Under the Oak Tree Book 2 "Conquering hearts" ( Fan fiction)

Chapter 17 - Riftan

The dream was always the same, a never-ceasing form of torment that my guilty conscience decided to subject me to every time I closed my eyes. I always woke from the dream to find myself in a cold sweat and heart pounding. When I was younger, I remember having nightmares, especially after my mother passed. They would normally all revolve around finding her hanging body and trying to help my father carry her into the woods. The only other time I remember having nightmares was right after I first joined the missionaries. We came across terrifying beasts, which wreaked havoc on the towns we visited. It was not necessarily the beasts that caused my nightmares but the aftermath of their battles.

The towns we visited always smelled of death and rotting corpses. There were always mutilated body parts peeking out from thick patches of grass that surrounded the barricades, greeting us. Sometimes, the patches of grass were on fire, causing a thick cloud of smoke to roll over the scattered bodies in the fields. This always gave me an eerie feeling and supplied more cover for the remaining beasts. The very first town I visited shortly after joining the missionaries, there was a young girl the same age as Maximillian.

She was lying in a patch of grass, semi-conscious. One of her legs severed off, and her stomach and right shoulder had deep gashes, which were uncontrollably bleeding. She looked to have been around the same age and height as Maximillian, and she had a similar body build as well. The only difference was the color of her hair and eyes. She had straight, dark chestnut brown hair that hung loosely around the sides of her face. Her eyes were blue, but not a bright blue like Maximilian's. They were almost closer to grey than blue.

The werewolves had bitten the girl, and as such, we had to ensure that she took her last breath and burn her body. If we did not, she would shift into a beast and attack the remaining townspeople. It was not an enviable death, but few denied becoming a beast was a fate far worse. Those who survived would eventually shift and lose all sense of their former selves, relying solely on their newly found instincts and urge to hunt. There were tales of families slaughtered while trying to nurse an infected loved one back to health. These tales spread quickly, and eventually, the king ruled that those infected die at once and their bodies be burned.

The leader of our missionary group had tasked me with finding who was infected and ensuring their deaths while they searched the remaining area. I had walked over to the girl, half hesitant to obey my orders. The girl was choking on her own blood when I knelt beside her. I was unsheathing my dagger to pierce it through her chest when she grabbed my tunic and pulled me closer to her. I was able to steady myself and stop her from pulling me further down. At first, her eyes were frantic, darting from side to side until they rested on my clenched hand, which was holding the dagger. After a few quiet minutes, she was overcome by an eerie sense of calm. It was as if she knew what I needed to do and had come to peace with it. Death was far preferable to becoming a beast.

The girl gazed at me calmly, and I positioned the dagger on her chest. Before I could plunge the dagger into her, she tilted her head to the side and peered around me towards the top of one of the mountains. I remember following her line of sight as she lifted her remaining arm, pointing one of her bloody fingers to the top of the mountain. There, at the top, were three werewolves covered in blood, snarling, as they paced back and forth. Below the werewolves, the missionaries were slowly making their way up the rocky slope.

I remember loosening my grip on the girl, turning to try to warn the men, but she clenched my tunic tighter, pulling my attention back to her. Her eyes had changed from a dark blue to a golden yellow, and blood was still trickling from the sides of her mouth. She was no longer choking on the blood. I quickly moved, positioning my dagger on her chest again, and the girl smiled. "They know you; they know who you are; they know!"