FicWad

IV. Hunter
Welcome to a new point of view. My name is Rowan Delemanous. I am a lycan, and I am on the hunt. I am hunting for a boy, another lycan who I accidentally created.
It happened a week prior, in a forest on the outskirts of a small town. It was late at night and I had lost control of my violent rage. I transformed onto my wolf counterpart. I ran through the woods, looking for an easy hunt, expecting an animal, when I came across a human child.
I stalked him for a while, only amusing myself with his human mannerisms. I lurked nearby until he noticed me and cautiously stalked off. I followed him, nearly noiselessly to the edge of a clearing in the woods where there was some kind of social gathering. Alas, I was spotted.
Time for some fun.
I started with the prey I had been stalking. He turned back to look at me. Bad idea.
I launched myself at him, catching him in my jaws by the midsection and clamping down with the full force of my mandible, crunching his ribs as I did so. His head bashed itself against a nearby tree, knocking him unconscious.
The rest of the pitiful humans had scattered like insects, trying to escape. I released my grip on the limp body resting in my mouth and howled. Nobody would escape tonight. I stepped over the body, crushing his leg with one paw and lacerating his arm with another as I pounced to my next victims, killing three with one sweep of my powerful claw. I continued in my murderous tempest, chasing down all of quarry that had tried to escape, and slaughtered them as well. Satisfied with the amount of gore I had created, I fed.
Bursting at the seams and with my umbrage subdued for now I turned back from the direction of which I had come suddenly exhausted. Transformations always left me exhausted.
Most of you reading this more than likely know nothing about my species. Luckily, I am here to enlighten you on the truth about us.
I’ll begin with the good stuff, what everyone wants; our powers.
Once you become a lycanthrope you are gifted inhuman speed, strength, and agility. It is a myth that we only transform on a full moon; this is only popular belief due to the fact that the corpulent moon gave off more light, making the stealthy wolves slightly more visible to the human eye. Lycans are also immortal and do not grow old.
Being a lycan in human form is not transparent. There are several signs that should tip you off as to whether or not your inscrutable next door neighbor has been afflicted by the curse.
There are a few physical signs that point to a werewolf. The third digit on each hand would become oddly elongated. Another augury of a lycan is their teeth; their canines grow into fangs.
A further… symptom, if you may, is the eyes. They change upon being cursed, becoming compulsory and imperative, making lycans irresistible to the average human.
There are also several idiosyncrasies in behavior such as uncontrollable bouts of indignation and more violent predilection. Not to mention a newly acquired taste for raw meat and insomnia. These changes can be brought under control after time, but in new born lycanthropes it is recalcitrant and unambiguous, making fledgling lycans massacres waiting to happen.
I guess I also owe you the secrets as to killing a lycan. Popular belief states that a silver bullet will annihilate one, but that is crap. It will hurt, but definitely not kill. The only way to kill one is by total separation of the heart or brain from the body, but the most popular method amongst hunters is decapitation.
There are only three ways to become a werewolf. You may be born one because a member of your direct lineage was. You may be bitten by another werewolf, which is the most common way to turn. Or, you may have wronged someone and they chose to afflict you with the curse.
Many newborns try to break the curse, and it may take years for them to come to the realization that it just is not possible. It is also popular belief that if you find your creator and kill him, you will be a human once more, but the simple truth is that there is no cure.
Perhaps now I should give you some insight as to how I came to be. I do hope you’ll listen to my lament.
The year was 1423, in Rome. I was a fitting 25 year old gentleman who had been courting a fine woman that was coveted by most men in the city. I was madly in love with her, when with my love I felt as if walking on air. Soon my life became completely devoted to her, everything I did was for her, and every breath I took was in the hopes that I would share my life with her by my side.
Her name was Lilith Saturnus and her beauty was striking, far beyond that of any other woman. She had fair skin and hair the color of charcoal that fell over her shoulders in subtle curls, and her eyes were of the deepest shades of green.
“Lilith,” I had said to her once. She had looked up at me with her big green eyes as I said, “What did I ever do to deserve something as immaculate as you?”
Memories of her will never leave me. As many have left me in the past nearly six hundred years, everything relating to her beauty will forever haunt me.
All I wanted was to spend my life with her, to grow old with her and love her until.
I was cursed on the orders of an envious man who had his eyes on my exquisite Lilith. It had happened so fast. It was late one evening and I had been lying awake in my quarters, unable to sleep when I heard a very subtle noise, slowly growing louder and louder. I looked to Lilith, soundly asleep in my arms. She showed no indication of sensing the noise which I now realized was indistinct chanting. It escalated in volume until it was a pounding roar in my head. The deep sound assaulted my ear drums, becoming intolerable, and just as I thought my head would explode from the roar, it came to an abrupt stop. I shrugged it off and began to resume basking in the beauty of my Lilith when another supernatural event took place.
