Apollo's Muse

Lykos (Enlightenment) XXIV

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Lykos was crashing mindlessly through the woods, stumbling through the snow, not caring about the messy trail of freshly disrupted snow that lay in his wake. Dead branches cracked and flew in all directions as he plowed through a thicket of brackish shrubs, his head pounding as pains stabbed through his skull. He dropped to his knees and groaned deeply, his body shaking with tremors. The pain slowly subsided, and he opened his eyes, relieved. 

Oh crap.

A huge black wolf with long shaggy fur and piercing black eyes stood hardly a metre away from him. The heat from his breath brushed past Lykos’s skin in a cloud of mist, the snow underneath his palms numbing his fingertips. He stared into the eyes of the wolf, debating his options in an adrenaline-fueled split second.

No weapon. Damn!

Option A. Stay and intimidate. Risky.

Option B. Run. Definitely has its perks.

He leapt to his feet, but the throbbing in his head became more than he could handle, and he crumpled to his knees, swearing.

I guess Option C is stay and die.

The wolf approached him with confident movements, the power radiating from the huge animal enough to get his attention, even through the painful haze that cloaked his brain.

Wait…

He frowned blearily.

Something’s weird about this. The breath… it was almost minty.

Now, I know wolves don’t generally brush their teeth…

He tried to focus his gaze. The eyes looking back at him were familiar, and he sat back on his heels.

“Dad? I can smell your cologne.”

The wolf sat on its haunches and stared at him with those incredible eyes.

They’re like black, bottomless pools, Lykos mused, relaxing.

Thank god he gave me that book to read, or I’d have no idea what was going on.

“Dad, can you speak?”

A niggling voice scratched at the back of his throbbing brain, and he strained to hear it.

… might be able… me, but… probably make it difficult… cold… don’t panic…

Lykos’s eyes widened despite himself as the wolf stretched its forelegs to the sky and his father’s body emerged. It wasn’t the cracking, distorted, awful way that werewolves in movies changed, it was far less dramatic, and it seemed completely natural to him. One thing that the movies got right, however, was the lack of clothes - Dad was completely naked. He didn’t seem to mind, though, as he held out a hand to help Lykos to his feet.

“You worked it out pretty quickly.”

“Yeah, thanks for preparing me,” Lykos replied, still a bit in awe.

Korvus led them to the shelter of a large fir, where they huddled down in relative warmth underneath the boughs. The wind had started to pick up, and snow flurried briskly through the trees. Lykos shrugged off his cloak and handed it to his father, who accepted it without protest. 

Kind of cool how this isn’t awkward.

Korvus leaned back against the trunk of the fir tree, watching the landscape with sharp eyes.