You’re losing it.

A splintering sound too wet to be wood crackled through the still night air. Beneath its stark reverberations thrummed a low, seismic growling, a consistent rumble that bled into itself until it was nothing more than bleak white noise. Only when it paused did the wolf’s keen ears realize it had been present the whole time; he froze, struck by the sudden wrenching silence, only to pour his focus into another thing held between his teeth. Diamond-hard carnassials sawed aggressively into a limb of ivory. When it did not immediately succumb to the merciless pressure he exerted, he gnawed harder, and unconsciously the monotone music grating at the back of his throat thundered to life once more. Jaw muscles contracted. Teeth dug their killing points into fresh bone. The wolf hooked a forepaw over one end of his prize for better leverage—and it snapped with satisfying finality, exposing dark red marrow to frost and his searching tongue. He didn’t bother sucking it clean. In a heartbeat he abandoned the femur and picked up another discarded piece from the grisly pile next to him to begin the whole process over again.

Kershov had been doing this for hours. Not breaking bones, specifically—first he’d needed to hunt in order to procure all of them. Rabbits and birds . . . a deer . . . and a few items scavenged from picked-through carcasses still fresh enough to entice the monster’s appetite. He should have been exhausted after the energy he’d spent killing—but instead his feverish energy seemed to grow, as if each taste of blood were tinder to the blue flames burning out of control inside his chest. Fangs shredded flesh, tongue lapped up goblets of flowing crimson, and then his obsidian lantern trained on the next unfortunately creature that moved. The next. The next. Kershov blinked and the moon replaced the sun, stars poked holes through the clouds and an entire day was gone. His skin was crawling. He felt as if an army of insects were marching through his bloodstream. Kill. Kill. KILL.

Losing it.

The colossal beast was tired of cracking leg bones. Still producing a quiet snarl that rivaled a demon’s murderous voice, Ker lunged to his paws and swept his bottomless glare around the “toys” scattered through the secret bowl-shaped copse hiding him from view. Tattered wings, random antlers, pieces of meat left to rot on the ground in a flagrant display of waste. What did Kershov’s hidden monster care of waste? He pawed around until he found something interesting. Vicious glee rippled through him. A severed head. How delightful.

The poltergeist fell upon it like a ravenous vulture. First he crunched the jawbone, spitting the pieces out into the dirt. Then he prodded the eye sockets with his bottom knives, hoping to literally crack the top of the cranium off and expose the brain. He worked the grim project for a couple minutes . . . and stopped. Something about the skull felt off to him. He dropped it, furious, between his paws, and fixed it with the slicing scalpel of his stare.

His heart stopped beating inside his breast.

It was the skull of a wolf.

Horror was a flash flood swallowing him whole and drowning his lungs in screaming panic. He couldn’t remember where he’d gotten this. Couldn’t remember. Couldn’t remember. Strips of fur and meat still clung to parts of the ghostly bone, as if someone had been meticulously peeling it off but then gotten bored. No, not someone—himself. The Ice King. Abendrot’s fearsome Alpha, renowned for his cruelty and his incredible self-control. All at once Kershov envisioned himself with the disembodied head propped between his forelimbs, canines ripping away fleshy ribbons with surgical concentration, throwing away scraps of fur and ears and eyes until a new surge of frantic passion gripped his thoughts and he threw himself into a different project. Shivering violently, gagging with revulsion, the pallid dragon carefully clamped his jaws around the sides of the cranium. The tips of his teeth fit perfectly into the grooves he’d carved there. His doing. This was all—

The head tumbled away from Kershov with a series of hollow thuds as he all but jumped away from it, hackles raised like a bed of nails and visage locked in a demon’s snarl. His lonesome onyx orb stared into nothingness while he struggled to remember where the hell he’d gotten that hideous trophy. Who was it? Someone he knew? Now the winter devil began desperately digging through the pile of bone chips and viscera, searching for a scent, hoping beyond life itself that he would not recognize whatever signature clung to this unknown victim’s hide. Talons pulled up clods of refuse until finally, finally he uncovered the musk of wolf—

He remembered. This had been no packmember. He hadn’t sinned so egregiously. And the relief that swept over the frost-breathing Pharaoh was so great and so complete he collapsed to the earth, unable to move for several moments, innards cold as snow and pulse a distant hammer in his brain. It wasn’t anyone he had known. But it could have been.

This madness knew no boundaries, but part of its terror was that it still managed to mimic sanity. Kershov knew well enough to drag the evidence of his break with reality deep into a hollow carved beneath a cluster of dead trees, piling bodies on top of bodies, until the space where he’d all but lost himself was clean except for a lingering pall of death. Then he stalked to the grey skeleton of an oak teetering precariously on the edge of the false “cave.” Rearing up on his hind legs, the glacial gladiator thrust his forepaws onto the brittle bark and shoved with all his might, pouncing on the deceased forest sentinel over and over until with a great groaning creak it toppled over—blocking the contents buried beneath its gnarled network of roots. At last exhaustion pounced upon his frame. The broken King felt his shoulders sag under a weight that had finally become too much to bear. His pitch-glass window grew impossibly darker, colder, an abyss from which he saw the only option he had left.

Night was his friend. Without another second’s hesitation the massive arctic knight plunged into the woods, making for the river that separated one side of his kingdom from its neighbor. Once at its banks he leapt into its frigid current, swimming with hungry, powerful strokes toward the other side. He had made sure not to leave any signs of his passage. No pieces of fur left on a branch. No heavy imprints of paws in mud. Just gone.

He reached the opposite bank with his sides heaving and icy water streaming from his pelt. And without glancing backward once—he ran.



[OOC: Kershov has disappeared from Abendrot, leaving no trace of where he’s gone or even if he left of his own free will. Grey Wind is now Alpha of Abendrot. If your wolf thinks they know what happened to Ker—they don’t. Not unless you and I plot about it.

May the new era of Abendrot begin!]