The Wolf Warlock: 'Sheep's Clothing'
The Wolf Warlock
http://www.weasyl.com/~iscin
THE WOLF WARLOCK
by Iscin
This is a work of graphic fiction. All characters portrayed within are 18 years of age or over. All rights reserved © 2015.
CHAPTER THREE Sheep's Clothing
To say that everything is now different hardly bears justice to this paradigm shift. Transcending body and soul, Rashawn can feel every cell of his being vibrating with energy as he walks out of the Creche. With each footstep he feels the great muscular weight of his body shifting from one side to the other. He stretches out his hands and examines them as he slowly walks. Though he still possess opposable thumbs on either hand, they end in wickedly sharp black claws, and have grown larger and thicker, as well as a heck of a lot furrier. Flexing his fingers and thumbs Rashawn notices the subtle way the short fur brushes against itself and against the 'pads' of furless flesh at the ends of his finger tips and around the palms. Everything is new, everything is different and there is still so much to discover and learn about his new self.
Now outside of the Creche proper the werewolf approaches one of the forest's many trees and makes a claw with one hand. He pulls his arm back, takes a deep breath and now drives his arm and the claws at the end of it forward with all of his strength. Wood splinters and breaks away underneath the shear force of the impact. Rashawn's feet, both now digging into the ground with their own set of claws, skid and slid against the ground, dragging up tufts of grass and dirt as they lose and regain traction. He flinches, expecting to feel at least some small measure of pain, yet there comes no such sensation. His hand and feet both come to a stop and Rashawn slowly opens his eyes, not sure what to expect. As his brain processes what his eyes are telling him a giddy elation wells up inside of him and in the madness of what has happened to him he starts to laugh in this strange new guttural voice.
The tree never stood a chance. Sticky sap clings to the fur along his forearm as he pulls his arm back from the hole he just made in the trunk, entering on one side and explode out from the other. Rashawn checks the viciously equipped appendage. There are no marks aside, only the now hardening resin as the werewolf flexes and twists his arm, examining it from every angle. No pain and no wounds. Rashawn walks around the beleaguered fauna and checks the other side where bark and wood has splintered outwards and left partial remains of what was once the tree's densely packed trunk core. Its assailant kneels down, his legs articulating at digitigrade angles that are unfamiliar yet nonetheless comfortable for him, and pokes at a few bits and pieces of the shredded tree matter. However he is no longer thinking about the tree, but other things, other possibilities of what he can now do with this raw and primal strength alone. The giddiness is coming back with a vengeance.
Rashawn takes a moment more to give a more thorough overview of his new body than the heady realisation from before in the Creche. Even without a proper standard to compare himself to it is obvious that he has grown quite a fair bit taller, perhaps a good three or four feet more, perhaps more than that. Checking his arms and legs he finds that the shaggy fur is helping to hide an incredibly well developed musculature. As the self-test just now has shown however, this is far more than merely additional muscle mass. Everything about himself, even merely from walking, belies a strange kind of vitality. At a whim Rashawn lurches forward. His legs propel him forward at tremendous acceleration, bounding more than running, over large tracts of land. Pushing everything to the limit he bends his odd double jointed legs before spring himself upwards. Up and up he rises until he can see over the treetops and the horizon stretching beyond the forest. Unfortunately on the way down he comes against heavy resistance and hits several tree branches before failing to land on his feet in a skidding mess.
'That was imbecilic.' Rashawn says to himself as he picks himself up and starts dusting off the grass and soil that has found itself attached to his fur with almost adhesive tenacity. However in spite of his sloppy landing there are no broken bones and not even slightly out of breath from the exercise itself.
Now another thought crosses his mind. Having performed some basic tests of his physicality, perhaps he should try something a little more esoteric. Magical incantations can be difficult things to perform, not due to their complexity so much as their innate effect of taxing the spirit of a person, or in other words their "soul" to bring life to the spell. Of course there are other methods of gaining the ethereal energy required, thus the use of talismans and other magical items that either generate, store or transfer energy so as for its user to be able to enact far more powerful effects. Rashawn can think of one conjuration that he can scale up to be require quite an impressive amount of magical energy. Still excited about his new self he stretches out both vicious looking hands and beings focusing his mind. Just as before he picks one of the defenceless forest stalwarts as his subject. A radiance quickly begins to build in his outstretched hands. Brilliant ribbons of photons suspended in midair begin to grow from nothing and swirl against and around one another, forming a meshwork of living light.
