcohol, and he caught himself heavily on the edge of Eni’s table. A tankard full of foamy beer was loosely gripped in one hoof as he balanced himself with the other. Eni shrank back from his boozy breath, crinkling her nose at the stench of him; the sour and yeasty smell of the beer blended poorly with the flowery cologne he must have doused himself in.

Go away, she gasped out, managing to lift her chin to look him in the eye as she placed her arms protectively over the manuscript and swept up her notes.

Do you know who I am? he asked, straightening himself a touch.

I don’t… I don’t care, Eni said, but her words were drifting away from her as the power started thrumming through her limbs.

The deer’s clothes were finely made even if they were stained with beer. The rich embroidery of his tunic formed an abstract pattern that could have been just about anything, the stitching straining at his sizable gut. His widespread antlers had been plated in gold and inlaid with precious stones, and were it not for his drink-slacken gaze he might have almost looked dignified.

Come on, the deer slurred at Eni as he ignored her words, The Mother gives you a body like that, she doesn’t want it covered. This isn’t Ghabarahata, you know. So come on, let me see.

He reached out, groping at the net hood Eni wore to hide her long and scalloped ears and protect her hearing, and when a finger brushed clumsily against her cheek the energy inside her reached out. Eni sucked in a sharp breath and the deer grinned, but even so sharp as her hearing was she couldn’t hear what he said over the sudden cacophony as everything in the inn with a spirit reached out to her.

Let me burn him, please, the fire crackling merrily in the hearth whispered, its voice pleading as fire tended to be, Oh, let me out and let me burn him.

Drown him, burbled the water in the beer in his tankard, I can drown him.

Or boil him, the fire suggested, Yes, boil him.

Choke him, the air in the tavern moaned, Please, let me choke him for you.

The voices of the elements were the loudest, but they weren’t the only ones. The insects crawling through the walls, the ghostly echo of wooden floorboards, even the rough-hewn stones of the foundation all called out in voices without words. The spirits tugged at the power within Eni, trying to pull it loose, and Eni could feel what little control she had unraveling like a ball of yarn kicked down a flight of stairs.

Remember what happened to the slavers, Eni thought desperately, trying to force down the energies within her, Remember—

Is this deer bothering you, milady? a new voice interrupted, loud enough to pierce the din.

Eni looked up. The drunk’s hoof had been drawn away from Eni by a paw that was much larger and broader, with thick golden rings on the clawed fingers. The newcomer was the wolf who she had been trying to eavesdrop on, and so close to the lantern above her table she finally got a better look at him. He was an Aberrant with an almost leonine touch to his appearance; his muzzle was shorter and blunter than a normal wolf’s and contrasting against his black fur he had a magnificent reddish mane that had been braided with silver beads. His eyes were amber, and while they were kindly when he looked to Eni they instantly hardened once his attention turned to the drunk. He was powerfully built, taller than any wolf Eni had ever seen, and his clothes were richly embroidered. But everything else about his appearance was secondary to his tail. It was long and thick, shaved as was the common style. But what if it wasn’t shaved? Despite herself, despite every false start and failure over the past ten years, Eni couldn’t help the twinge of hope that fluttered up her chest.

Could she have possibly, at long last, found him?

Didn’t mean anything, the deer was mumbling, glaring spitefully at her rescuer as he staggered off, but he did leave them.

The Aberrant smiled at Eni as he reached down to the floor and picked up her hood, which she hadn’t even felt coming loose as the force within her surged. She could feel it inside her, still—she could always feel it—but it had died down, the threat of it bubbling over having passed.

He owns a quarter of the orchards around Ctesiphon, Eni’s new companion said in a low voice, nodding at the retreating back of the deer, Or he did, anyway. With the Blight I expect he’ll lose everything.

He passed Eni her hood before adding, Not that it excuses accosting a lady. Are you alright?

The Aberrant’s voice was soulful and mellow, rich and warm as an old book. He looked to be about forty, somewhat weathered but possessing a nearly regal nobility.

Fine, Eni managed as she took her hood and carefully put it back on.

Her hood was patterned after a fishing net, made of tightly woven silk strands and weighted at the corners, which made it a comforting presence once her ears were covered again.

I must say, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a hare Aberrant before, he observed, But I’m afraid wolf Aberrants such as myself are nearly as common as copper pieces.

