Shades of Grey

LOCATION UNKNOWN— DECEMBER 1843

“What do you mean?” I asked. “How can you know my—”

“Your thoughts? Simple process really. I’m surprised you haven’t arrived at the answer yet.”

I held out the Longsword, fed up with all this colloquial vagueness, and held it over his heart.

“Tell me! I’ll not be manipulated or controlled!”

He let out a grave and terrible shriek, but then stopped and looked at me with contemptuous glee. He gripped the hilt of the sword and smoothly pulled it into his body, daring then to slide it easily out and wipe his filthy Vanguard blood on his robes. He then rammed it into the compartments along my leg. I cried out briefly for he had run the blade directly into my flesh, producing a thick stream of blood. I clenched my fists as the stinging pain began to grow.

“I already do,” he sneered, bringing his knee into my gut and propelling me backwards through the long tunnel into the hallway towards the wolf. I crashed into the bars of the opposite cell just as the doors to the cell I had just left swung closed ominously, Evan’s hideous Romanian cackle echoing through the stone dungeons as it did.

“NO!” I cried, beating on the bars before I heard a familiar long and fearsome growl. I turned and beheld the wolf once more, drawing the Longsword slowly out of my flesh.

The wolf, who had now grown significantly in size and ferocity, greeted me with a bone-shattering snarl— but something about Evan’s words struck me.

“You are where you have always been…I am always in your thoughts…”

Then my mother’s passionate warning came back to me.

“You control everything here!”

I looked at the snarling wolf, at the foam that seeped out from between its teeth, when an idea came to me.

“You will not move,” I said in a steady voice.

But the wolf did not obey. Instead it roared at me with malevolent eyes and took a devious step forward.

“You will not move!” I said again, stronger this time. Still, the wolf would not listen.

“You are where you have always been…she is what you fear to become…I am always in your thoughts.”

The realisation then came to me and I suddenly felt stupid for not realizing it earlier: Natara had not sent me to any foreign place or magical realm, she had sent me into my own subconscious: everything I had seen and encountered was merely a figment of my imagination. I had been running around in my own head for the last several hours.

I then closed my eyes and concentrated on Forma, on calling her to me…releasing her from the prisons of my mind….

I heard a dark clank as the thick manacles around the wolf’s feet snapped open. The wolf’s growls then stopped and I opened my eyes, staring at what had until now been a frightening, monstrous wolf but whose features now held a sort of softened, exhausted dolour; much like a frightened young housecat.

“Forma?” I queried.

A diminutive and aggrieved moan escaped the wolf’s snout.

I dared to take several cautious steps forward. Once I reached the wolf, I raised my hand and placed it gently on its snout. The wolf whimpered and I knew that I had finally found her.

“Natara! Release me! I’ve found her!”

I felt a cold chill begin to envelope me, gasping as it entered my body and froze everything inside me. Forma howled as the same chill came over her and after a minute the paralysis lifted and I sat on the floor of the Witch Palace in the Kuligari camp once again.

“Very good,” snapped Natara in a petulant voice. I looked to Forma’s melting ice prison. “You found her.”

I stood up quickly, eager to leave this horrid place.

“Yes, now may I have my belongings back?” I asked with clout.

Natara inhaled slowly and glared furiously at me but with a wave of her hand my cloak, mask, hat, and weapons leapt back onto my body. I breathed a contented sigh.

“Our deal?” I said, looking expectantly at Natara. Her demeanour then changed to one of malicious delight. She waved her hand over Forma’s ice block and it began to melt faster. Once Forma’s body was free there was a dark moment of tense horror as she looked down at her limbs, slowly shifting back into their natural form. She then looked up at me with a look of pained anguish before collapsing to her knees and falling to the floor in unconsciousness.

I quickly ran to her side, ripped off my cloak and wrapped it around her frozen form, noting with guilt-ridden terror how cold and blue she had become. I turned to Natara.

“Will she be alright?” I asked.

“That depends on your definition,” she said cryptically, donning a malevolent smile.

In a flurry of wild rage, I ripped out my lit Flamesword and crossed the distance between us in a single leap, lodging the flat of the fiery blade against her windpipe. She looked at me with a cocky smile as though she thought me a child incapable of carrying out any lethal attack.

“What does that mean? You swore we could walk out of here if I found her within the time limit!”

“Yes I did,” she spat curtly.

“Well what are you talking about ‘that depends on your definition?!’ I swear, if you’ve harmed her in any way, I will not hesitate to destroy your entire clan and anyone who dares to speak your name!”

My voice had grown low and seethingly gritty with wrath. Natara showed no signs of intimidation, however. She simply flicked her eyes to Forma, her arrogant smile remaining. At that exact moment, Forma gasped awake with sudden gusto, taking several deep violently bloody coughs. I looked over at her shivering form and as she took in a wheezy gasp of air, I heard the soft undertones of a minute growl. Fury swelled inside of me as I realised the terrible truth.

“You said...”

“…that if you had failed, the consequence was you choosing who would bear the werewolf curse. I never said that I could not choose if you had succeeded.”

Natara gave me a cagey smile, pleased at her Shylockian trickery.

“Well hurry up...” she urged forcefully, as though talking with a dim-witted child. “If you don’t get her near warmth soon, she’ll die of hypothermia.”

Natara grinned slyly. I looked down at the shivering Forma and quickly picked her up.

“Send my love to the men of Jzasach.”

Natara then flciked her hands towards me and I suddenly began running, not of my own volition and much faster than I had ever run before. I didn’t care though: I didn’t care that Natara had done something to my legs or where she was even sending me, I was just gratefuly to be running…away from the cackling, beautiful Witches and away from any magic that I could not defend myself or Forma against…away to safety.