The Legend of Nimau

‘Okay, one more, one more hill, and I am in safe territory,’ Serah thought as she ran through the bushes, below the hills, counting as she passed each one. Her sight blurred as sweat and fog fought to blind her. She was bleeding from her legs—injuries created from the multiple falls on the way here. She was not healing fast enough, and she did not know why.

Her white nightdress had been torn by short branches and other elements of the wild. The dress was also no longer white; it was a faded brown with dark red spots on her thighs and ribs.

Behind her, the howls grew louder, and she wondered if they were really after her life or if they were making a joke at her expense. She had to get home to her husband and her children. She had no business being in werewolf territory.

Serah had always been a wanderer. Her mother would often tell her when she was younger, ‘You have your heart in places where your heart should never be,’ and Serah would reply, ‘When I get older, and I turn, I shall be strong and unkillable. Alas, with adulthood came the revelation that she could be killed by a number of things, and one of them was the bite of these beings running behind her. She saw a tree and used the rest of her power to climb onto it.

‘Finally safe,’ she thought until she heard growls just beneath her. Werewolves could climb; what was she thinking? She closed her eyes tight and willed herself to jump, but she had no more strength. She was spent. She was beginning to heal, but she needed to rest. The growls came again, and Serah decided to make that jump. One foot in the air, and it dawned on her that this was a mistake. Serah lost control and fell down the tree.

‘Oh no, what was she doing?’ Gonzalo thought and threw his paws up in a bid to catch her. ‘Wait, what was he doing?’ he thought again as the other four members of his pack looked at him. He was sure that they had the same questions.

Everything happened so fast. Gonzalo leapt to catch her but caught only her legs. She hung from a branch with a tip that could not be described as sharp, but was shaped in a way that, with the right force, could impale a person—a vampire.

Serah stared at the beautiful sky above her. She could clearly see the stars and the receding full moon. From the side of her lips, blood trickled carefully as if afraid to fall. She smiled and allowed the burning tears to finally blur her sight as she finally shut her eyes to everything—to the pain, to the rustling of the bushes, to the crackling sounds underneath her. It was all over.

Gonzalo groaned as his bones cracked with each second the moon receded. He had not yet mastered the art of turning whenever he felt like, so as the moon left, his human form returned unsolicited. His pack shifted as well. They stood up, looking at themselves—five men who had inadvertently committed a murder.

“What do we do?” Alfred asked.

“We walk away,” Gonzalo said. “We walk away, and we never speak of this again, not even if this comes back to the werewolf community. We deny all responsibility. We do not speak of it.”

His pack nodded, and slowly the five naked men walked into the dark of the night, amidst the cold which they did not feel. The howling of wolves filled their ears. They walked away and never looked back.

Elsewhere, Abel Alarick rolled over to the other side of the bed and tried to touch his wife. He found an empty bed beside him and rolled his eyes.

Yes, vampires were nocturnal beings, but wasn’t that the point of the potions they took every day? It was supposed to help them live like normal humans, to give them the circadian rhythm of an average human being to enable them to have a working relationship with their food.

But no, not Serah, not the night wanderer he married. Every night since they had been married, Serah would wander into the night and return in the morning, tired from her sojourn into the forest. For a while, Alarick would stay up late, fighting sleep because he had taken the potion and had not thought that he would have to wait for his wife to return home. That is, until he began to sleep through the night because it seemed the wandering vampire could take care of herself.

Five hours later and Serah had not returned home. Alarick was now worried. Serah could wander all night long and still make it home in time for breakfast. If she was not home by now, something was amiss. But he was not going to rattle the vampires over something that may not be a problem, so he decided to search for her by himself.

As he trudged through the bushes hoping to catch a whiff of her wild rose scent, he thought of the first time she disappeared on him in the night. They were just a few years into their marriage. She was a hard-to-read woman, so half the time, he was worried that Serah did not really want him. She was betrothed to him according to the customs, and as such, obligated to marry him. Serah always had this blank stare behind her stoic expressions. She was indeed a hard woman to read.

