He smelled her before anything else.

The odor, like blood in the water, water full of sharks, wound through him like a drug. Instantaneously Öde was shoved back and the demon assumed full control. The colt could only vaguely watch, like trying to peer through an opaque window which had iced over in the cold. That was fine, except the windows were the back of his eyes.

Teeth chattered anxiously, fangs bouncing off fangs with a saliva-sleeked clack and click. Tiny hooves picked their way over ice and snow in a flurry of movement; muscle and bone wound tight beneath a black canvas of destruction. An ode to the common massacre, a tail streamed in the wake of the hunter's lope, a banner that billowed over frozen ramparts. Its tong tendrils spreading out and dancing against the wind like spider's silk jiggling against freshly caught prey. All the while it breathed, huffing, puffing, steam pouring through its nostrils as though a dragon slumbered inside.

Not a dragon, just me. Just a boy.

She already knew that though, her eyes a dazzling blade that pierced through the armor of the wretched beast that clung to him. She saw into those clouded windows drenched with blood and found him wandering in the shadow of the dark. She called to him, a sound so pure and filled with hope that he couldn't ignore it even if he tried. Öde stumbled, the wolf's head swinging like a wrecking ball and slamming into a pile of snow. His body, so frail and fragile under the shell of the wraith, collapsed, briefly.

In a last moment of rebellion, for they had been entwined so long, this power and this child, this beast and this mortal, this wold and this horse, the body rose once more. It seemed physically affected by the song which lilted from the dove in disguise, its pace slowed, but its rage engorged. It snarled and snapped, swinging to and fro, a demented pendulum that trick to hack its way through the barrier of her serenade with snout and growl. It almost worked too.

Step by struggling step, the demon encroached upon Lena's position, so close she might feel his breath hot upon her hide. His mouth split open one final time, so wide it towered above her, strings of spittle sliding down off the roof of its moist mouth.
Eat her! I urged with a strangled cry of outrage. I was back in my own mind, staring down the wrinkled muzzle of my wolf, feeling the power slip through like sand in the wind. That sensation rattled me. I forgot all of my fears, all of my helplessness, all of my slipping sanity. All I knew was that she was taking my godlihood from me, and I didn't like it. I wanted to harvest her soul - but I was at my limit.

God damnit.

With that final yawn of teeth her ending note blew over the broken body and sheared the darkness from Öde's being. It feel from him in smokey tendrils that writhed and slithered away, his cocoon shedding, but he was no butterfly born. Instead the child collapsed into the snow, shivering.



It was several minutes before he came to, eyes flickering back to life like old lights remembering how to shine. Cold he thought pensively, simply. He had been but a babe when he was consumed, and now, a yearling, but not one grown. His body had been stifled by the infection, but his mind more so. Words tangled in his mouth, emotions a livewire in his thoughts. Even now as he lifted his head, guarded gaze watching his savior, his heart beat with fear and anxiety because he did not know her. He did not know anything any more.

Only the teachings of his mother, so well mingled with that of the wraiths, stained his memory.

Her question washed over him like a cold wave. He understood her, but he wasn't sure how to answer. After a pause he told her what was at the forefront of his mind, what had been the last intention of the wraith that had split from his body like a bonded companion. "Eat," he whispered to her, his gut rolling with hunger. What other than souls would he sustain on?