He smiled at her, inviting her to join his little joke, and after a moment of stunned silence—almost no one ever correctly called her a hare instead of a rabbit—Eni smiled back, hoping he couldn’t see her notes and sketches hidden under the wrappings for the book. He was right, and on both counts. Eni had never met another leporid like herself, but of all the species of mammals it seemed as though wolf Aberrants occurred much more frequently than in any others. It was one of those frustrating points for trying to trace the legend; with so many other wolf Aberrants, each of them with their own largely unique appearance, it muddied the water as to what he had looked like. It had also been quite common for the illustrators of books to simply find such a wolf to use as a model, which didn’t help either.

I’m Ceslaus, by the way, he continued, offering her his paw to shake.

Had she at last learned the true name of her idol? A flicker of enthusiasm passed over her at the idea, her tail twitching, before she told herself not to get too excited.

Eni, she said as they shook.

Eni had shaken paws with nearly a hundred Aberrants during her quest, all of them with five-fingered paws like hers that unquestionably marked them as different. Besides that commonality Ceslaus’s paw was nothing like Eni’s, being far larger and thicker, but his touch was quite gentle. He applied so little pressure Eni could hardly feel anything but the slight roughness of his paw pads against her palm and finger tips. An instant before he could break their contact, Eni risked upsetting the chaotic flow within her to deliberately pull a little up and push. It was something she had learned, more through trial and error than anything else, sometime before she left her home village for good. There had been a Chloroid in the village square, a monstrous tree tolerated only because it was completely immobile and a single drop of the juice from its misshapen fruit could dull almost any pain. Eni had found that when she grasped the threads of power she could feel the tree’s response, as though she was standing a good distance away from a fire and put out her palm to savor the warmth. Surely, if the wolf Aberrant really was him, she’d be able to feel something similar.

She didn’t.

It wasn’t like feeling the heat of a fire from ten feet away; it was like she had plunged her paw into a fire except without the pain. Energy, stronger than she had ever felt or even dreamed about, called back to Eni, blotting everything else out as it overrode her senses. She could see colors exploding before her vision, her ears overwhelmed by unearthly music sweeter and stranger than anything she had ever heard. The smell of it was like the beginning of spring and the promise of summer, so lovely that the gloomy threat of winter seemed impossibly distant. Eni’s entire body burned with the sensation of that force caressing her back, each strand of fur on her body so exquisitely sensitive she felt aware of each one.

And then Ceslaus let go and it all disappeared as instantly as a soap bubble popping. He shivered slightly, his eyes widening in surprise, and Eni felt as though they were completely alone in the inn, everyone else entirely irrelevant.

You— You’re a very special hare, aren’t you Eni? Ceslaus said at last, and he all but staggered as he took the seat across from her at the little table, Where did you come from?

Siverets, she said eagerly, Are you—

Ceslaus put a finger to his lips, glancing around the room as if checking to see if anyone had noticed them. So far as Eni could tell, no one had, the other mammals still lost in their own conversations and drinks. Not so loud, he murmured, and Eni realized she had spoken quite a bit louder than usual, I’ve never heard of Siverets. Where is it?

It’s on an island off the Nihuron Peninsula, to the West, Eni said, and Ceslaus nodded slowly.

The Nihuron Peninsula, he repeated, his voice low and musing, That’s a long way.

It was. When Eni had left Siverets with the goal of attending university in Terregor, it had taken months to reach Ctesiphon, and then another few weeks of travel once inside the Circle to reach her destination.

Are you… Eni began softly, and then pitched her voice even lower, Are you a mage?

Eni had wanted to ask him if he was the almost mythical hero, returned from his long absence, before she realized how foolish a question it was. The hero had avoided being found for decades, and if Ceslaus really was who she was looking for the last thing she wanted to do was scare him off. He would have to be a mage, though, like one from the days of old when there had actually been mages. Ceslaus glanced around the inn again, and then he slowly pulled a pipe out of his tunic. He pressed one finger against the bowl and the tobacco within suddenly started burning. It had been, unquestionably, magic, done with such ease that Eni couldn’t help but be jealous of his control.

We shouldn’t talk about that here, he said, leaning conspiratorially across the table, Did you come here alone?