Alarick would often catch his wife staring from the windows out into the hills, and he would wonder why. One day she said, “It is beautiful, isn’t it?” He had been watching her for a while, and he did not know she knew he was there. They had not been turned at this point, so she was cautious about going into the woods.

“Yes, yes, they are beautiful,” Alarick replied, focusing on her and not the woods.

“I like to think of all the elements of the wild as one, as one large body that calls to me, so yes, it is beautiful,” she said, and for the first time since they were married, she smiled faintly. Alarick went weak in the knees. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen. Her smile was like a witch’s enchantment. Like the kind that was cast on the potion that they drank that made some part of them human. The enchantment that made it possible for vampires to procreate and have human children. The good kind of enchantment.

“I should smile more often,” she said as she turned to look at him. “You seem to lose all that hardness on your face when I do.”

‘Yes, yes, smile more often,’ he thought.

“Come,” she said. “Let us lay under the stars tonight.” He went with her, and they laid under the stars.

The first night she disappeared, they had just been turned. They felt all their power at once. Alarick woke up in the morning, and she was gone. He ran to her parents. After telling them that she was gone, they began to laugh. They explained her wandering spirit to him, and after that night, he accepted that she would always wander. It was why he did not raise the alarm this time around. It was why he was under the sun right now looking for his wife.

The further he went into the woods without finding her, the faster his heart beat with fear…until it stopped beating. He saw her. She was hanging from a sturdy tree branch that jutted out from her chest with dried blood on her cheeks. He saw her, eyes shut peacefully, and what seemed like a smile on her lips. He saw her.

He walked slowly and felt the kind of cold they said only happened when a vampire crossed into the great beyond. He touched her fingertips as if to be sure that this was really Serah. Then he screamed. He took sharp breaths and began to take her off the branch that had impaled her. As he pulled her off, a fresh spurt of blood pumped as if she was still alive, but she was not. He brought his face down to hers and muttered inaudible words.

Alarick walked into the vampire community, Serah limp in his hands, and crumbled to his knees once he was inside. Dez Alec, the leader of the vampires, rushed toward him and took her from his hands. That was when they both saw it. Right there on her thigh, were four lines in fading black—the unmistakable mark of a wolf paw. At the same time, both their eyes went red. They would get revenge, but first, they would mourn their dead, and they would send her home.

Gonzalo, in his wolf form, lies on the floor. The floor is wet. His breathing is hard. His hypersensitive sense of smell begins to pick up scents around him. The smell of wet wind, damp earth…no, that is not wet earth. It’s the smell of…of blood! Blood mixed with earth. The faint smell of wild roses wafts through his nostrils as he begins to transform back into his human self. He looks up at the sky above him, and a figure forms in his view. Dressed in a white nightdress is a woman suspended in the air in a lying position, blood dripping from her sides and landing on his face. The image gets clearer. There’s a large branch attached to a tree piercing from behind. He stands up, naked and drenched in blood.

Gonzalo woke up panting again. This was not the first time he had had this dream, but he had grown weary of the consistency with which it came. He wondered what purpose the torture served. If it was to remind him of what he had done, then the dream needn’t show up so often. The image of the vampire woman in her shredded dress and his paw mark on her thigh was etched into his memory like he was an empty canvas and an artist had used a brush to forever paint that image into his memory.

These dreams used to be shorter months ago, and for a while, it seemed like they had disappeared. But now, they had returned, and it would seem, with a vengeance. The dreams were longer now, more vivid, like he was a bystander and had been forced to watch the most gruesome murder committed in the world.

He turned to look at his pregnant wife, Daciana, as she laid beside him on her side. She had one hand resting on her large protruding stomach and another hand under her head. She looked peaceful, and Gonzalo wished he could transfer some of that peace on her face to himself. It had been five months since he accidentally killed a vampire, and he had not slept well since then. Every time he turned on a full moon, his guilt pulled him closer to the tree where she had hung, impaled by a branch. He would stay under the tree and howl as if to pay respect to the beautiful woman who was killed in the most gruesome way because he and his pack thought it harmless to scare and chase a defenseless vampire woman.

