Wolves Forest

Horrors of the Night

My name is Benjamin Ifeza Nocte, and I was a half-elf who lived a normal life in my village, the village of Alfend. Living quietly with my family and with an engagement prepared for next spring. Then the murders started... At first, it was just one or two each month, the villagers suspected of being some wild animal due to the wildness of the injuries: bodies shattered in alleys, blood spilled on the surrounding walls, destroyed organs scattered everywhere, bones broken, bite marks and claws ...

After a while, the villagers decided to hunt this animal. Me, my dad, and the villagers who had some hunting skill set off in search of the creature of the night. For days we only found few footprints, patches of dried blood in the forest, and few clues, until the day we went out for another search, on a night with a full moon ... A light fog ravaged the winter environment, the white snow falling slowly, our breath came out in small clouds and the night was silent and bathed in the silvery light of the full moon to the skies. Due to the extra light provided by the moon, the villagers split into pairs through the forest, and I was in pairs with an old friend of mine, the dwarf Belrom.

- What do you think we're looking for, Ben? A bear maybe? -he asked me under his red beard

- At this time of the year Belrom? I'm starting to think that the time you spent on your crazy inventions is making you lose some screws, old friend. The bears here are already hibernating... - I answered, crouching down to check a mark on the floor. It looked like a dog's footprint, but the shape and size were strange. I turned to comment on this with Belrom but stopped when we heard a sound that would haunt my nightmares for years.

We heard its howl long before we noticed its presence, a guttural and savage howl that resembled the howl of an atrocious wolf, cutting through the nighttime silence. By the sound, we thought we were about thirty meters away, we looked at each other and with a nod, Belrom fired a light signal to the sky to indicate our position to the other villagers and we went towards the howl. The problem is that we thought we were hunting this creature, but we were the ones being hunted ...

After arriving in the clearing where we thought the howling had come from, we stood with our backs to each other and refined our senses, trying to locate the origin of the howling after we saw no sign of the creature ... The silence reigned as my gauze darted from corner to corner around the clearing, looking for any sign of movement. The full moon in the sky, our silent observer, lit up our surroundings but all we saw were trees and rocks on all sides. He attacked before we could react, running at an impressive speed and knocking us to the ground. Belrom and I fell with screams of pain, great strands of warm blood ran down my back through the tears that the creature's claws made in my flesh. Belrom was not much better off with a deep scratch on his leg preventing him from walking. I got up in pain and tried to take him behind a large rock in the clearing, desperately looking for some form of cover. Before I got there, however, the beast attacked again, I didn't feel any direct impact this time, but Belrom's cry of horror told me that he was the target of that attack. I forced myself to look at him and I found myself holding half of my friend's dead body, his legs brutally torn off by the creature's impact and attack; his lifeless eyes stared at me with the coldness of the dead. I ran under the stone taking the remains of Belrom with me, I would not leave his body to be devoured by the monster, he deserved a better end ... Sobbing under the stone I waited for several seconds that seemed like hours of terror. .. The silence interrupted only by the pounding beat of my heart like a drum, I was sure the creature could hear my heartbeat so loudly that it was in my ears, and just hoped the other villagers would come and get me out of there.

An excruciating pain ran through my body, and with a scream of horror I looked at the arm on which I was holding Belrom's body, and there was the monster that killed him, now trying to tear my arm off with a violent bite, next to the remains of my late colleague. Holding on to the idea that if he did I would not survive long enough to take Belrom to a proper funeral, I got a good look at the creature in front of me - black fur covered his immense body in a similarly humanoid shape, muscled arms ended in deadly razor-like claws. A big wolf-like face, with bright orange-yellow eyes that resembled amber, its sharp, deadly teeth embedded in my arm ripping my skin and flesh - and at that moment it became unthinkable to die there. If I died there would be no guarantee that they would find my body or Belrom's, he would not have his funeral, and I would leave behind a mother, father, two younger siblings, besides, of course, my future wife.

At that time a force within me roared back to that beast and I noticed a strange rune in the stone behind me glowing with an intense green light, I saw the creature's skin in front of me burst into green flames. With a howl of rage and pain, the creature released my arm, but it looked like it was about to attack me again. At that moment, at various points around the clearing, I saw the villagers' torchlight and shouts of threat, "they arrived" I thought before my body collapsed as I passed out beside Belrom's remains ...