A strange presence felt as if it was forcing its way into my body through every orifice, imposing itself amongst my insides. I felt a searing indescribable pain that caused me to contort and cry out in pain. Lilith stirred and woke up, her gorgeous eyes widening and her mouth falling agape.
“Rowan…?” she whispered in a voice that I longed so much to hear once more.
I felt the odd sensation of being stretched; my body felt as if I were being pulled in every direction. Lilith moved away from me, falling off our bed and backing up against a wall.
Fear was in her eyes.
I tried to comfort her; to tell her all was alright, but I couldn’t make words, the only sound that escaped my lips were growls.
I climbed over the bed, the sensation of being elongating dulled slightly. I stood on my hands and knees in front of Lilith and stroked her cheek softly, and was horrified at the sight as I retracted my hand. Her porcelain skin had been torn by my hand. She touched her fingertips to her wound and looked back up at me, petrified. The expanding of my body had finally stopped. I backed away from her, completely confused.
“Please leave…” she breathed, hardly above a whisper. She was petrified. She closed her eyes and tried to make herself smaller against that wall.
I wanted to ask her why? To tell her that I couldn’t leave because if I left her, my life would mean nothing, that she was everything to me and I had never wanted more, that I would rather die than abandon the only thing that had ever meant anything to me.
But, alas, I would never willingly do anything to cause her physical or emotional harm. I saw the distress she was in and it hurt me more to see her like this than it ever would to leave her.
I turned away from her, and jumped out the window, landing on my feet unscathed.
I ran. It was all I could think of doing. I ran as fast as my legs would carry me, stopping only when I passed a river and my own reflection caught my eye.
I was no longer myself. There was not a sign of Rowan Delemanous in that reflection.
The river showed a beast glaring back at me with cold eyes. I saw a monstrous wolf like creature with a long rounded snout sheltering a mouth full of sharp teeth and long pointed ears. It had muscular front and hind legs that ended in awe striking claws. Thick fur grew all over the snarling creature that I refused to believe was me.
That was when my first bout of rage came. I was so deeply enraged my entire frame shook madly. A howl escaped my lips and I ran back in the direction I had come, bent on destruction of everything I could get my hands on.
I broke into houses, dismembered the inhabitants in gruesome and pernicious ways, creating a trail if death throughout my once beloved city, but it was nothing if I could not share it with Lilith.
I may have killed thousands of people before grief swallowed me and I was too exhausted to cause anymore pain. I fled the extinguished city for a forest several miles away and collapsed deep in its shelter.
When I awoke, I found myself completely nude and blood stained with barely any recollection of the previous night’s events except that my beloved Lilith did not want me. This sent nails piercing through my heart, I loved her so.
I knew not what to do next, I had nowhere to go, nobody to help me, not even clothes to wear.
I wandered aimlessly, crying for the first time in my life past infancy, not sure what to look for or what to do, but feared that if I stopped walking, I would perish.
Dusk soon crept over the sky, living me in total darkness. I should not have been able to see my surroundings, but I could.
As luck would have it, I found a cabin on the edge of the woods. I broke in and murdered the inhabitants without a second thought and helped myself to their clothes.
For the next twenty years, with a heavy heart I watched Lilith from a far as she grew old with another man. She seemed happy, and that was the best I could hope for. I sat by her side on her death bed, wanting to hold her one last time.
She had become old, for that was considered old at the time, and I still had the appearance of a twenty-five year old man.
When she died, I fled the country and traveled the world until maybe ten years ago when I chose a life of solidarity in the forest.
I had been at peace with my loneliness for a decade until that night a week prior when I had created another killer. He needed to be stopped.
I walked into town that day, most everyone looked on the edge.
I picked up a newspaper at a random house and skimmed through the front page. It interested me greatly.
A teenage boy had brutally murdered his entire family and next door neighbor and then fled the city.
That sounded exactly like the boy I was looking for. Just for kicks, I walked by the house mentioned in the paper. Crime scene tape was still all over it and the one next to it which also had a shattered window.
And this was just without transforming. I assessed him as dangerous right away.
I smelled the air; it still had a distinct smell. Blood.
I had no guesses as to where the kid would go, but my first guess was to where it all started: the forest.
I made my decent back there and I couldn’t help but noticed how foolish these people were.
They couldn’t sense a killer taking a stroll amongst them. A few of these people even politely acknowledged me with a hello. I pitied them and their rotten existence, and at the same time, I longed it. If only I was still human, if I had never been cursed, I would have died right alongside my love.
One can only dream.
I tried to focus on more pressing matters, such as the catastrophe I had to end by killing what was, by technicality, my son. Well, I had always wanted to be a father. The thought almost made me smile.
I arrived at the edge of the woods and smirked at its vast loneliness. I once more looked at the newspaper I had taken. At least now I had a name for my mysterious prey.
Vincent Best, you will soon die.