His friends seemed to have moved on from the incident as they had big smiles whenever he saw them. He, on the other hand, had to feign a smile whenever someone talked to him. He walked around with a large weight on his chest, and with every step he took, it felt like the weight added a few more pounds.

“Arrrgh!!!” A loud, piercing scream broke through his thoughts, jolting him back to reality. Who screamed? And why? He was not the only one shaken as more screams began to rent the air. Daciana was soon woken up, as well as his sons, Farkas and Fiend, as they ran into the room where he and Daciana laid side by side, his hands on her mouth to stop her from making a sound. He opened the cellar and sent her and the boys inside, girded his loins, picked up his weapons, and stepped out of the house, ready for whatever was out there.

What he met outside his home was a fight he had expected but was not prepared for. The vampires had come to avenge one of their own; this must have been why the dreams had become more frequent. It was time to face his demons.

He shifted and charged into battle, ripping legs from bodies, impaling chests with his paws, and cracking skulls with his teeth. He may have committed the crime that brought them here, but he was not going to let the entire werewolf community go down without a fight. They brought a battle to his doorstep, and he was going to defend his home.

Gonzalo was a ferocious warrior, but tonight he was afraid. He was afraid because he had a defenseless family. He was afraid because this was not a random war; this was revenge, and the vampires had a powerful witch on their side. Finally, he was afraid because only a few of the werewolves had the power to turn and access their full strength when it was not a full moon, which meant that scattered all over the community humans were fighting against supernaturals with super strength, speed, and powers to heal themselves. The genocide that was about to happen was his fault.

He growled with blood dripping from his mouth as he saw a man in the distance. He was angrier than the rest of the vampires. He had a small knife and was slicing through werewolves. His eyes were red, and his mouth was dripping blood. Gonzalo watched as he pushed his fangs into one defenseless werewolf after another. He was brutal.

Gonzalo pushed away the vampire in his path and rushed toward the man. As he drew closer, a familiar scent threw him off balance. It was wild rose. It was not as strong as he remembered, and it was tainted with the smell of blood. He shook the smell from his mind. If that woman wanted revenge, she had already gotten it; she did not need to torture him with her scent to prove a point. He had already gotten the message. He came back to his senses and charged at the man, who turned, looked at him, and leaped.

Alarick was a beast that night. Every werewolf he smelled, he devoured. He bit into them, person after person. His two children, Rue and Adolpha, were hidden inside a cave far outside the vampire cave. It was a safety rule for the vampires to clear the community of their weak and defenseless in the middle of a battle. Every vampire family had a place where they hid their weak. Alarick’s was the cave his parents had hidden him in when he was a child. It had been enchanted by a witch and would only open to the family who owned it or someone who was truly in need of help.

He was finishing off a young werewolf who had put up a good fight when he heard a growl. He turned to see a green-eyed werewolf growling at him. Finally, a worthy opponent, he thought. There was no time to waste. This weakling he had in his hands was going to die eventually; there was no saving him. Alarick had bitten into him and sliced through his stomach with his knife.

He looked at the snarling werewolf in front of him and leaped at him in a fit of rage.

Gonzalo was ready to take him in his jaws when he saw something that made him stop. Wrapping the vampire’s left wrist was a white-turned-brown silk fabric. It looked very familiar like the dress on the woman from his dreams, like the dress on the tree, like the dress on the woman whose death he had facilitated. Whoever this man was, he had a personal stake in the matter, and the last thing Gonzalo wanted to do was kill him. He stepped away and let the man fall. Then he backed away and ran into the bush, the man hot on his heels as he activated his super vampire speed. Alarick landed on the floor with a thud and watched as the werewolf fled. Surprised but still determined to kill him, he chased after him.

Gonzalo ran through the bushes until he got to the spot where the murder happened. He did not understand why, but when he got to that point, he stopped and looked up at the tree. The branch hung proudly under the dark night, and for the first time, he wanted to leap at it and break it down.

Alarick stopped when he reached the werewolf stopped. This spot held too many emotions. It was where he found her, but why had this werewolf brought him…he stopped thinking and watched as the animal transformed into a green-eyed man. He recognized him. This was the man whose father left the werewolves. Immortality made it possible for Alarick to watch as werewolves lived and died, passing on their curse to their children and their children’s children.

