Chapter 10. The Crimson Blood-Hounds
"Remember the name of the wolf who will defeat you." Lorcan Whitelaw, had howled viciously at me through his wolf form. It wasn't a battle I had been intending to have to fight. It wasn't even a battle I was expecting to have to fight.
This was- er, had been my Beta.
My second in command.
The one within the Pack who had held my most trust and confidence... the one to whom I had told everthing.
No Alpha ever wants to have to admit it to any fellow Pack member when they have any sense of genuine fear about, well, really any given situation. No Alpha wants to have his Pack believe that they wouldn't have any threatening or harmful sitaution under control.
Yet, the very real and terrifying threat that the re-emergance of the Dark Ones' had brought with it, an ominous cloud of dread for what was going to be an innevitable blood bath. If not now... if not next week... if not next month or next year... they would eventually come for the Pack when they believed their numbers or skill had the strength.
While I had silently harboured this fear and confided in only a single soul, Lorcan Whitelaw, I had already began preperations for the worst case scenario with the Dark Ones. Contacting the Alpha's of other Packs which owed an allegiance to the Crimson Blood-Hounds.
Our Pack was widely upheld and respected, for the ancient and long standing role we had played in keeping the Dark Ones' and their numbers in check. Plundering any gatherings of strongholds that any of the Scouts reported back on.
Hitting them hard consistantly, to ensure their numbers and skill would never again grow to a mass which threatened the very basis of every creature on this earth's existance.
A certainty with the Dark Ones', was indulgence... and over indulgence to a gluttonous heights and dizzy proportions.
I allowed my thought's to take me back to one of the plundering parties' I had lead as a young wolf, not long after my first shift and one that my father, - the old Alpha - had been so keen on me leading and attending.
As a pup I used to protest against the constant killing of the Dark Ones'.
"...Surely they have a family too? Aren't we just making more enemies for the sake of making enemies if we keep killing them, with no reason to?" I had only been ten years old, or around then when I would begin to protest that line. Right up and after my first shift.
My older brother Samuel would always side with father, and I could never understand his reasoning... his justification and how he made sense of such sensless bloodshed - at least, through the eyes of childhood and innocence.
That Plundering Party... the true nature and horrors awaited by those ill-fated enough to fall victim to a Dark One was laid before my eyes. They only fed off blood, and made no use of the meat of their carcasses. The scent of wrotting corpses was a distinct marker of any stronghold the Dark Ones' tried to establish.
The more of them there were to feed, the more bodies of animals, humans, shifters and other creatures, would be piled high outside, or sometimes in a subternanian cave. They had begun adapting recently, in this way. Hiding the corpses of their victims in ways which masked the scent.
This was the type of stronghold I plundered that day. I lead it so nievely, going in truly believing that the Dark Ones' had any hint of goodness in them. That they my have families and live a reasonable life, as other creatures do.
Bodies towering in a pit, with varying stages of decay were laid bare. This was one of which we finally detected, and had no true scope of their size, numbers and overall strength until we were in the belly of the beast.
A female shifter child, no older than 5 lay on a blooded slate. One of her arms had been completely cut off. Yet the poor child remained alive. She wimpered almost inaudiable. Her tears mixed with the bloody finger prints of the Dark One which had been butchering her alive.
Samuel had made a point in showing me this, "Do you still believe that these creatures deserve your sympathy, Brother? When they can show none for a defenseless child?"
The young girl wasn't a werewolf specifically.
Werewolves had no birthmark to show their shift creature. Other shifters did have this and these shifters tended to live in nomadic tribes. Moving from place to place. Only a set few had stopped that way of life and succeeded territories from some territories from other werewolf Packs.
The little birthmark on the bloodied ends of her shoulder, revealed the shape of a sparrow.
While werewolf Packs and Harpy Clans' rarely spoke. They often got on well enough to know about each other, or at the very least entertain mutual and civil respect for one another.
Samuel and I knew well enought, that there was no Sparrow Harpy Clan. Such a thing didn't exist. The closest to this was the Sparrowhawk Harpy Clan but they were very different and no Harpy bore a shifters mark either.
This young Sparrow, was a true sparrow shapeshifter, and this hoard of Dark Ones' had cut off one of her wings at such a young age.
If she had ever flown before; she would never again feel the joy of flight.
If she had never flown before; now, she never would.
The only comparison, I could think of back then for such a crime... was cutting of the feet and hands of any werewolf. Remove the the primal and wild thrill of running and hunting within a pack.
The poor child was so very young.
It was for that reason she was lying in the abysmal condition she was. Her young and youthful blood was one of the most sought after when Dark Ones' weren't being picky.
My inexperience also failed to pick up that this meant that there was an older and more experienced one leading the hoard responsible for such attrocities.
It was the rage from this sight before my eyes, and the processing and understanding of just how disgustingly cruel these Dark Ones' really were. Their cold malice ways... worngs, so wrongful like cutting the wing off of a young sparrow shifter had no rhyme or reasoning that would ever justify it.
Watching other members of the Crimson Blood-Hounds assist the young girl under my brothers commands as second in command; they began to dress her wound, though she lay limp and unmoving. Terror and pain had frozen her and the attrocities committed to her, sealed any shred of childish nievety which remained, lingering. Remaining limp and without expression as they had lifted her from the bloody stone slate and carried her away.
She was such a small and fragil seeming thing. If we could not locate her family, the the Crimson Blood-Hounds would take her in as their own and ensure she had everything she would ever need... we just wouldn't be able to give her, her wing back...or the ability of flight.
