Ink of Ages Fiction Prize

Møya

“Lyall. It is Lyall … isn't it?”

Her voice shivered, like autumn leaves trapped in winter's breeze, but I stayed frozen, watching her reflection on the mirror in front of me. My silence asked her questions, and she answered between flickers of firelight:

“Your eyes give you away. My sister told me about your eyes.”

Shadows shifted and shaped across her face, revealing her details one at a time, but never all at once, and I saw within them the woman soaked in guilt. From my chest beat the heart of an animal, and from somewhere in my stomach ascended an incandescent snarl that grew to fill the room.

She didn't react.

Instead, she walked around me, brushing a leg across the fur on my side, and lowered herself to a chair perched by a table.

The feeling came over me again, as it so often had in the last few days, since I'd awoken to find myself in the body of a monster. It was a feeling of rage, of uninhibited fury that nipped at my skin like breaths of cold wind, pulling me to pounce to her neck and sink my teeth through every inch of her skin.

It was the one thing that reminded me that I was still human, somewhere – the hesitation.

She raised a hand, noticing the fur on my back stand on end, noticing my eyes grow narrowed and bloodshot.

“I know what you want to do … to me.”

The arch in my back softened at the sound of her voice, and my throat's grip loosened. As if at the flip of a coin, the air became filled with something different.

“I wouldn't blame you. My sister has forced this spell from my hand in the past. And every time it is cast I feel a part of my self wither away.”

A spell. As soon as I'd seen this hut, standing lone where the forest meets the lake, dark magic twisting from its every corner, suspicions grew from my mind like tortured weeds. My answers lay within.

And though I knew it, somewhere, that it was a work of magic, that the woman before me was a witch, the witch, responsible for my midnight transmutation, a part of me stuttered. She sat before me, my life in her lap, yet she did not seem to know it. Her eyes were a hollow silver, and her skin had gone deathly pale. Her hair, once a deep gold, had faded into stiffened strands of wiry silver.

She looked tired.

Still, the pieces refused to fall into place until she continued:

“My name is Gunnhild. My sister …

Well, my sister is the woman your father has had the misfortune of falling in love with.”

I stepped back. The crackles of the fire grew deafening, and the frosty air in the cabin snapped at my ankles until the muscles went rigid. The emotions of an animal coursed through my blood and I conspired, with what little remained of my consciousness, to sigh them away. I lowered myself where I stood, shaking over every inch, and looked up at her with tilted eyes. I spoke in my head, and I prayed she would hear me:

Tell me, I said. Tell me everything.

It made sense, in that moment, when she dropped her head with a solemn nod. A witch hears the words upon the wind that everybody else dismisses as background noise. Naturally she would hear me, a victim of her twisted magic.

With a heaving sigh, she stepped to what looked like a kitchenette hidden behind a wall of animal pelts. For a moment, she disappeared behind it, and the only evidence that she hadn't left altogether was the clinks and trickles of a tumbler being filled with water. She returned a minute later with a bowl placed ahead of me, half-full with water dirtied by secrets, and a glass of her own. The room filled itself once more with pops of the fire's soot, the low hum of a water-side wind whipping up beyond the window, and beneath that trepidation was the tangible quiet that preceded a story yet told.

“My sister …”

She hesitated, and I forced my back straight. Glare still locked on the witch, though somewhat softened by the remorse I saw her drowning under, I waited patiently, and listened.

“Elena is a broken woman,” she started. “When I discovered these … powers, if you could call them that … she was the first to make sure I didn't grow beyond my shadow. She sniffled to our mother about how dangerous I was, and started riots on the schoolyard to ensure nobody would be caught dead speaking to me. And, like any teenager, I ran. I ran away from her, away from the murmurs of schoolchildren, away from the burning eyes of passers-by, to here, where we stand now.”

An empty gesture towards the hut around us. It meant a great deal to her, once.

“But she found me, as she always does. It took her a decade, perhaps a little longer, but she found me. She was a lensmann, now. And when the strings of Fate put me in her path, there was no joy around our reunion. Instead, there was the glimmer of something different. It was far more powerful than mischief, but it hadn't quite fortified itself into evil.”

I cocked my head, still stifling cold shivers, and she dropped her head. Every clause in her tale seemed to be torn from the cloth of a woman already in tatters.

“Magic is forbidden, you see, in this corner of Norway. Had the village's eyes fallen upon my corner of this forest, I would have been drowned. And there in front of me, of course, stood my sister, a playground bully turned law-enforcer, no less, and when she exchanged her compromise with me, she did it as the older sister, the victor, once more.”