Looking into his eyes, Alarick knew. This was the man. His paws had marked Serah. The realization drove him mad. He dropped his knife, sheathed his fangs, and walked slowly to the man. This was going to be a man-to-man battle. They would fight, one strong supernatural pitted against another.

Gonzalo wanted to speak, to apologize, but it seemed like this man had already drawn his own conclusions and was ready to fight. Gonzalo sighed and took a fighting stance. If this vampire wanted a fight, he was going to get one. At least, the vampire was a man of honor, Gonzalo thought, as he seemed willing to fight without extra abilities. Gonzalo did not know the strength of this man, but this was going to be a fair fight.

Back in the werewolf community, scores of bodies were scattered all over the ground, humans and animals alike. The vampires were winning. They began to go from home to home, looking for spoils of war. Three vampire men made it to Gonzalo’s home and began to break in. It was not hard to find the cellar.

Daciana sat down inside the cellar, holding both her children close to her heart. She knew she had to do something to distract them, so she pushed her sons far into the back room, covered them up with a sack, opened another door in the cellar, and exited. The vampires, distracted, looked towards the noise, and went after her. Daciana ran into the bushes with the three men hot on her heels.

She wished she could transform at this moment but being pregnant limited her from accessing her true powers, so she kept running until she fell against a cave. She looked up at the vampires, who had reduced their pace as if they wanted to enjoy the moment they took her life.

Something fell behind them, and the vampires looked away, and in that split second, she entered the cave. She watched as the vampires became confused. They did not try to enter the cave with her. They simply ran away, saying to themselves that the werewolves had a strong witch who performed disappearing spells.

As she crawled into the cave, she felt a wet liquid trickle down her thighs, and she knew. It was time, but it was the wrong time. She kept crawling as her contractions began. Daciana had entered labor in the middle of a vicious war. This was the worst time to have a baby, and she was not in the right frame of mind. She could not take care of the baby right now. Every movement she made hurt more than the last. She screamed and hoped that the vampires could not hear her.

Rue and Adolpha, 6 and 3, held themselves closer to each other as a strange woman crawled inside the cave and screamed. Their father had told them that he would be back to take them home, but he had not yet come. Instead, a strange woman had appeared. Adolpha wanted to scream, but Rue held her mouth and pulled her closer to him. Her tears slid down to his hands, and he held on tightly as he fought his own tears. His father had told him that men did not cry. He had to be strong for his sister.

Daciana felt a push against her cervix and turned to lie on her back. It did not matter what she wanted; this baby was coming. She was in the middle of a crisis at this point. She took off her undergarments and gave one last final scream as the baby came out.

She laid there for a few minutes as she felt her strength return to her. She turned to look at the boy, but he was blue. He was not crying. He looked…dead. Daciana growled in her human form, then groaned in an animalistic way. How dare he be dead? She stood up, wrapped the boy up in her clothes, put him in a corner, and transformed into her wolf form, a white wolf with blue eyes. She dashed into the night to protect her remaining sons. She would come back to bury the dead one later.

Rue and Adolpha watched as the strange woman dashed out of the cave in her wolf form. Some minutes after she dashed out, they heard a baby’s cry. Slowly, both children walked to where the baby lay, wrapped up in clothes, his face red. They sat there looking at the child as he cried, not knowing what to do.

“What do we do, Rue?” Adolpha asked her equally confused older brother. “We wait for father,” he said without a doubt, sure that Alarick would know what to do.

Alarick toppled over Gonzalo and groaned as his back tore against a branch. His back healed as soon as it tore open. Gonzalo had already run out of breath. Unlike Alarick, he was not immortal. He was unable to heal himself, and he had suffered enough damage to his body already. Alarick stood up, picked up Gonzalo like he would pick up an animal, and propped him against the short tree his wife had died on. He climbed on the tree, found a balanced position, then reached down and grabbed Gonzalo. With little effort, he pulled him up to the tree. He held him above the same branch and was about to drop him when he heard his name.

