Skinwalker

    Gather around me if you wish to hear my tale, for I am a shaman king from the old country. My world is not yours, my words are not the ones spoken today. I am a wanderer of the path that separates men from beasts, and on certain nights preys upon other men. I do not do this because I dislike them or because I have no control over my actions, those are the motives of a criminal. I do it because I am a relic from a time when human predation was both normal and understood.

     In my century we were not victims of a lycanthropic disease, but voluntary shapeshifting mystics although I hesitate to compare us with witches. A witch is an unscrupulous deriver of spells from a pact forfeiting her own soul, and is lucky to even find the sign of a werewolf. Not only am I a far cry from these but from other classes of werewolves. We had mass gatherings at graveyards, exhumed and ate freshly buried corpses, and were more likely to attack with a knife than bite someone (try it yourself if you doubt me). All this will be explained to you, but first, the story of how my long night began.

      I am not the same man by day as I am in wolf-form. I know as little about him as a man I have never met. Before I don the hide I am merely a skinwalker knowing nothing but what I must do. So each night for me begins like emerging from a brain fog, barely aware of what bed I rose from and what was required of me to get the skin.

      On this particular night I was called by a phase of the Moon which tells men to lock their doors but for us heralds the time of the gathering. I wandered naked from the sleeping battlements of my ancestral home into the wild, neither a man nor the beast I was yet to become. A skinwalker is a dumb intermediate creature that does not know its own self, and what would become of me if I could not find the hide I have no idea.

      It is difficult for you to grasp how anyone today could confuse a man in a wolf's hide for anything but a man, but a Medieval community lives in fear and that fear is of great importance. I do not mean an understanding of the threat of an enemy and its ways, for a wolf does not allow itself to be understood. Prowling at night in wolf's fur is something men do not do, so when I wear the hide I can commit acts that would never be attributed to a human; and easily be the murderer in my own kingdom, a responsibility as necessary as that of a king.

           We are descended from the ancient Berserkers, mercenaries who lived for the bloodsport of battle dressed in wolf's skin and ate their kills. When civilization had no more use for us we were disbanded and had to find ways to conceal ourselves. The custom of laying out a wolf's skin on certain nights to protect a community from madness was not as secretive as it is today; even those who remember to do it hardly know the reasons.

           I came to a dark clearing in which a large oak stood. A wolf killed during a hunt had been stuffed deep into the hollow of the trunk and left for me. Although it was necessary you must understand I did not know who these men were as I warily examined their tracks and approached the cavity.

           I must wear the skin of a freshly-killed wolf each time, for those who wear old pelts are considered shameful, a predator that no longer has the skill to take the place of a living animal. I dragged the carcass out of its hiding place, finding a crude ceremonial knife hidden with it that I had used many times.

           As my hand touched the fur I felt a jolt of my true self. I apologized in our secret language and pledged to take its noble place with dignity. I do not dissect wolves for the purposes of divination, they have no speech and trying to derive what their organs say may drive a man mad.

           The skin was still bloody when I placed it over mine, the wolf's face becoming my own. The primeval parts of the mind suddenly took hold. I gnashed my teeth and let out a howl that frightens owls and wakes small animals in their burrows.

           I looked down at my filthy goose-fed skin and dusted it off wondering where it had been without me. The phases of the Moon are fleeting and a wolf that does not take his hide off again when his task is done puts himself at a risk we are sworn not to take. I dropped to my haunches and smelled the air, then I saw the Moon and thought of the gathering.

           Even the destiny of a lone hunter is interwoven with others and I was interested in knowing what those are. There is such a thing as an antisocial wolf, a motherless beast that was never formally introduced to our ways. How this happens is usually through some unfortunate circumstance. Such transformations are sloppy and don't leave the line between beast and man cleanly drawn as it should be. As a skinwalker they have to kill to get their own hide, probably with their bare hands, which makes them little more than lunatics men can deal with themselves.

           The practice of eating the dead has been greatly misconstrued. Taking victims accomplishes a variety of tasks depending on what kind of information one is interested in, and it is hardly possible to do this while the victim is still living. The place of the gathering is not a task to be taken lightly or without knowledge so my first order of business was to determine my immediate future.

