He left the young Bosmer with the Argonian amid stern warnings that if she returned yet again….if she rejoined the hunt…he would give her to the Lady Justice to put in dresses and be kept inside the house to sleep on beds with only books for company. He told her if she disobeyed him yet again, he would expel her from his pack. Ridiculous threats, but she believed him and he tried to forget the hurt look and the cowed spirit as he headed back out to rejoin Wulfran who had eyes on the dead thing named Erikk. They had been asked to wait for the orc called Reaper who had a debt to repay this creature for his attack upon Lady Aly’sande. And so he had left the boy there to watch as he took the waif away from the dangers of a vampire hunt.
He was getting too soft with these folk. He who had felt nothing for so many years, was now wounded by the look of betrayal from the little slip of an elf who adored him. How had this all happened? He brooded as he rode, taking the wayshrines closer to where the lad watched their quarry whom they had treed on Bleak Rock Island.
So much of his life given over to hunting monsters while bound to one himself. The long hunt and the presence of companions…one the likely lad who had become much more than an ale drinking companion and a shield in a fight…the other the willful, disobedient elfling that could stalk prey as well if not better than he could…the wee slip of a thing that he would find curled at his back like a pup on cold nights…
All who had been bound to him had been lost. For all of his savage, martial prowess, he could protect no one. Had he not learned? More, and at the deepest heart of it….had he not sacrificed all and everything to the end that he would bring down every last living thing with a drop of his enemies’ blood in its veins? The last of his clan…those staunch warriors who had first set out to avenge with him the atrocities committed against hearth and home…his lieutenant, his brothers in arms…all so much wood in the fire of his vengeance…all given over to his vows of erasing every trace of his enemies from Nirn…
He had not meant for this to happen. To find himself amongst a clan, even one as unlikely as this, running what must be as cursed a path as his…attempting to pry a daedric prince’s talons from Nirn. In the forging of an alliance against a common enemy he had fallen in with a pack and he had not seen it coming. The healer that had looked at him that very first time and seen far too much, and in her recognition of who and what he was had given wordless acceptance and forgiveness. The young Imperial officer whom he had saved on the road…her brother…the Argonian that had hunted for the exact recipe of mead he had loved as a young man- mentioned only once…and the casks of the stuff left for him without comment when his demons drove him to the darkest depths.
He brooded on the faces of the souls that peopled his days now- as well as these new folk of Invicta. Softest bunch of so-called mercs he had ever encountered. Off rescuing folks and working against slavers left and right with pay seeming an after-thought. Good folk can never disguise what they actually were no matter the guise worn.
He wondered what they would all think if they could see a full accounting of his own monstrous actions? The folk given to the wolf inside him whose only sin was whose blood they shared? Women, old folk…aye even children. After the first, he told himself that at least he made it quick and painless….more than had been done for his own wife and children. But that lie had ceased to have any meaning a long time ago. No- he knew he was a monster in more than one measure. And irony of ironies, he had given his last weeks over to hunting down another monster…a freak like himself…for attacking a woman…for killing other women along the way….
He had watched the lad Wulfran shocked and outraged each time they came upon a feasting site of the vampire along his trail. Always blonde women with blue eyes. The old wolf saw a game being played in that, but had no idea of its significance. He only saw the lad grow more angry each time they discovered a grisly tableau… women hung upon trees, gutted with throats torn out, clothing in suggestive disarray. It wore on the lad in ways Axel himself had become immune to long ago.
He came out of the cold ‘in between’ of wayshrine travel with a growing concern as he started to worry the lad would try for the vampire alone. He felt a sudden urgency telling him to ride quickly to get back before…
He stopped abruptly.
All thought of the vampire or Wulfran or anyone else fled his mind as the wolf in him let out a sudden howl of excitement and he scented the spoor that had been his reason for living for the past several decades.
One of his quarry was near….blood of the blood of his enemy. A man….riding hard…in a direction opposite he needed to go to rejoin Wulfran.
In the end there was no contest. There was perhaps a split second of inner debate. The urgency he had felt to get back to his hunting companion faded away as the geas to destroy those sharing blood with his sworn enemy overrode all else. He did not stop to think how strange it was that this scent would happen right now at this moment. He was no more than one of the skooma addicts he abhorred in that moment- rolling in gutters filled with their own filth doing anything for one more taste…and for him as always, that addiction was vengeance.
And so he turned away from the path that would have returned him to Wulfran’s side, and he gave voice to the hunter’s cry and followed the second trail instead.
guardianwulf 