Eni nodded, not trusting herself to speak, and Ceslaus gave her an encouraging smile in response.

I’m sure you have a lot more questions for me, he said, And I have some for you. I’ve got a villa just beyond the gate where we can speak without being overheard.

His amber eyes tracked slowly around the room as he spoke, as though he was inviting her to join his paranoia. It wasn’t as though an inquisitor was sitting in the inn, after all, and Eni had seen Ceslaus use magic to light his pipe.

Where is it? Eni asked, When’ll you be free?

Ceslaus lit up his face, his features kindly and warm. It’s not far. We could go now, he said, and he stood up, pulling at the front of his tunic.

Eni stood up too, her remaining cider and plate of food entirely forgotten. She stuffed her notes and sketches back into her bag, hoping again that Ceslaus hadn’t caught a glimpse of them, and barely even remembered to wrap the copy of The Seven Labors into its cotton cocoon before it joined the notes; she was simply much too eager to hear what he had to say. Could he at least know something that would help? After ten long years of doing the best she could to manage the unpredictable energy that had suddenly welled up in her, after spending so much time and effort searching for any clue that might guide her to her goal, Eni had achieved her first small success. Even if Ceslaus wasn’t who she hoped he was—and she had to admit to herself that she desperately hoped that he was—a mage was the next best thing. A mage would have knowledge that couldn’t be found in any of the world’s libraries, no matter how extensive or rare their collection. As she followed the wolf toward the exit of the inn, Eni felt as though for the first time in quite a while she was making progress.

And then, when she was not even five feet from the door, the warning horns began alarming.

The sound was deeply unpleasant, a mixture of a booming bass pressure Eni could feel in her lungs and a higher pitched overtone that all but deafened her sensitive hearing. Throughout the inn, mammals were reacting to it, some freezing in place and others bolting suddenly upright. One mammal fell off his chair, something that under any other circumstances would have surely thrown his audience into gales of laughter. But no one spoke. Even though the horns had not been sounded in decades everyone in the inn, prey and predator alike, understood what they meant on a primal level.

Monsters.

And then, like an anthill that had been kicked, the inn flew into a mad frenzy of activity. Mammals pushed for the exits, all manners forgotten as they shoved others aside. Eni herself was body checked heavily by a goat bleating in mindless panic, and she barely managed to make it out the door before the rest of the mad crush. The other buildings on the street were emptying in a similar fashion, all of the mammals scrambling in the direction of the Altstadt and the protection of the wall and gate. Cries of alarm filled the smokey air, but the warning horns could not be drowned out. Eni’s mind was reeling in confusion; how could this possibly be happening now, right when she was about to get some answers?

Eni! Ceslaus shouted, and she could barely hear him above the din, We need to get inside the wall! Hurry!

His eyes were large and full of concern. Only, no. It wasn’t concern.

It was fear.

Ceslaus was afraid of the monsters, and he was already eager to leave the inn and flee for the protection the wall offered. Eni realized it, and her heart sank. He was a mage, of that she was certain, but he was no kind of hero. A hero would have never run from a monster, wouldn’t cower in safety while danger lurked outside.

Eni swallowed her disappointment, turning to follow Ceslaus, when her eyes were suddenly drawn to something that didn’t belong.

There was a mammal-sized pillar of shadow, black as fresh ink on a clean page, moving against the push of the crowd. And then the shadow was free of the crowd and seemed to be nothing more than a mammal, tall and wearing a ratty gray cloak with the hood up to hide his face.

Eni would have dismissed her vision as a trick of the light, something she hadn’t seen right in the moment with so much soot and ash still filling the air. But the mammal was walking—not running—with a calm sense of purpose. And he was walking away from the safety of the wall, apparently unperturbed by the danger of a monster. He was too well-covered for Eni to tell his species, but as he passed her Eni caught a glimpse of the tip of a long tail poking from beneath the hem of his cloak.

Excitement as shockingly sharp as when she had first heard the legends suddenly rose in her chest, and for an instant it was like being a kit again when everything had felt more intense.

Just like that, Eni knew what she had to do, and not even the pragmatic part of her mind could protest the wave of enthusiasm washing over her.

Eni, come on! Ceslaus shouted, but she ignored him.

She could always find his villa later, after the threat of the monster was gone. But if the ragged mammal was him, Eni wasn’t going to let the opportunity slip through her fingers.

