He came back the next midday leading a detachment of soldiers, and I watched them from the trees, growling my displeasure. I still considered this my land, see. My home.
That night, after they’d set up tents in order to further investigate in the light of morning, I crept in, the darkness as the day to my new senses. The horses screamed with my approach and pulled their pickets free, crashed off into the night, back to the safety of town.
The soldiers circled around behind their spears and shields and stoked the fire higher and higher, and the whole night I only circled them.
Just before dawn broke, then, the part of my mind that thought like a wolf presented an obvious fact to me: if the soldiers were here, then they weren’t protecting the town, right? And, without mounts, they wouldn’t be tonight either.
I left them to their slow investigation of the ruins—really, they were plundering what they could from the rubble—and that night began my days-long siege of the town. I picked off those who wandered out to the edges, the children playing games, the women walking out to the hill to see if their soldier husbands were approaching, and then, never mind that my hunger was long sated, I picked off those who came looking for the children, the wives.
They didn’t nourish me the same as my own sons had, but I learned to draw pleasure from their fear. It was enough.
When I’d gorged myself on the town such that I was only pulling the tongues and certain organs from the bodies I’d plundered, I padded back to my lands one last time and—just because I could, because I knew now that I was larger than any of the wolves I’d used to hunt from horseback—I crashed into the sleeping soldiers’ camp and tore whatever flesh flashed in front of me, not even eating it, just destroying and destroying.
As a child, from a high place, I’d once watched a pair of wolves move through a herd of goats, killing for no other reason than the sheer joy of it.
Now I was that wolf.
I don’t bite holes in the world because I dislike the world, I bite holes in it because I have these teeth.
That night with the soldiers is probably where the connection was made between the former king and the current monster, too. Since a head injury in my middle years, I’d always had a narrow blaze of white at a distinctive angle through my black hair. In my new form, as you can see, that blaze persisted and revealed my true identity to those soldiers.
Such are legends born. Such do necessary truths begin to get told.
* * *
As a king of men, my sons had numbered enough to form their own phalanx, nearly.
As a wolf, my progeny were even more numerous.
Zeus neglected to geld me, see.
His punishment against me was that I would have to run my dinner down every night, that I would have to be as savage in my daily life as I was when I cubed the smallest bit of my least son into his stew.
But in punishing me thusly, he also gifted me with everything a wolf might have.
Chief among those has been wives.
As king, I had privilege and access to any woman who caught my eye. As king of the wolves, my dalliances ranged even further. Not only could I mate with wolves of the forest, I found that, much like my maker Zeus, I could share such congress with other animals as well. Specifically, the curs and mongrels that lived off the waste of towns.
My children were numbered in litters in those days, and of course, as when I was a man, I selected favorites to let walk alongside me, capable wolves I trained to hamstring your kind and leave them flopping and moaning in the dust of the road. You die soon enough on your own and, dying alone, can’t lash out with knives or pikes. However, there were also lessons my children could learn about the back of the neck, and the throat. Open the throat, and everything good spills out, doesn’t it?
The soft belly is good too, if there’s time.
You’ll learn this all as well, don’t worry.
Really, there’s no part of a man that a wolf can’t take advantage of.
And of course I instructed my children of those early years to hunt mainly at night, and to keep their distance from the soldiers, and to always stay upwind, unless the panic of the livestock is beneficial in some way.
Myself, while I still took one of you from time to time as reminder, it was less about sustenance, more about a display of who was still king, and who was not.
What I found I derived more nutrition from was the puny whelps the town curs threw, with their floppy ears and mottled coats—my pups, I mean. Did living my first week as a wolf on the meat of my own sons dictate my taste, I wonder? Was I still living Zeus’s judgment, then?
If so, it was a sweet judgment.
What I would do is pass through the edge of a town, mount whatever straggly dogs were bold enough to pad out for the fresh deer I’d dragged up, and then I would come back a couple of moons later. With pups, I liked to wait until they were suckling on their mother. When they were lined up on the teat like that, I could lower my great mouth down to their wiggling bodies and pull them up one at a time, their mouths holding onto their mother, stretching her out until there’s that pleasant pop of suction collapsing.
While chewing the meat and soft bones together in a single mouthful, the rest of the pups wouldn’t even scramble away, would just keep feeding, loading their bellies with that pale blue milk that is the perfect garnish for their soft muscle, like a center that comes in a warm rush, surprising every time.
The mothers just glared up at me, unable to move.
Sometimes I would leave them one or two pups yet wriggling, for the next generation. I found that throwing pups off of pups I’d fathered was even sweeter, is what I imagine I might taste were I to bite into my own naked belly.
Such is the way mighty Zeus designed me.
Even better, eating the milk-saturated, wriggling-blind pups born from pups I’d myself fathered had an unexpected effect, one not dissimilar to the one you see before you now.
If I gorged myself on the whole litter back then, I could, for perhaps an hour, stand up on my hind feet as I used to when I was man.
With practice I found I could even walk a bit, unsteadily.
It’s a release like none other, to work around the curse laid down by a god and prove it not a curse. To walk slowly through the market of a sleeping town, my every sense alive, my children arrayed out behind and beside and ahead of me, lest some soldier wake to relieve himself, try to raise the alarm.
The night was populated with monsters in those days, yes.
In these days as well.
* * *
It was during one such midnight stroll that my revenge against mighty Zeus took shape.
Having eaten, this time, the mother of the litter as well as the litter—she was weak, it was a mercy—I found that my balance was even better, and I walked confidently all the way through town this time, to the meadow on the other side where it smelled like horses usually grazed. There were no horses then, though.
One of my sons growled deep in his chest, alerting the rest of us to what was happening out in the grass. In a burrow out in the field was the pounding heart of one of my many curs, giving birth. She’d come out here for safety. She’d come out here to try to escape me.
Having never eaten a litter this fresh, still sheathed in afterbirth, and curious what the result might be, I had my children uncover her, never mind that the pups wouldn’t be filled with that milky-rich center this time.
The mother was a pitiful thing, starved down and weak, whimpering, crying from the effort, shivering with fear, only half done with her delivery. The first four pups were rolling in the dirt, eyes closed.