           I rushed headlong through the dark countryside across many scent trails until I found the right one. There was a lost peasant attempting to start a fire; a careless fool unnecessary to his fellow men. I watched him take the time to build a stick shelter, for the privacy of a hovel is something I prefer when working. He did an excellent job at it, but to an animal a monument of utter futility.

           When he was finished I sprinted from the darkness and slashed him with a well-practiced stroke. The idiot stumbled forward into the fire he had spent an hour lighting, burning his chest on his own coals and rolled over on his back, squealing as a pig does. My knife had only glanced him, hardly a wound worth screaming about. I split him open without damaging any vitals, which when perfectly done can allow you to see a man's heart and lungs working. As I bent over him there was something odd about his scent I could not place, like that of a man with something wrong with him.

           I took him inside the hut. There was even a knob from which to hang him up from the crossbranch using the natural fold of skin at the back of the neck. I recited the incantation, surveying anatomy and processes that had not yet been named.

           The human body is useful for a variety of purposes but I went directly for the information I sought. The heart and lungs are for manipulating the destinies of men; the liver is the seat of vice used for curses and dark deeds; it is the harmless lower organs that serve only divination and consumption. I removed each of these, carefully placing them down and then I saw something I did not expect. This man had some female parts, rudimentary in nature, and the meaning was inescapable.

           "There is a woman waiting there for me?" I wondered in silence.

-

           I do not think of women as you do, in fact I do not think of them at all except for their role in the propagation of our race, which is not often in my thoughts. They are of a different upbringing than males; the ones I have seen are mysterious, feral creatures with the responsibility of bringing young cubs into the fold.

           Since my first transformation I have had no memory of the daylight world or my place in it, but what I do know is that I had no mother. Without maternal guidance I was a wild, uncontrollable child. I participated in my first hunt and killed a fox, which I crudely skinned and wore as a hood and cloak from that day onward. I ventured further and further into the wood, until the day I became lost and experienced a night of horrors.

           I was abducted by hooded men and taken to a place where I was staked to the ground and left to fend for myself. I did not know all the circumstances under which this occurred; some mystic orders abandon their inductees to a test of manhood that will drive them mad. In my case they left me to be found by a creature they only knew of through legend; the she-wolf.

           I struggled against the twine that bound me, whining to any living thing that could hear me. I spent long fearful hours shivering until I awoke to find the wood had gone completely silent. There in the moonlight was a huge wolf stalking me.

           There was something odd about it. I thought it might be the ghost of a wolf, then it came rapidly toward me and I cried out. It rose up on its hind legs and I could see the underside of its body was that of a nude woman.

           I closed my eyes and cowered against the leaves as she lowered herself over me, breasts hanging. She sniffed me as a mother does to be sure of its own offspring. A musty smell covered me like a blanket and I was no longer a boy-child but an infant. This creature was my long-lost mother.

           She nursed me like Romulus and kept me warm for the rest of the night. I fell asleep partly out of shock, and she carried me clutching against her bosom a great distance into the mountains.

           In the morning I awoke at the opening of a den. My mother lay beside me breathing in silent fits like a predator that can awake at any moment, her bare body partly visible under the hide. When she awoke she "marked" me by rubbing herself on me, then left expecting me to follow.

           She never once spoke to me, looked me in the face or made any female sound. She taught me how to survive by example, drinking from the brook while laying on her stomach. She presented me with raw organs she had acquired during the night. I understood what they were but did not equate them with people.

           I tried to show affection and was ignored. It was then I began to see her impatience with me, which seemed to increase with each day. The first words of our language I ever heard spoken was when she muttered "my son is a dead fox". I did not realize how repulsive it is to be close to someone who wears the skin of a long-dead animal. So began our quest to get my first hide.

           One day without a word she left the den and made me follow her until I was no longer able to walk, then I rode on her back until we were in what must have been a different kingdom.

           At nightfall she had me accompany her with great stealth to the outskirts of a human settlement. We cautiously approached something that I have not seen since; a raised wooden platform with several recently-killed animals placed on top of it. My mother climbed up rapidly and found the body of a wolf and its half-grown cub. She spoke the words of mourning, took out a crude knife hidden in her pelt and skinned them both with amazing finesse.