She turned away from Ceslaus and ran after the stranger.

CHAPTER TWO: SIREN

Eni! Ceslaus’s voice called, distinct even above the fearful chatter of the fleeing crowd.

Eni didn’t stop running as she spared a glance over her shoulder back at Ceslaus. He seemed to fight a brief internal battle, hesitantly reaching out with one paw and taking a few tentative steps. Then the alarm horns sounded, fiercer and stronger than the first warning, and Eni came to a halt. It was the last blast, signaling that the gates would be sealed shut in five minutes.

Ceslaus stopped dead and turned, looking this way and that. In hardly any time at all, from the direction of the stable across the street from the inn, a fine gray stallion appeared at his side. He was astride his mount in a flash and was soon easily outpacing the mammals forced simply to rush as fast as their own legs could carry them.

Eni turned back to the stranger, who had started walking a little faster, and pushed Ceslaus out of her mind as she started running again. Knowing that she was about to be locked outside of the city with a monster—an actual monster—prowling about should have frightened her, but it didn’t.

Eni knew she should have run for the safety of the wall the way Ceslaus and everyone else in the Vorstadt had, falling to her knees and thanking the Mother when the gate closed. And yet she didn’t regret her decision.

Maybe it’d be another dead end, another painful reminder of why she shouldn’t trust her hunches. But anyone suicidally bold enough to go off toward a monster was a special mammal indeed, and Eni wanted to at least talk to him.

That, however, was going to be easier said than done if she didn’t move faster. The stranger wasn’t quite running, but the long strides of his legs moved him along with an easy rhythm. He was getting harder to see, too, the dull and unadorned gray of his cloak blending into walls and making him vanish in the pools of shadow that the few streetlights didn’t penetrate. Off Ardashir Street, the main and wide thoroughfare that ran right past the Three Apples Inn and continued to the gates of Ctesiphon after a slight kink, the streets became almost claustrophobically narrow, the overhanging second stories of buildings looming above Eni’s head as she chased after the stranger.

The press of mammals fleeing the opposite direction slowed to a trickle as Eni followed the brief glimpses of the gray cloak that she got among the crush of bodies, and eventually the streets were empty of anyone but her and the stranger. Everyone else must have either made it to the gate or decided to huddle up in their homes, choosing to risk death by monster attack if it meant protecting their belongings from opportunistic looters. The stranger seemed too focused on wherever he was going to be a looter, passing by houses and shops with no apparent interest, and he didn’t seem to have noticed Eni, either. His head, so far as she could tell from behind and with it covered by a hood, didn’t deviate from looking forward, and he made turn after turn through narrow alleys and side streets with absolutely no hesitation.

His pace was gradually increasing, and as the distance between them lengthened Eni thought she heard the solid rumbling bang of the gates being sealed, although they had to be blocks away. It spurred her onward to press herself for more speed, and when the stranger turned down an alley she was running flat out as she turned after him and came to a sudden stop.

The stranger was gone.

It shouldn’t have been possible. The alley had no doors at street level, no balconies above her. There was nothing to hide behind, the smoothly worn cobbles covered only by rotting garbage and scraps of peril papers faded by sunlight. A single streetlight somewhere beyond the other end of the long and narrow alley made it bright enough to see everything, and though Eni desperately craned her neck as she looked up and down, she couldn’t see so much as a sign of the strange mammal. He had, somehow, completely vanished. Something like panic made Eni’s heart start beating furiously, and she could feel her pulse in the tips of her long ears as she stood still, straining to hear anything.

There was only silence.

The usual sounds of the city were gone, only the gentlest whisper of a wind fouled by the garbage it blew across making any noise whatsoever. There were no murmurs of conversation or the creak and groan of carts, not even the clop of hooves against cobblestones. It shouldn’t have been possible for the stranger to lose her. It shouldn’t have been possible. It shouldn’t! And yet he had. The frustration that welled up inside Eni’s chest felt almost childish to her, raw and overwhelming. Something deep within her, something she couldn’t describe let alone name, told her that she needed to find the mammal she had spotted.

But how?