Taking the little sparrow in was exactly what happened... Swiftly had turned out to be her name. Over those years she became an honorary member of the pack, but had settled in reasonably quickly.
More than anyone in the pack, she had the deepest hatred of the Dark Ones' and more reason than most of us.
Dark Ones' were abominations, and for the sake of every creature... they must be managed, removed and extinguished from this earth. What Swiftly experienced, and that very sight itself had sealed it for me.
"Do you understand now, why we must eradicate every Dark One hoard we find?" Samuel sighed and his hazel eyes softened in understanding, as he placed a comforting hand on my shoulder, "I used to think exactly the same way as you, Nikolas. Until father brought me on a Purging Party like this with him. There was no mutilated little sparrow child, with an arm- or, eh, wing, cut off. There was a room full of mere humans, kept in a pit and gravely malnourished. Some even died in that room and they were living among their own dead... the Dark Ones there had been keeping them as stock for food. Though they weren't doing a good job at feeding them, rather than themselved."
Samual stopped, realising he was rambling to a memory that such a Purge Party had brought back, given that I, his own little brother was seeing the true nature and terror of the Dark Ones'.
Once we had made it back from the Hoard's Purge Party, father had come over to both of us. Seeing the grave and solomn expressions on both of our faces, his own expression fell. "I am sorry you boy's are in a world where such violence is necessary to combat such horrors." He started. When he had been Alpha of the Crimson Blood-Hounds, father had been absolute and never faultered in his apperance of strength and dignity. His reign over the Pack was assured and no one dared question it... and yet even he, was appauled and feared the Dark Ones'.
"You boy's should know... that it is the the duty of the Crimson Blood-Hound's to uphold an ancient pact made between our ancestors and the ancestors of the and Royalty of the Raven Harpy Clan. They may no longer hunt the Dark Ones' as we do but, believe me. They were close to extinction before the anciant oath was made." There was a cool rightiousness eminating from father as he spoke about the history and origins of the Pack like this. "As long, as there is a true decendant of the original oath makers, the Crimson Blood-Hounds are bound to a duty of purging Dark Ones' from this world."
"...And what of the Raven Harpy? What about their duties?" Samual seemed slightly urked, it had always bothered him that the Raven's no longer hunted the Dark Ones' as they used to and that they no longer, aided the Crimson Blood-Hounds in the ancient endevour.
Father smiled at Samual. Understanding coloured those hazel eyes all Von Kasin shared.
The lack of assistance the Pack had been getting from the Raven Harpies, frustrated father to no end. It was apparently due to a King with pacifistic ideals, who had never seen war; had war waged upon him or even seen the horrors committed by the Dark Ones'.
That cool righteous aura father eminated while he spoke about the Pack's ancient oath, our duty and how our honour was bound to it. It was the aura that as an Alpha I would always aspire to attain and fail achieve... I would end up being jumped on a scouting expedition by my own trusted Beta.
My nieve leadership, inexperience and failings would cost my older brother Samuel his life. Once Swiftly was settled back at pack territory with the best Doctors we had available, though none of ours had any familiarity with avien-shifter physiology, they had done their best, Samuel had set out to track the Older and more experienced leader of that hoard of Dark Ones'.
The pack had slaughtered maybe two, to three dozen lower level and newly turned broods. Those newly turned would never have had the sense to hide the bodies under the earth, and a group that sieze was a clear sign and indication of a will to increase numbers and strength.
Samuel went out to track the leader of that brood down... his last words had been, "I leave you in charge of the birds while I'm gone." Ruffling my hair playfully, he then nudged me before returning to some sembelance of restraint, from childish play. "Take care of Swifty. Father and I will be back soon."
That day I lost my father and my brother... they had walked into a perfectly laid trap.
That day the Crimson Blood-Hounds gained an Alpha who was inexpereinced, and always felt like there were things father hand never shared about our history. Something in my gutt had always said there was something more to it... and now I would never know, and he would never tell me.
The experience I would gain would be through repeated Purge Parties and strategic scouts. After 5 years, Swifty began assisting with strategic plans to strike back at the Dark Ones', she was a natural as strategic analysis. For a child it was both a marvel and heartbreaking at the same time. As every member of the pack knew why she assisted, and why she was so keen and jovial every time she got news of another successful Purging Party.
My nieve leadership would, cost Samuel his life. And now it had cost me my own, with my own Beta betraying me for the possition of Alpha... my chest grew heavey and I sputtered blood.
Collapsed at the base of an old redwood trea, I had refused to die where he had left me. Where he had jumped me without any honour.
He had known, that in a fight between our wolves... as custom to a fight for dominance; for Alpha of our pack... that he would lose. Which left deception and betrayal as his only route to getting what he wanted.
Throughout the whole of one side of my body was wrought with the intense and fiery agony. I had been an Alpha... an Alpha of one of the oldest and most feared, yet well respected werewolf packs.
Yet, I had been beaten in an underhand and cowerdly attack by him for dominance... by my own Beta. "Give the Moon Goddess my best regards! Eh?!" He had snarled, a cruel smile curling at the edge of his lips. Gleefull that he was about to get everything he ever wanted as Alpha, and doom the Pack and this world in the process.
So this is how and where the Von Kasin bloodline end?. I throughed, as my lungs felt hot and heavy. Blood continued to trickle out of my sides. Not by the cruel ways of the Dark Ones' but by senseless human greed. This is how the ancient oath comes to an end, huh?
If it wasn't for something coming into contact with my shoulder, just at that very thought, and shaking me lightly.
Accompanied by the sound of a bell-like voice... I do not think for one a moment, that I would ever have opened my eyes again.