As the light grows in intensity Rashawn moves both hands forward and turns them so as it create a parabolic cup out of both of them. He blinks before giving the release, his claws twitching as energy arcs from along the sharp edges to the ball of living lightning. Light, noise and heat all wash over his face and naked body as the densely packed force leaves his grasp and slams into the targeting he was aiming for. However it does not stop there and now goes through another and another. Rashawn watches in some small portion of horror as the magical attack he has unleashed tears through one tree after the next, anything that gets in its way is rendered in a cold fire as it continues on its trajectory before disappearing all sight. But he can still hear it with his acute auditory sense, as more of the forest is torched by the simple yet devastatingly overpowered conjuration.
However another quandary is now on his mind. Although part of him had never expected to accomplish this much without further issue, there was another part of him with more self-confidence and had made some hazy, half-witted plan to use the Keepers' own people to become his servants, maybe even vassals of a sort. It makes sense as they have the castle and the resources necessary for him to establish himself as something of a man of power in these lands he calls home. Or rather, to become the alpha wolf he now so thoroughly feels like up to being. The dilemma though is that they are explicitly trained to combat supernatural threats, granted ones of a normally mundane level compared to what Rashawn has now become, but nevertheless something of a disaster waiting to happen if he goes back without some safeguard.
Enough of this reveling. I need to prepare for what I have to do next.
Thankfully the very nature of his new self provides an answer, if he can draw it out of himself. The tome is the key, Master Tiamat performed extensive research into the protean properties of the werewolves he studied during his many years of research. Of course the action itself is always going to be far removed from what can be framed into limited words, even a first hand account let alone the second and third that Master Tiamat has offered down the centuries. Nevertheless the fur cloaked warlock takes the time to reread the key passages in the book, all the whilst remaining standing in the middle of the dark forest whilst eyes of feral creatures take cautious looks his way. Even for the simple minded denizens of the forest it is obvious that this thing standing amongst them is dangerous, the lupine features only one indicator of this, as something far more subtle is emanating from him that stirs a powerful dread inside of every prey species heart; and to a beast such as he, everything else is prey.
He soon finishes rereading the particular passages which he requires and sets the book down, along with the satchel that has a spare change of clothes inside of it; a small miracle that he remembered to take those with him. Rashawn now requires a moment of patient focus. Searching for an inner calm and depths with which he can submerge the beast and, but for only a short time, drown the damn thing until it submits. He closes his eyes, clasps his clawed hands together, and starts to repeat his mantra in his mind, his lips moving silently in muscle memory. This is one of the first techniques that any adept is taught, partly because it is easy enough to learn and partly due to its universal use in controlling the often unstable internal conflicts that can render a warlock such as Rashawn at the mercy of his own machinations. Of course what he is using the meditation technique for here is far from what was ever expected of him from his tutor, Marius.
The process is gradual, almost like collecting water from dewdrops. At the very beginning it seems as though it will take the whole morn to fill his flask even halfway. But Rashawn channels his impatience to reflect his conscious thought every more inward. There they are. Threads of his soul's tapestries. Markers by which he can ingratiate his very physiology to morph, bending to a will that is more of the man and less of the wolf. It is an arduous though not entirely painful process as Rashawn feels bone, sinew and muscle shift. Skin contorts and shrinks whilst fur is shed in large bushels of drying follicles. All in all he is not sure how long the process is going to take, whether it is over the course of seconds, minutes or even longer. However he endures this and more, buried in the hardest to find depths of his psyche and soul, working hard to gather the physical aspect of his new self and cram them into a dark corner with which they might slumber but for a brief time.
And so Rashawn returns to a furless, shorter and human form. He slumps forward, braced on his knuckles alone, as he shakes his head and starts returning to a normal state of mind. Eyes blinking, back shivering and naked toes curling against the soil underneath them he stands back up. Remade again, he is almost back to his old self, maybe not quite so dwarfish as before but close enough. Rashawn checks himself over in quick turn, no tail, no claws, no pointy ears, and sadly not the same robust musculature; although he does feel slightly more toned than the pudgy little man he was before. Everything is working out better than he had even expected. Now he starts to take his new change of clothes from out of the satchel lying on the ground and reclothes himself. There is still much to do before the night is done. The others will be out looking for him and Rashawn is now ready to rejoin the Keepers and share with them the wonderful news.