There were no visible tracks to follow, no clues that would tell her which direction the mammal had gone. All she had to go on was the feeling that he was chasing after the monster, and then suddenly Eni knew what she had to do. Eni breathed deeply, trying to settle her pounding heart, and then cautiously began gathering the power within herself. It was like picking up threads, each as fine as a strand of fur.

She knew the danger of what she was doing—it had been the luck of Ceslaus’s interruption that the deer in the inn had escaped without injury—but it was the only thing she could think of. If the stranger was going after the monster, all she had to do was find the monster. Eni pushed, willing the power away from herself, and almost instantly felt something.

It was like the heat of the sun on her face on a winter day coming from the direction of Ctesiphon’s gates. Warm, but still faint, and it could only be Ceslaus, cowering with all the other citizens. But from the east, from where the borders of the Vorstadt gave way to farmland, the feeling made her legs weak.

When she had been standing right next to Ceslaus and reached out with her power to him, it had been like a gentle explosion that had touched all her senses at once and threatened to overwhelm her mind. What she felt from the east was just as strong, but different somehow. Hungrier. It was like being caressed by a lover’s paws who knew every inch of her body, like feeling a mouth against her own. It was as though all of the blood in her body had come alive, and Eni felt acutely aware of herself in a way she never had before, tingling with the sensation.

And then the feeling was gone and Eni realized she had fallen to her knees. She blinked, and when she rubbed at her eyes her paw came away wet. She didn’t know if that had been the monster or the mammal she had felt, but for it to be so strong, even at such a distance, only renewed her hope. It was powerful in a way nothing she had ever known was powerful, and Eni started running in the direction the feeling had come from.

Ctesiphon was a maze of streets, but Eni ignored all of the businesses and houses she rushed past, turning only when she had to in order to keep heading east. Eventually the buildings began to thin out, the alleys getting wider until there were actually patches of sickly grasses between buildings that could charitably be called gardens, before she was in the farmlands.

Despite her urgency, Eni was awed by the devastation that the Blight had brought. From where she had emerged, everything she could see was charred stubble, the crops closest to the buildings of Ctesiphon plowed under and those further away burned to the roots. The stench of smoke clung to the earth, and Eni could see a billowing haze of smoke coming from the south and further east where fires still burned. She forced herself onward, her feet crunching through the brittle stalks of plants ruined first by the Blight and then by fire, searching desperately for any trace of the stranger she was pursuing. There was none, and so Eni didn’t deviate from her course at all.

She ran toward the cloud of smoke, coughing as the acrid fumes burned at her lungs and brought painful tears to her eyes, but she didn’t stop. The visibility dropped down to almost nothing; she could have been standing twenty feet from the mammal and not seen him. But even her sharp ears couldn’t pick anything up, and she ran onward.

Eventually, a massive shape began to coalesce dreamily out of the smoke, and it wasn’t until she was almost on top of it that Eni realized it was a barn. Just as she idly wondered how the barn had survived the burning of the fields, Eni stumbled and nearly fell into the fire break that had been dug deep into the surrounding soil. She caught her balance just in time, clumsily leaping across the pit, and as she paused to right herself Eni stopped a moment to think.

She was running after a strange mammal and a monster, and the only weapons she had were her dagger, which seemed pathetically small tucked into her belt, and the weighted net she still wore like a shawl. Neither one was exactly ideal for if something attacked her, and so she ran to the barn’s door. Its red paint had dulled to a grayish pink from the soot that clung to it, and the metal hinges and latch showed runnels of rust, but it slid open smoothly enough and let her in.

The interior was nearly empty, the hayloft on the second floor depleted down to little more than a few stray pieces of hay and dust, but a number of tools hung neatly on one wall of the first floor. Eni’s eyes ran past farming equipment she couldn’t have guessed a use for—Siverets had been a fishing village, after all—before stopping on the one thing she knew she could use.

Eni grabbed a pitchfork from the wall and hefted it. Compared to her trident, safely locked away in the room she was renting with the rest of her belongings, the balance was terrible and it was too long. The tines were somewhat crooked and rusty, but they did still come to sharp points. It was better than nothing, though, and she left her hood on to leave both paws free to control the awkward weapon. If she was wrong, and the stranger was simply crazy, she’d at least be able to put up a good fight.