A sigh, and Gunnhild rose to her feet. Her skirt shuffled over the dust on the floorboards, and creased as she bent to tend to the fire. When she raised herself upright again, she remained facing the fire, the tears I heard invisible to me.

“She promised to keep my existence a secret, to keep the other policemen and their dogs away from me, so long as she could use me as a vessel, use my power to get her the things she wanted. She used me to transform people, children, wanted for petty crimes, into animals, so she could claim that she had chased the peace's disturbances away. She used me to find a man that would love her, after an extra spoonful of sugar in his drink.”

The air in the hut grew cold again, and Gunnhild turned to face me.

“And when she saw how much the town loved you, how much he loved you, his daughter, when she saw how much time he spent to see to you and your brother… oh, your poor brother… She used me to turn you into the creature you are now. Into the wolf she saw within, a predator to her idyllic fantasy yet to unfold, so that nothing … nothing … would any longer stand in her way.”

I had stopped listening to the story a little while ago, until she mentioned Sam. The instinct grew in me again, to raise my claws to her throat, to run them down the length of her body and slice her neatly in two, until the realisation filled me, rather like how water fills a sinking ship, that my father had been the victim all along.

He had lost his wife, not two years ago, and found his son, my brother, Sam, afflicted by the same condition. He had brought us here, to Norway, to give Sam a new lease of life, to find a way to cure him, and instead had been seduced by the siren of the fjords, lost in the song of a woman soaked with insecurity, desperate to bear the child of a man who, by no natural means, would give her love.

“I know what you're thinking.”

Snarls were snapping from my tongue, and my eyes had narrowed again, but she was right – she did know what I was thinking. It seems, somehow, she knew it better than I did.

The woman before me was a witch, the very witch who had transformed me into a wolf. Logical, then, it would be, that she could transform me back. I approached the table, lifted my forepaws to it – the closest thing I could enact to begging – and let my eyes lock deeply with hers as she sat herself down alongside me. I transmitted through the shivers in my fur the little girl that awaited within, the little girl that I was, longing only for her life to return, wherein she could go back to huffing at her father, caring for her brother, listening once more for the love of her newfound city.

But the witch gave a light shake of the head.

“I can't.”

I dropped a paw to the floor, and let my back arch again. You can, I thought, holding down fury in my throat, you can and you will.

“Magic is …”

She stood herself back up and turned away, running a finger through her hair.

“Magic is an ugly thing. And it cannot be undone by the simple muttering of a counter-spell. The gods themselves know that a mistake must be punished, that plain regret is not a just price for an impulsive curse.”

She stepped to the fire once more, and this time I followed, followed her wistful gaze into the flames as they snapped at their frame.

“There is a way to undo the spell. I know this for I wrote it myself. But, oh, Lyall …”

I looked up and saw a river of remorse flowing back from her eyes to mine. There was a pause, punctuated by a lone sigh.

“Your brother … his name is Sam, yes?”

If there was a response in me, it hid behind a curtain of anticipation. After all, what did Sam have to do with this? With any of this?

“Lyall … Lyall, the only way …”

She fell to one knee, and brushed a hand over my cheek, her warmth muffled by a mixture of fur and sweat. Her voice fell heavy as she finished, the words falling to our feet like broken glass:

“The only way to reverse this curse … is to drink his blood. You must drink the blood of your brother.”

I stumbled back. This time, there was no hesitation. It burned through my skull, ran down my every nerve, my every vein, until I was shaking once more, though it was no longer from the cold. The Devil herself, the culprit to whom I own this wretched ego, was looking me in the eyes with the sole option of murdering my brother or living the remainder of my days as an animal. This time, the wolf's fury had tightened its fingers around me, pierced its strings through my limbs, and I no longer had the means to fight it. I no longer wished to fight it.

“I know what you want to do to me.”

She repeated herself, and my ears became flush with the fire of blood.

“I beg of you …”

Her voice dropped to a whimper, and my back arched with a fervour of its own. I was not given the chance to beg before she made me into this. My brother was not given the chance to beg before she made him her leverage. Yet I paused, if only to hear the sorrow come from her mouth.

In the end, what came was not the sorrow I expected.

A quiet sob. She lifted her head, exposing her neck. Her knuckles whitened as she gripped onto the chair, and her shuttered eyes dampened:

“Grant me your mercy.”