           I observed a wildness come over her as she exchanged her old hide for a new one. I mimicked this behavior as I put on my own skin, baring my teeth and stamping the ground. I deduced the skins must make us invincible somehow.

           She led me toward the settlement, this time to hunt. My mother dropped to the ground and approached a poor man singled out by his own people. He stood there breathing in heavy gasps until she slunk behind him and wrapped her bare arms around him. (I have never given a victim such consideration.) Then she called to me.

           His fear changed to puzzlement in his last moments. My mother handed me the knife which was something I would have to do by myself the next time, so she wrapped my small fingers around the handle and we plunged it together into his gullet.

           My time spent with my mother was fleeting. I began to honestly think we were wolves, however her intention was not for me to stay in the wild permanently. They are our gods, role models which no man can fully be. We cannot chase down deer or ever be welcomed into their pack. We must return to society and forget ourselves for if we were solely wild creatures we would be exterminated and there would nothing left for men to fear. The two halves of my mind split and I do not know what sort of man I became in the daylight hours, for he is but a sheep. My mother was the last person I truly loved. Her scent has been gone from this land a long time.

-

           When I say the werewolf is the deadliest of forest dwellers I do not mean we are devious or untrustworthy, for a wolf can be trusted to follow a certain behavior as much as anything alive. If there is something to worry about in the wilderness it is surely a witch.

           On the second day of my journey to the place of the gathering I slept and became invisible under a rock ledge on account that I had encountered a forest road where a great host of men were marching stupidly by. There is no place for a man in the forest unless he is a hunter, so their clanking presence puzzled me. At dusk I resumed my quest through a dark hollow where I encountered a different kind of hovel and a smell that intrigued me.

           Unlike the peasant’s hut this was something weaved out of woodbine like a nest, its gaping entrance stretched between two trunks in a geometric pattern as a spider does. I see so many spider webs I did not recognize it as a pentacle, for there was no smell of human activity witch or otherwise. A witch’s lair that was no longer in use.

           I foolishly stepped inside, breaking the gossamer threads that were a part of its construction and her spell. The source of the smell was a bag of gallstones left there for me to find, and the stones of many men can be used for many things. I felt an unnatural fatigue come over me.

           I am fortunate the witch had died or was indisposed, for when I woke from my dream of the gathering I was untouched. In fact the cobwebs had multiplied overnight and were stuck to my face. My hide felt stiff, so I got out of there and sniffed the night air. It was the same night, these were the same woods, but something was different.

           I hastened to the necropolis of my people, moonlit hillsides covered in tombstones and crumbling defensive walls of another time. To my horror the graveyard was deserted; I could see and smell for more than a mile and there was not a wolf to be found. No stragglers watching feverishly from the groves, no word of a mass genocide of our race and a rude awakening of humankind.

           I crouched at the base of the ancient battlements in plain sight waiting to greet any latecomer but there was none. Eventually I was disturbed by a light, a lantern swinging at the head of a carriage that made its way down the middle of the cemetery and stopped rudely in front of me. Some humans came out to pay their respects to a particularly large tombstone. There was a beautiful woman dressed in black holding roses which she placed at the grave.

           As I watched this I gathered that the woman’s mate had died on this very night. Uncaring and overcome with grief and confusion for my own tribe, I went mad and rushed into the midst of them demanding to know what happened to them.

           The humans were shocked by my appearance as I held out my curved knife to defend myself, but the woman had at least eight armored bodyguards (which I have never seen) and they surrounded me easily. They had the sense to all rush me at once, four men holding me back as my weapon was pried from my hand. They held me down, peeling the hide from my flesh as I howled in agony for the last time, my voice changing as they removed it from an intelligent predator to the gibbering of a mindless simpleton.

           Something was stopping them from finishing the job, then their mistress looked at me and said “Richard?”.

           My bleary eyes rose to meet her face not recognizing my own name. The men whispered to each other “Is it the king?”, and then suddenly released me and started kneeling.

           “Your majesty has been missing for ten years!” my bride lifted her skirts and rushed to embrace me in her arms.