She knew it was foolish. But Eni didn’t feel foolish as she hurried out of the barn and leaped over the fire break on its other side, her stride unbroken as she kept heading due east. Surely the power she had felt meant she was heading toward something special, and she ignored the growing ache in her lungs and the worsening burning in her eyes. Time became impossible to judge, the light of the moon and stars only feebly reaching her through the haze of smoke. It might have been only fifteen minutes or perhaps half an hour or more before she came across something that once more made her stop.

In the burnt remains of the field was something unlike anything Eni had ever seen before. Droplets of some thick black liquid beaded up on the surface of the ground, somehow not soaking in. It was oily and somehow nasty-looking, its malevolent darkness keeping Eni from poking it with her borrowed pitchfork let alone touching it with her paw. She continued onward, listening as hard as she could for anything, and could have sworn she heard something from up ahead.

Eni moved a bit more cautiously, noting that there seemed to be more puddles of that unpleasant substance as she drew nearer to the source of the sound. Something was hissing and clicking, like the roar of a waterfall was being mixed with the sound of all the punch card readers in the university running at the same time, but the night was still too dark and the lingering smoke was still too thick to see what it was.

Until suddenly it no longer was.

Eni had come across another barn that might have been larger than the last. It was impossible to be sure, however, because there was almost none of it left. The building had been smashed into kindling, not burned, and standing incongruously intact by the wreckage was an enormous grain silo that might have been a gleaming white in the moonlight had it not been for the ash clinging to it. A farmhouse, nearly as ruined as the outbuilding, was falling to pieces nearby, and between the two was what could only be the thing that had wrecked both.

The university had the preserved head of a Shogorath in its collection, nearly a hundred and fifty years old and kept in a barrel full of alcohol larger than Eni was with a glass viewing panel as a lid. She knew how large monsters could grow, after all, and had seen it for herself. But the difference between what she had intellectually known for years and the horrible reality before her took her breath away and made her freeze in place.

In the dim light, Eni could only catch terrifying impressions of the creature’s massive body; its pulsating abdomen was larger than a shed and the fearsome claws at the end of its lone pair of arms could have cut through an ox. Its repulsive head was bigger than Eni and its eight loathsome legs were horribly armored and bristling with wire-like hairs. Its mouth was a nightmare of articulating parts, like a machine designed by a maniac given biological form. A nest of six glowing red multifaceted eyes the size of Eni’s fists were set into its squat wedge of a head, two more rising above it on stalks.

It could only be what the Codex Monstrum called a Zezernak, and giving it a name was weirdly comforting, as though knowing what the monster was would give Eni some kind of control over the situation. It almost certainly wouldn’t, but remembering the dull and slightly stilted language of the book seemed to make Eni’s legs work again. She threw herself to the ground, pressing herself into the ash-covered remains of plants without a care for the mess she was making of her clothes, and watched the monster with her heart pounding in her throat.

She knew she had no hope of killing it, not something like that. Even if the power within her was more predictable, it was far from controllable; the last thing she needed would be to miss with her one attack and then be eaten alive by the Zezernak. The creature’s movements were ponderously slow, its legs moving with a terrible grace as its two-stalk eyes waved about as though it was scenting the wind.

It was, Eni saw, the source of the terrible inky liquid she had seen; one of the massive glowing eyes set into its head had an arrow lodged in it, and the monster was weeping something oily from the ruins. Its carapace was covered with scrapes and scratches, dulling the glossy blacks and browns mottling its shell, and that foul ichor sluggishly dripped from half-a-dozen small wounds.

The Zezernak clicked to itself as it used one claw to lift something to its terrible mouth; Eni caught a brief glimpse of a fur-covered paw and realized with horror that it was eating the remains of a mammal. She swallowed hard, wishing she could see more clearly in the dark. Was the monster devouring the stranger she had chased? Eni suddenly realized the enormity of what she had done by staying outside the safety of Ctesiphon’s walls. If she caught the Zezernak’s attention, she somehow doubted the pitchfork she was clutching as tightly as a lifeline would do much more than bounce off the foul creature’s tough hide.

She stayed frozen for what felt like eons, her nose twitching as she warred with herself on what to do next. If the stranger was dead, she was risking that she’d be next. But if he wasn’t…

The decision was suddenly made for her when something burst out of the ground near the Zezernak with explosive force, a cloud of dust shifting around the thing as it rose. It was, Eni saw, the stranger. The mammal threw his cloak open with one paw and reached inside with his other, and almost too fast to follow he had pulled something long and whip-like from around his waist and lashed out at the monster.

