The nation of Werewolves had two problems, and he was the one who could solve them both. And the more he thought about it, the more he wished he could get drunk; but his pack contained two bottles of whiskey, and for a Werewolf, that’s rather the equivalent of one particularly light mimosa, the kind you have somewhere that servers brunch with waffles so small you sometimes need your waiter to point them out to you, and bacon so artisanal that you might accidentally think they are very, very tiny and oddly-coloured crumpets.
(“Those are crumpets, sir,” says the waiter, with the kind of bubbly good chair one finds in waitstaff who have several pitchers of iced cocktails in back, and minimal kitchen oversight. “They’re a house specialty, made from freshly-collected squid ink. The bacon is more the idea of bacon, we cook everything in bacon fat as a preventative against anyone walking out of this restaurant with low cholesterol.”)
I’m hallucinating, thought the Wolf. This is not a good sign.
The Wolf’s name, in human language, was Porter; this was a pair of jokes. First, as Chief during these weird times, he’d be required to bear the weight of human stupidity. And second, he’d clearly need alcohol to do it.
They weren’t very good jokes; but these weren’t very funny times.
It didn’t help that had a dining companion. Not, he admitted to himself, that she had been any particular burden. One did not particularly need to keep up a flow of small talk with this child; one simply had to be ready to snatch certain morsels of assorted foodstuffs before she did. She eats like a wolf, he thought, paying her a silent and extraordinary compliment. But then his spirits darkened. If only wolves could eat, he thought.
Everything, everything that the Wolves might consume was tainted with madness. The Order of White Wizards called it Evil, but Porter had (at the expense of great difficulty, lasting injury, some casualties, and a few highly inconvenient scars) managed to bite one of the bastards, and he was as batcrap bonkers as the rest.
Werewolves shift skins; they do not have the same relationship with flesh that most of us do. They were, therefore, very much affected about what went into their alimentary tract. (Porter reflected that this lovely feast must have been made almost entirely by magic, a feat which, while common in fairytales and other stories, was on par with erecting a massive stone monolith, or travelling several hundred miles in a single step: very difficult, and very costly. To produce a reasonable meal in this manner, one had to, among other things, have a master artisan create replicas out of fairly rare materials; and it helped to have a master chef present to oversee the process, as what you wanted, ideally, was to take each element, carve it into some semblance of its organic form as ingredient, then smash it all to bits, combine it in a pestle, and sprinkle it, as a fine powder, over a porcelain or glass representation of what you wanted to cook, and perform certain rather draining rites to transmute them from representations into actualities, using some bastardized version of the Law of Similarity.
And then, your chef would likely take real ingredients (squid ink, by the Gods?)—and massage the flavors until it tasted a little more of nature and a little less of the weird doppelgangers of actual comestibles it currently resembled.
It was possible to create something simpler and sustainable, but in general, all magic could really get right was coffee and small amounts of jerky. Magic preferred not to make food; that’s part of why what it did create was so extravagant, and why it could provide him with a very welcome meal, but couldn’t particularly feed the Pack. (Oh, given time, and skill, and experiment, she might create a new species of animal; these things were difficult, but there was precedent. But any living beings she made would be subject to the same considerations which troubled him in the first place; no good.)
That’s not to say that this meal, this the gesture, for one of his kind, was unappreciated, especially now. Which was appropriate, considering the favor being asked of him.
The Dark Lord had asked him to kill “everyone”, which was a cruel joke, and a very werewolf joke. She actually wanted his kind to harry the forces of the White Wizards—their proxies—for a time, to snipe at their armies, to give them something to fear. To be targets.
That wasn’t a bad role, for lycanthropes. They held little love for the self-righteous, and they were angry. But it was particularly difficult in a time when his people were famished.
They could eat almost nothing. It wasn’t just humanoids. The beasts of the forest (and the field, and everywhere else, for that matter) will flee from natural disasters, and if they’re in enough of a panic, you don’t want to make a practice of sinking your fangs into them; a species whose entire dignity and civilization rests on impulse control does do well with great gaping mouthfuls of hyperadrenalized blood. And given the kindly propensity of humans for covering the entire planet with themselves, it was difficult not to stretch forth your canines and tear into some homo sapiens.
This meant that they would have to run among the human herd, slashing and tearing and not actually biting; to be among mountains of flesh when they all wanted food.
And this wasn’t just food; it was the meat of enemies, the sweetest substance known to fang.
But it was bubbling over with madness. You wanted to eat it; but you didn’t want to catch whatever insanity seemed to be leaping from body to body.
Werewolves were hungry by nature; it was a defining trait. But equally defining was the fact that the Werewolf was not an unthinking beast, but a reasoning creature.
One could satisfy the beast, and lose the reason. It seemed that other species were all to eager to do so.
Wolves, by every God that’s ever been broken by disbelief, by every Hell that’s ever been drowned in sweat and tears, werewolves would goddamn rather starve.
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My name is Jeff Mach (“Dark Lord” is optional) and I build communities, put on events, and make stories come into being. I also tweet a lot over @darklordjournal.
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