Fenrir's POV
The wind shifted.
I scented death.
Not the frail, pitiful kind I'd smelt a thousand times from trembling prey. No — this was colder. Sharper. Like steel soaked in blood. Like fire choked with ash. Like something that had forgotten how to die.
Something was here.
I turned before the whisper of its blade reached me. My muscles screamed in protest, old wounds barking like echoes through bone—but I moved. Fast. Faster than any of my kind should be allowed to. The strike sliced through air, so close I felt the wind peel fur from flesh.
Our eyes met.
He did not flinch.
Neither did I.
I knew that scent. I had tracked it along the edge of my territory for decades. Always there—watching, waiting. A ghost that left no tracks, no sound. The silence that came before his strike was as familiar as the cold bite of winter. He thought himself predator.
And perhaps once, he was.
But now he stood before Fenreir — first of the Beast Kings, the one who conquered the Northern Wastes and drank the blood of titans. I am no prey. I am the King of Wolves.
So I charged.
My claws came down with the weight of mountains behind them, the force of a century's worth of kills. But he was already gone. He moved like wind wrapped in flame, fluid and precise. He slid past my blow, ghosting behind me. I twisted, snapping, but he was reading me—every twitch, every breath. He knew my tells. He had studied me.
And I realized—he'd been watching me for a long, long time.
Still, I had power. Strength earned through blood, fang, and fire. My kind had lived and died beneath my howl. I had stood against monsters and emerged with their bones between my teeth.
I struck again. And again.
But he was stronger. Faster.
I felt it in the way he parried. In the way his blade met my hide without fear. Too many of his kind had fallen to feed his rise, and now he wielded their deaths like a weapon.
Pain.
White-hot. Sudden.
His blade bit deep into my flank—piercing where no weapon had for decades. I staggered, breath catching. I howled—not in pain, not yet—but in fury. The sound shook the trees. The forest answered.
But he didn't back down.
He came faster.
Each blow was deliberate. No wild strikes, no wasted motion. He wasn't fighting me. He was dissecting me. Measured. Studied. Like a scholar carving open a corpse to learn its secrets.
Then came the fire.
It erupted around me, a wall of flame too fast to escape. Heat clawed at my lungs. I spun, but he was already inside the circle. Already moving. Already striking. My blood steamed as it spilled.
And still he came.
This was no prey. This was no man. This was something ancient and hungry. Something that saw me not as a threat—
But as food.
I stepped back, hind leg trembling. Fear crept in. A new fear. One I hadn't known since I was a pup lost in the shadow of my first moon.
I'd faced monsters. I'd led them. But this… this was something else. Something carved from hate and fire and unrelenting will.
I needed numbers.
I called.
A howl from deep in my chest—older than language. A sound that cracked through the canopy, rolled across valleys. My kin would hear. My pack. My children. They would come.
And they did.
I saw the flicker of hesitation in him—just for a moment—as hundreds of voices joined mine. Snarls and growls rose like a tide. The trees shook with their fury.
I grinned.
He wasn't the only one who could plan.
But then—
He smiled.
Not in amusement. In revelation.
Heat built behind him. But it wasn't fire. It wasn't magic. I looked at him and saw—
A dragon.
Not of flesh. Not of scale. But an image. A vision burned into the air behind him, wings spread wide, mouth open in a roar that echoed through my soul.
I had only seen such power once before—
Balerion, the King of Dragons. The strongest of the Beast Kings.
But now… his image resonates in this thing. This man. This monster.
The ground cracked. The trees withered. My fur rose in protest. Something wrong poured from him, something ancient and vile. A furnace of rage and will.
He shot forward like a comet. I lunged in desperation. My jaws snapped shut around steel—only for it to shatter in my mouth.
A trap.
Pain exploded in my leg. I collapsed. Blood poured freely now. My strength bled with it.
The pack arrived. My sons, my brothers. Warriors born of fang and hunts. They surrounded him.
But it was too late.
He didn't hesitate.
He didn't even see them.
He burned them.
The clearing became a furnace. Fire danced like it had a soul of its own, leaping from wolf to wolf, setting fur alight, devouring bone. Screams rang out. Then silence.
He did not pause.
He did not mourn.
The last survivors tried to flee. He caught them.
All of them.
And then it was quiet.
I ran.
As fast as I could, my mangled hind leg dragging. Fear gripped me like chains. I knew he would not let me go—
But I had to try.
"I want to live."
Ten minutes later.
My breath came in ragged gasps. I scanned every shadow, every shift in the leaves. For a moment, I thought I had escaped.
Then I felt it—danger.
I leapt, just as a wave of flame scorched the ground where I'd stood.
I turned.
He was there.
Still coming.
He charged—
Too fast.
Too strong.
I tried to flee, to create distance. But he didn't let me. He struck. Again. And again. And again.
Until I lay broken in a crater of his making.
I blinked through blood. A flicker of hope sparked—maybe this was the end. Maybe this was mercy.
Then I felt his hands on my jaw. One on the top. One on the bottom.
I looked into his face.
There was no man there. Only a grin—wide, mad, cruel.
I screamed—high, shrill, a sound that no wolf should ever make.
"Gagh… no—please, no."
Crack.
RIP.
…