“Alarick, let go of the man. Four score, as is our rule. The debt has been repaid!” Dez Alec screamed from where he was standing.

“No! It was this man who took her life. If he does not die, the number means nothing.”

“Alarick, we are men of honor. This is how it has always been. Let this man live with the guilt of 80 dead people on his head. Our wounded have already regenerated themselves. Alarick, we lost nothing. Let him go.”

“I lost something, Alec. I lost Serah. I lost her.”

“Alarick, there will be another time for this battle. Drop the man. That is an order.”

Alarick groaned and dropped Gonzalo on the floor. He jumped down from the tree, looked Gonzalo in the eye, and said, “I will have my pound of flesh, you accursed murderer. I will.”

Gonzalo watched through blood-blurred eyes as these two men retreated into the darkness in front of him. It began to rain. He looked up, and he could swear that in the blur, he saw a woman in a white nightdress hanging from the branches above him.

He closed his eyes. It had become increasingly hard to keep them open. He was in a lot of pain as his body shivered in the cold. If this was death, he was ready to pay penance for the death of the vampire woman.

Alarick got to the cave where he kept his children after he had angrily walked out on Alec and the rest of the vampire team. The rage he felt needed the blood of the werewolf man who killed his wife, but Alec refused to let him take revenge because of an old rule. Rules were meant to be broken, and at that moment, he wanted nothing better than to break the…

What was that coming out from the cave? What was that sound? He had two children, a six-year-old and a three-year-old, so unless one of them had aged backwards, that cry was not theirs. He crawled into the cave and found his two children seated next to a crying baby.

“Rue!” he called, and his two children ran to embrace him in his bloodied state. He looked at the baby again, and Rue shrugged. He took his children out of the cave, leaving the baby there for whoever came back to get it. Then he remembered that they would have no access to the cave and went back in to grab the child.

As he brought the baby out, Rue looked at him and asked, “What will we call it?”

It? Alarick shed some of the clothes and saw a definitive description of his gender staring back at him and said, “Him.”

“Okay, what do we call him?”

“Nothing, child. He is not ours to keep. We will leave him here for his mother to come find him.”

Rue looked up at the rain, and Alarick did too. Alarick looked at the goodhearted son that he had raised and knew immediately that he had to take the baby with him. It was the honorable thing to do. If they left him here in the cold rain, possibly hungry, he would die before his family found him, assuming they were still alive. Alarick and his two—no—now three children walked back to the vampire community together under the rain. The rage in Alarick had finally settled. Something about the baby he held in his hands had taken away that rage.

“What will we call him, Father?” Rue asked again.

Alarick thought for a while and said, “Hausten. His name will be Hausten.”

Gonzalo forced his eyes open and shut again. The light that shot through was too violent, and it caused a headache. Voices filtered into his ears, but it seemed like they were coming from far away. He drifted back into sleep again. In his dreams, he was running through the fields with his wife, his two sons, and there was a baby somewhere, a baby…his wife…He forced himself back to reality again and forced his eyes open.

The voices around him became clearer and recognizable. So did the faces. They were his friends. His pack. Corleon, Gastos, Brandon, and Gavin. He heard the sounds of two kids playing in the distance, his two sons. He looked around and did not see his wife. He tried to get up, but a searing pain threw him back down on the bed. He shut his eyes to block out the pain. Gonzalo was used to pain. He was a werewolf, and turning was an unimaginable pain, and he turned whenever he wanted to, so this was nothing.

He pulled himself up again, and Gavin said, “Gonzalo, stay down. You suffered a brutal beating. The witch will be here to help you heal in a little while, but stay down, my friend.”

“Gavin, where is Daciana?”

“She is resting in her room, Gonzalo. Please rest.”

The next time he opened his eyes, a witch was in the middle of incantations above him. He was no longer feeling so much pain. It was mostly dull now. By the time she was done, Gonzalo was able to get up. This time, Gavin and Brandon were gone, and only Gastos and Corleon were around.

“How long was I out?”

“Two days, Gonzalo.”

“Two days? Damn!”

“What happened to you?”

“I met him.”

“Who?”

