Mantle of Shadow IX
Renhir
The North Downs, Arthedain
February 3019 TA
(private)
From the black barrow into the winter white world, Renhir traced the witch’s steps through the snow. Furious fire ignited his veins and flared his footsteps in hot pursuit.
Wights, loosed wild upon the land of his home. It was his doing, his greed, his weakness that willed them to freedom. The crime would haunt him until his dying day. May it be soon to ease his suffering.
He would find Mara, and he would kill her even if it cost him his own worthless life. He would scrape the flesh from her bones for her poisonous lies and cursed spells. The thirst, the hunger, the anger and driving need to bleed her dry drove him on.
Far in the distance, on a wide expanse of flat, snow-blanketed earth, a sickly green light flared to life and burst free, arcing through the sky and across the snow like a beacon calling him closer. Mara’s spell craft gave her away and Renhir honed in on her like a hunting predator sniffing thirst-quenching blood and satisfying flesh in the air. He raced across the snowy plain, hatchet in hand, ready to carve her to pieces.
Her eyes glowed unearthly green, reflecting the haze emitting from her bone staff. On the top of the staff, a new sight beheld him with vacant eyes—a skull stolen from the barrow crowned the staff. It was unrecognizable, neither man nor beast, but a thing in between: Horns rose from the head above wide human-round eye sockets and a pointed snout like that of a dog or fox. The mouth gaped wide with razor-sharp teeth fit for tearing apart tendon from bones.
Renhir shuddered at the sight. Wind stirred and churned snow into the air, forming ghostly apparitions before him. They reached skeletal tendrils toward him and he staggered back. Falling into the snow, he panted, heart racing in his chest as blinding white flared across his eyes.
He couldn’t see anything but white, aching, blinding nothingness. His hearing grew muffled as if underwater. He was choking, suffocating, numbness spreading through his limbs and he faded, faded, falling into another time and place, where death clutched cold hands around his heart…
Sweat beaded his brow but he shivered uncontrollably. He opened his eyes and the canopy above swam into sky, swaying in fevered vision. Still, Renhir was aware of someone there, the man’s presence solid and still beside him. “Let me go,” Renhir croaked. “Just let me die.” He confessed his pure exhaustion dripping with despair.
“You saved all those men. You’re not dying on my watch,” came the soothing response and a cool cloth dabbing his forehead. “So don’t you dare give up.”
A familiar face hovered above him, haloed by forest canopy and blue sky, framed by auburn hair. Worried green eyes gave Renhir something to focus on and he blinked, focusing on them, finding a tether to the world he knew.
“You’ve always been a stubborn fool, Dae,” Renhir muttered. “If you insist, I could try…to hold on…” Renhir wrapped his fingers around Dae’s hand, feeling the steady pulse in his wrist, finding something worth holding onto as his fleeting strength faded.
Renhir surfaced from diving into the past and drew in sharp short breaths that lanced pain through his chest. He squeezed his eyes shut to the vast, empty scene and stitched together a picture of Dae’s face in his mind. Auburn hair beneath his grey hood, bow at his back, an easy smile, and eyes the color of the trees in the summer. Renhir held on to the only person who ever brought him back from the brink and he opened his eyes and saw through the haunting haze.
The eye sockets of the skull pulsed with a putrid green light. They called him forward and he came.
Renhir crept up on Mara, preoccupied with her spell and enveloped in the eerie glow, and tore the skull from the staff. It burned his skin through his glove on impact but he grimaced and held on, and threw it far out of reach. The bewitching light disappeared.
Startled, Mara faltered, and Renhir ripped the bone staff from her hands and snapped it clean in two. Her eyes widened and she seemed to shrink before him, sinking back and appearing like a little lost pup, a mere mortal, without her staff pr spells to arm herself.
Relentless, Renhir dug his fingers into her neck, pressing down to stymie the flood of breath and blood. At first, she remained calm and placid as a doll in his arms, and just when he thought she was slipping away, she scratched his face with her nails and tugged herself free. Not for long. He snagged her back and thrust the hatchet into her arm, sinewing flesh and bone and pinned her to the snow stained with her blood. She screamed in agony.
Howling answered her call. Wolves appeared out of the snow and circled Renhir and Mara. Their hackles raised, they snarled with teeth bared, pressing closer and closer. There was no way out.
“Set your hounds on me, then,” he said through a ragged breath, “but I will take you with me into the arms of death.”
He reached for the hatchet embedded in her arm. The wolves leapt forward and buried him in fur and fangs. He thought it was the end. Here it was at last, so different from what he expected, to be mangled and eaten by wild beasts. Blood and sinew flew into the sky and across the ice as they drove their snouts into flesh.
Renhir lay back, gasping, and stared up at a white sky heavy with clouds.
It was not his flesh they tore into but hers. They ignored him like a shunned packmate and he remained prone on the ground, paralyzed by subsiding adrenaline. He shuddered on the ice, relief and regret warring within him, cold seeping in.
What Renhir had done to her was child’s play compared to what was left when the wolves were done with her. The green-eyed lead wolf padded to Renhir’s side, drops of blood dripping from his maw. Renhir remained frozen, fixed in place. Surely now his death would come. And he was tired in his bones, in his body, in his mind, and his aching, broken heart. He would let it come, he would let go. But the wolf knelt, rested his head in his paws, and regarded Renhir before nudging him with his snout.
“Just kill me already,” Renhir groaned.
The wolf laid a paw on Renhir’s chest, howled to the heavens, then nudged him once more. A chorus of answering howls echoed around him. Renhir struggled to his knees and saw each wolf kneel before him until finally the leader circled his legs like a familiar dog wagging his tail and bowed last.
The pack had a new master and Renhir saw them, at last, for what they truly were. Unnatural creatures with haunting green eyes, not ordinary wolves, but weres. Humans who had been forced into a lupine body and leashed to Mara’s bidding. If he stayed, he would become one, too, a thing wild and caged at once.
He should never have come here. This place had long since stopped being his home. It had done no good to come here chasing a ghost of what once was. And he had brought nothing but wickedness from the witch, the wights, the wolves.
Renhir licked his lips and took in each wolf, each tortured soul forever doomed to a wild, wandering life. He stroked the thick fur of the leader and the touch softened something in him. “Go and be free, and be at peace. You serve no one but yourselves now.” Wasn’t that what every man truly wanted? Freedom and solitude. Was that what he wanted? To serve only himself and years spent groveling at the heels of the Rangers?
The wolves howled one by one, growing into a rapturous chorus that echoed across the wilderness. Renhir fled, leaving behind the blood and body, the wights and wolves. If only he could run from himself.