The Zezernak’s previously ponderous movements gave way to a blur of activity, one massive claw reaching out and catching the whip before it could strike at the creature’s eyes. The monster suddenly shrieked, and Eni could feel the terrible force of its cry vibrating her chest. The Zezernak pulled at the whip at the same moment that the stranger gave it a sharp tug, and suddenly the monster was missing half its claw.

The beast bellowed again, even louder than it had before, and lunged at the stranger so fast that for a single heart-stopping instant Eni was convinced that he had been caught and cut in half by the monster’s intact claw. But before she was even entirely sure what had happened, the stranger rolled away from where the terrible claw had been, one of the creature’s legs catching at his cloak and tearing it before he could rise again.

The Zezernak seemed to have gotten more cautious, lifting both its intact claw and its ruined one, which was dribbling more of that blackish blood and emitting a pungent smell like a rotting wound, to protect its head. It hissed at the stranger, clicks and chirps that didn’t seem to intimidate him at all. The stranger raised his own head and barked at the monster, the fearless sound reverberating and echoing as he taunted it. The Zezernak side-stepped with the delicate grace of a dancer, coordinating its many legs with fearful synchronicity, before lunging again with the sharp point of the remains of its injured claw.

The stranger’s whip lashed out again, cracking with how fast he moved it, and in the light of the moon Eni caught the impression of something metallic before it wrapped around the forward-most leg on the same side as the injured claw and pulled hard. There was a horribly wet tearing sound, like an ax going into a rotting tree stump, and then the leg simply fell off, filling the air with more of that choking pus-like smell as ichor oozed from the creature.

The Zezernak tried striking again with its claw as the stranger rolled away, and just as Eni was sure that this time the stranger would lose his head, a long and smooth tail emerged from under his cloak and deflected the blow.

Eni’s eyes widened, and she didn’t trust her first impression, looking desperately for the stranger’s tail when he rose. She had been right the first time; his tail was unusually long and thick, muscular in a way utterly unlike any normal mammal. And, as he shifted again, repositioning himself against the monster, Eni saw his whip reflecting the moonlight again.

But it wasn’t a whip.

It had a lengthy and flexible central segment, like any other whip. But set at regular intervals there were gleaming and bifurcated pieces of metal, their edges looking brutally sharp. Eni’s breath caught again, but it wasn’t out of fear. The stranger hadn’t set it afire, but he was wielding what could only be Nidhogg.

And then, as Eni watched breathlessly, the stranger narrowly avoided another blow from the Zezernak and his hood slid off. As his head was revealed any doubts left her mind. He was the mammal she had been desperately searching for. He was the hero of legend who had vanished nearly a hundred years ago. He was the only predator who could fight monsters alone and come out on top.

He was the Slayer.

The Slayer wasn’t as tall as Eni had expected; he had at most a head of height on her, and that was only if her ears weren’t counted. His body was slim beneath his ragged clothes, but his neck was longer than a normal wolf’s and thick with muscle. His fur looked to be entirely a glossy black, including a great shock of it that grew mane-like from the back of his head and disappeared under his collar, except for a bib of white the color of starlight on the underside of his muzzle. The Slayer’s tail, at least, looked exactly how she had expected it to, thick at its base and tapering over its significant length to a fine tip.

The Slayer dodged another attack, backing slowly away from the Zezernak, which was heavily favoring its uninjured side. It crept after him in carefully controlled steps, never allowing him to set himself up again at the perfect distance for another strike with his whip. But the Slayer’s face remained a mask of intense concentration, his eyes leaving the monster only briefly as he looked back and forth from it to the grain silo he was approaching.

At last, the Slayer had his back to the silo, and the beast froze, keeping its distance as he slowly maneuvered himself around the enormous cylinder of its base before reaching the single massive door. Without looking away from the Zezernak, he pushed it open with a shrill creak, motes of dust suddenly dancing in the moonlight as the interior of the silo was revealed.