“The husband of the woman.”

Gastos froze.

“Yes, he was here that night, and we fought in the place where it happened.

“Why?” Gastos asked, confused.

“I do not know how it happened. I remember that he came after me. I realized that he was the one, and I took to my heels. He chased after me, and I suddenly stopped at the spot where it happened. That single act must have sealed my fate because he suddenly realized who I was and went into a rage. He was angry, ferocious, strong, and brutal.”

“This may come as an unpleasant question, Gonzalo, but how are you alive?” Corleon asked.

“The vampires have a code they live by; for every soul taken by another community, they take four scores in return.”

“Four scores?” Gastos asked.

“We did a headcount yesterday, Gonzalo. We lost 80 werewolves.”

Gonzalo closed his eyes in pain. Yes, they took four scores. He, however, had to be careful because this man promised to still come after him in the future. He had to be ready, but for now, he had to see his wife, then start the ceremony to bury the people whose deaths he had caused. He got to Daciana’s chamber and met her in the dark, wrapped in a blanket.

“Daciana,” he called. He got no reply from her, and that worried him. He slowly walked up to her, opened the curtains to let in the light, and tapped her. Slowly without looking at him, she opened her blanket.

He saw what she was trying to show him; she had delivered the baby. But where was the child?

“He died. I left his body in a cave during the battle. The vampires chased me to the cave. I went in and had him, but he was so blue, Gonzalo. He was blue. He was very blue, and he would not cry or open his eyes. He was dead.” As she talked, she stared into space blankly, emotionless. She was broken. Gonzalo felt like a sharp sword had pierced into his heart. He had lost too much in this battle.

Inadvertently, the vampires had broken their word. They did not take four scores; they took four scores and one. Whatever this debt was, it had been more than repaid. They had taken his son.

In a few hours, Daciana dressed in black. Gonzalo, looking grim, went to the spot where the cave was to retrieve the body of the boy with a few other werewolves, but they did not find him nor the cave. Daciana looked like a terrible thing had happened to her. Her son and the cave were gone.

That night, the werewolves combed the woods looking for the child but did not find him. They assumed that a wild animal had taken him and went home to continue the procession without a body to bury.

***

It had been three years, and Hausten was growing into a rather beautiful, green-eyed young boy. He was eager to spend time with Rue and Adolpha, and neither of them failed to love him breathlessly. The vampires respected Alarick’s wishes to raise the boy with his children and said nothing about him or his origin.

Night after night, Alarick would gather his children and tell them stories about how they came to be and what communities existed. He taught them the things that Serah would have wanted them to learn while silently hoping that none of his children were like Serah. He looked at Adolpha as she slowly morphed into her mother and hoped that all she had were her mother’s physical looks. He had lost enough for a lifetime. If he lost another person, he was not sure he could handle it. He was protective of all his children, Adolpha especially.

But as Alarick watched his children grow, he realized that the one who was most likely to turn into a wanderer was not Adolpha. She was content being in the garden watching flowers bloom. It was Hausten. He often found the boy staring into the wild just like his wife had always done.

Subconsciously, he found himself turning the child’s attention away from the wild whenever he found him staring. More than anything, he wanted to purge the child’s mind of the outside world. Inside the vampire community, there was enough for him until he grew old enough to be turned. And then with his full strength and abilities, he would be able to defend himself.

Alarick was not the only one who had taken these precautions. All over the vampire community, it had become a law that the women and boys who had not been turned stayed away from the boundaries leading into the woods. The vampires did not trust the werewolves to take the defeat lying down, and even though they were no match for the vampires, the vampires did not want another war. The last one, even though they won, was a little brutal. Some vampires did not come back the same, even after the witch had done all she could to heal them. Dez Alec wanted to protect his community without wars. He had charged into the werewolf community for two reasons that night: to send a message to them that they could not just kill vampires, and because Alarick was his best friend. If he had let it go, he would have broken his relationship with Alarick. Right now, he was more concerned with protecting his wife, Aranea, and his daughter, Grenada.

