01.10.2016
Families, the following morning, pried themselves out of their boarded up and secure homes. From their microcosms emerged energetic children who ran to pay in the streets and meadow. A layer of clouds covered the town as warmth built up as part of the day.
The parents investigated the homes of those attacked during the night. None answered any of the calls or knocks on the front or back doors. So a carpenter brought out a ladder and used it to get up to the windows on the second story and climbed in through the fractured frame.
The homes were all a mess of scattered and broken belongings. And the roofs sagged in areas where structural damage had been done as the wolf clambered through hallways and inner doors. Blood painted the floors and spattered the walls. Huge claw marks gouged into the floors and walls, and, in some cases,through the entire wooden planks.
The violence wrought by the wolf took breaths and words away. There were no remains of the families attacked, and the town agreed that none would live in those homes after the horrors that had occurred. So the town set the homes ablaze as pyres to the families, even if it were only belongings that went up in smoke.
This was more for the benefit of the surviving town members than as actual tribute or remembrance of the deceased. The homes burned quickly and the towering infernos soon reduced to smoldering, flattened coal beds. But they smoked and burned on all through the day and into the evening.
A layer of smoke and ask settled over the entire area and lended toward the moon’s rays piercing eerily through the haze as night fell. Before the homes were set alight, the town’s members took timber and nails from them to help shore up the top floors of their homes. They would not give the wolf such easy passage tonight, regardless of his size.
And another six families packed up all their goods onto wagons and made a caravan out of town in the same way as those yesterday had. Those who remained couldn’t blame them for leaving, but there was no possibility for them to flee. Their home wouldn’t be taken from them or their kin by menace of a beast. Those handful of families that remained were safely inside their well-secured homes before the sun’s disc had even touched the top of the forest as it set.
They slept earlier in the evening, as they could, so as to be more alert during the full night when they expected the wolf to appear. Children hardly slept though. Instead they lie in their beds staring with fright at the boarded up doors and windows which let through small slivers of moon-light.
The wolf had set aside his avoidance of the sun in order to follow the caravan out of town. His hatred for the brightness and heat welled up inside him, but was overtaken by his lust for the easy meals which creakily made their way out of the town’s cove.
As the sun slipped toward dusk, when the wagons were still some way from the nearest town of Harsenth, thanks to the time lost repairing a broken wheel, the wolf launched his attach. Straight up the darkening path, and through the wagons that were all in a line. The wolf had grown in size again compared to the previous night, and was nearly the size of a house.
The wagons and riders and contents splintered under his paw and clenching jaws. He gobbled down the families, and spilled relatively little of their blood tonight seeing as he was able to swallow many of them whole, particularly the young and the old. The wolf lie down on the path and napped as he digested his meal, but this was not his only course for the night.
When the darkness gathered more, the wolf’s eyes slid open and he pushed himself to his feet. He’d no longer fit in the cave he had been used to sleeping in, but he would make due. He crept his way back to Founsel and found the smoldering wrecks of the homes he’d devastated the night prior. Leaping over the coals, the wind the wolf created stirred up the coals and one log caught fire again and it popped with a hiss. The sparks from the pop carried through the haze and settled under the cedar shake shingles of a neighboring home.
The roof ignited and the fire spread quickly. As the family inside realized their home was ablaze, they worked frantically to get out of the secured door on the first floor. Just as they swung the door open, the wolf crashed in to the house. He scooped up the family and chomped them lifeless. As he made his way out of the house, his tail whipped around and demolished the walls of the building.
The fired roof collapsed into the first floor and the rest of the house went up in flames too. The wolf went from one house to the next, and, before the first house had its fire settle down, had killed every last family member left in Founsel.
Another of the houses had caught on fire due to the embers, and the wolf had sufficiently destroyed the others in his thorough search for food. As he licked his chops, he crashed his way back into the forest so as to avoid the sunlight of the upcoming day. As he huddled under the thickest canopy he could find, he plotted out what he’d like to do to the sun so that he’d never again have to be afraid of the harsh daylight, and have the world be his very own in a state of perpetual twilight.