With a surprising speed, the Slayer suddenly turned and dove into the silo, and the Zezernak seized its opportunity. It moved faster than Eni had seen it move yet, so fast that she was absolutely sure it had only been faking the seriousness of its injuries, and lunged at its much smaller opponent. The tip of one claw caught against the Slayer’s back, but he had turned with an unthinking agility and squeezed right past the thing as he left the silo.

The Slayer turned and in one smooth motion cracked Nidhogg, which suddenly burst into flames with a white-orange intensity so bright that Eni threw up one paw to cover her dazzled eyes. But even watching between her fingers, she saw quite clearly as the fiery whip-sword swung into the silo at the rapidly turning Zezernak.

And then the silo exploded.

The concussion of it slammed Eni into the ground and deafened her for a moment, a high-pitched ringing all she could hear. The silo was simply gone, the circular stone foundation all that remained as flaming pieces of wood and burning bits of debris fell all around her. At the center of that stone circle the flames were the most brilliant, and Eni could only gape at the magic the Slayer had commanded. She had read of his greatest feats, and she had felt for herself the powerful tug of something weaker, but she had never imagined seeing such destructive force wielded with such ease.

As she watched, the Slayer stood up from where he had thrown himself to the ground, shaking his head as if to clear it. His cloak had caught fire in spots, but he didn’t seem to notice, instead watching only the flames where the Zezernak burned. Its horrifically insect-like form was still a moment, the air foul with the stench of it burning, and then it suddenly tried lunging at the Slayer again.

The Zezernak was even more nightmarish as it burned, its carapace cracking and popping in the fire and revealing its irregular and unfathomable internal organs. One of its stalk eyes burst from the heat, but its remaining eyes fixed themselves hatefully on the Slayer as it rose from the flames. Before it could act, Nidhogg whipped through one of the monster’s loathsome eyes and deep into its head, a tarry stream of ichor spurting out as it wailed its last breath and convulsed its horrible clicking mandibles.

As the thing died, the unnatural light going out of its remaining eyes, Eni felt something odd in the pit of her stomach. It was like putting one paw on a clothesline shaking in the breeze or watching drops of dew vibrate on a spider web in the light of early dawn, something that refused to be bound to any one sense. And then the monster shuddered for the last time and the feeling was gone.

Eni stood up before she realized she was going to, watching the monster’s corpse burn in the fire pit that the silo had become. She stood there for a long moment, feeling as though she was in a dream, and took her first step toward the Slayer. He had shaken off his cloak and stomped out the fire consuming it, and then turned his focus to his whip sword. He was wiping a no-longer afire Nidhogg against the grass—which, Eni noticed, was yellowing and shriveling where the monster’s blood had touched it—as Eni approached him hesitantly.

Her throat was suddenly dry; now that the moment she had dreamed of for so long was upon her Eni realized she had no idea what she should say. He didn’t seem to be paying her any attention, more concerned with getting the horrible black ichor off his blade before winding it back around his waist.

Master Slayer… sir? Eni began hesitantly, her voice cracking.

She fell to one knee, bowing to the legendary hero, who seemed to take notice of her at last. He grunted as he turned around, and Eni’s ears burned at having his attention on her. Up close, his features were as noble as she ever could have hoped, the lines of his muzzle regally sharp and the eyes above them a pale sky blue. Where the monster’s attack had torn his clothes it had exposed a well-muscled chest without so much as an ounce of fat, and Eni forced her gaze down to the earth to show him the respect he was due.

It’s the greatest honor of my life to meet you, and I’ve been searching for you for a decade now, and I’ve finally met you and I watched you kill the Zezernak and—

Are you stupid, rabbit? the Slayer suddenly interrupted, Were you trying to get yourself killed?

His voice was richly masculine, low and gravelly in pitch. Eni’s gaze was drawn to his eyes, where something like annoyance seemed to be filling his features, and anything she might have said died in her throat as her mouth fell open.

CHAPTER THREE: HOUND AND HARE

What? Eni asked after a moment that seemed to take an eternity.

She couldn’t believe what she had just heard. Eni had thought she would be prepared for anything when it came to actually meeting the Slayer. She had learned to speak Jarku in case he would be more fluent in it than Circi, and even gone to the trouble of learning Gangurr on the off chance the legendary wolf wasn’t a wolf at all but rather a kangaroo. She had studied every single one of the stories about him, memorizing every detail. She had even practiced what she would say if the famed lady-killer took an interest