The Last Werewolf (Vidar #1) | ONC2021 Grand Winner

The Not-so-big Bawling Giant

Vidar stood on the pedals, pushing them with all his might. Strong winds may craft strong warriors but were a freezing hell to cycle through, even when wearing the sturdiest shoes in history. 

For the occasion, and mainly for his own safety, he had polished the leather and replaced the laces. Though a millennium old, the shoes were as good as new, more comfortable than any sneaker crafted in the last fifty years, and would knock out Lange Wapper with one well-placed kick, if he had to.

He had other options too.

A porcelain figure of the Virgin Mary clunked against the bottle of wine at the bottom of his backpack. One look at the figurine and the shape-shifting giant would crumble to his knees and surrender to his arrest, or so the book he had read during dinner said. He would soon find out what was real and what was fiction.

The bike path ignored the bend in the river, following the industrial railroad instead. He passed a complex of factories and warehouses, between them an abundance of pipes, steel constructions and fields on which only the toughest weeds grew.

While in the city, shops closed and humans plopped down on their couch or entered the bars, the wheels of the petroleum industry kept turning. All for more, faster, cheaper, better, but mostly to keep the rat race alive.

Scooters flitted around him, and cars raced by, splashing up water from the cracks in the road.

Vidar grumbled. For once, couldn't he get out of his house without getting drenched?

A quiet side-road led him back to the river, then the bike path suddenly stopped. He continued along the cobblestones, bouncing, the frame clattering, the Virgin Mary rattling in his backpack.

He was almost there. Copses of oak and birch trees dotted the landscape. On the other bank chimed the church bells of Burcht. Within a hundred acres, history, modernity, and nature crossed. 

The cobblestones flattened as the road narrowed into a freshly paved sidewalk that ran between the river and the polder forest.

To find a bike station, he cycled around the park and into a maze of middle-class mansions and three-storey apartment buildings. Then, at the heart of the suburban area, in front of an aluminium school building, once a temporary solution but now an intrinsic part of the community, he clicked the bike into a free slot and ended his Velo session. 

Twenty-nine minutes and forty seconds. Zero euros spent.

Powered by the magic of the Nine Realms, he strutted down the street. From now on, he would wear his shoes more often. They deserved more than to gather dust in an old box in the attic.

While the other parks in the city were usually well-maintained, the polder of Hoboken was a wilderness of high grass and nettles once one left the gravel path. Undoubtedly, Lange Wapper's presence had something to do with it. He was a trickster, able to manipulate nature and undo weeks of intensive forest mowing and woodcutting with a snap of his fingers.

More a nuisance than a real criminal, but he was the only creature Vidar could think of that had any motive. According to the stories, Lange Wapper had a difficult relationship with Antwerp. The humans had learnt the giant hated the image of the Virgin Mary, so they attached small shrines to the facades and on street corners, so he would run away and leave him alone. One tale mentioned Lange Wapper fell into the river and supposedly drowned.

That he turned into a fish was more likely, but probably too fantastical for the humans to understand.

Vidar opened his backpack. As he feared, the porcelain figure had crumbled to a dozen pieces. Not his brightest move, and as painful as his failing memory. Luckily, he still had the bottle of wine to lure Lange Wapper.