On Hausten’s 6th birthday, he told his father he wanted to go to the woods. For the first time, Alarick screamed at the child so loud that the boy crouched on the floor clutching his ears. Rue and Adolpha saw it happen and ran to hold the child, who was shivering on the floor. Dez Alec saw the exchange and took Alarick out for a glass of wine.

“He does not know what happened, you know?” Dez Alec said to an already remorseful Alarick.

“I know, but my world ended when I lost Serah. I do not want to lose anyone anymore.”

“I understand, my dear friend, but I do know that there are ways you can pass that message without making the poor boy wet his pants. Be kind, be gentle, and explain to him that there are dangers outside, dangers that he can’t even imagine.”

Alarick nodded. If there was something Dez Alec was good at, it was giving good advice, and Alarick knew that no one had his best interest at heart more than his friend Dez Alec.

Later that night, Alarick gathered his children and decided to tell them a story he hoped would save them.

“In a community not far from here,” he began, “a man married a beautiful woman who loved to stare out into the woods like little Hausten here. She was so beautiful that the man would often catch himself staring at her as she stared into the dark of the night. He wanted nothing more than to have her in his life forever, but there was a problem. She was a wanderer. Every night, she would leave her home and go into the woods. She always returned home until one night, she never came home. Her husband went to search for her and found her in the woods. She had been killed by a monster.”

Hausten held his mouth with both hands, and Adolpha widened her eyes in shock. The only person who did not react was Rue. His father had told him that his mother was traveling when he had asked why he hadn’t seen her in so long. But right now, looking at his father as he told the story, he finally got the answer to the question he had stopped asking for years: his mother was dead, and she had been killed by a monster in the woods.

The children huddled up together as they promised their father never to go into the woods. Alarick planted a kiss on each of their heads and went into his room. The moment he entered, he allowed the tears he had been fighting to take over.

As he cried, his entire body rocked. “Serah, I am a mess,” he said in between sobs. “I need you, Serah. I miss you. You were my entire world. I do not know how to behave without you. I cannot cope. I am a lost man, Serah.”

He wanted to be angry with her. She did not have to become a wanderer. But even he knew that he loved all of her, even her wandering soul. Whenever she came back from her wanderings, the smell of wild rose mixed with wet bushes had his body warm in places that weakened him. He loved all of her. Even the part that took her to her death. He allowed the sweetness of sleep to overcome him as he laid his head down.

Alarick laid under the stars with his wife Serah beside him. Her hands trailed his chest as she whispered sweet nothings into his ear.

After a few minutes, Alarick was overcome with longing. He pulled her up until she was looking into his face. They stared into each other’s eyes for a few seconds. Taking in each other’s breath, Serah leaned in further and planted her lips on Alarick’s. Their kiss was soft and tentative first, almost like they were afraid of kissing each other. Then it was strong and hungry. As he kissed her, he ran his hand down her hair, her neck, her back, her buttocks, her thighs. Her small frame felt right above him.

She broke off the kiss and stood up. The moon cast a blue light on her hair as she took off her white nightdress. She stood over him, her eyes shining in the dark, her nipples hard in the cold. Alarick undressed and laid back down. Serah slowly straddled him and allowed her body to take him in as she threw her head backwards, her breasts taut in the air. Alarick kept his eyes open, taking in the beauty in front of him. They moved to the rhythm of a song they had created in their minds, and their pace increased with each move until they screamed into the night.

The sun shone through a small space in the curtains, and Alarick opened his eyes. He sighed deeply; Serah had taken over his dreams. This was not the first time he’d had such a passionate dream about her. He wanted it to continue. If his dreams were the only place he could see Serah, he was going to take it.

He came out to his three children playing in the garden. Rue ran up to him and said, “Father, I know Mother died. I know a monster killed her.” For the first and last time in his life, Rue saw a tear fall from his father’s eyes. Alarick pulled the boy close and ran his hand through his hair. He did not know what to tell the boy or how best to explain the concept of the other world, so he just pulled the child close and hoped that by the time the boy grew, he would have mustered the courage to properly tell this story.

He nudged the boy back to his younger siblings and sat down on the armchair to watch them run in the fields as everything turned to slow motion in his sight.