Fimbul Samhain

She looked at me and smiled.

"What?"

"Our kind," she said.

"What do you mean?"

"You are as I Jonathan Wilkes, you simply must be ... awakened."

I was not prepared for her to suddenly run her hands across her body in a flirty caress. Her hand cupped her heavy breast, the finger pinching the nipple. She wet her lips with a shockingly pink tongue. Then smiled at me.

"I've seen your eyes upon me, this whole night. I've seen your desire grow and fall."

She moved then in ways that would make an exotic dancer jealous of her sensuality. Bernadette made even the act of walking to me too breathtaking to be believed. Then she sat astride my legs, as if she was just such a dancer about to give me a lap dance, and looked down into my eyes.

"I must awaken what is inside you, Jonathan. It is a hunger that sleeps in all, but can be roused in but a few. By lust. One hunger drives the other." She leaned down to right before my face, our lips almost touching. "There will be some pain."

Her hand on the back of my head pulled my face to her and our lips smashed together with a tooth loosening force. Her hands were then clawing at my shirt, and at the skin under it.

The feeling of her bare skin on my chest, the heavy weight of her breasts moving across the pepper gray hairs, the scorching heat of her ... and the number of months since I had been with a woman, combined to harden me instantly. My own hands went to the flare of her hips, and there I felt the raised scars of her tattooing under my fingers. And thick muscles were hidden just under a soft cushion of womanly curves.

Then we were out the office chair and tumbled to the floor, her still astride me. This woman used her size to move us easily. She sat up and began to work at my belt, urgent to free the bulge under it. Bernadette didn't waste the time to pull the pants down; she simply pulled my cock free and moved herself over it. Then she dropped down with a force that took my breath from me. I was engulfed instantly with warm wet heat, from root to tip!

Then those thick hips began to grind on my cock, a feeling beyond compare. Laying on my back, looking up at her, I watched her squeezing her breasts, pinching the nipples to heighten her own arousal.

Again the wolf howled.

"He no longer hunts among the town. He has sated his lust for easy prey. Now he wants stronger meat, tougher to bring down, harder to chew. He comes for me. But he does not know of you." She placed her hands on my shoulders looking into my eyes as she rode my cock. "You will be the sharp bone in his throat that he cannot swallow. We are always our most powerful in the moments of our birth. I am old now. My powers have faded. But you, you my lover will be strong!"

Her words flowed over me and the earlier thoughts I had about her, that she might be mad, were more than confirmed. But then the world itself had gone mad. And how was I to judge what madness was, and what it was not?

Abstract thought don't tender well when you're being sex ridden by a woman in the throes of lust. She was aggressive, demanding, and gripped me with tight inner-pulses that I had never felt from any woman.

Then she was off of me and knelt beside me.

"Take me this way." She lowered her face to the floor and lifted her ass into the air. "Please, be quick. He is coming at a run for us now. You must be ready."

Getting onto my knees behind her, I for a moment wished we were in a bed, the throw rung on my cold, hardwood floor was painful under my knees, but then I was back inside her and I could not have cared if the floor was covered in broken glass. She seemed to grip me and pull deeper. When she leaned forward I had to follow, then she slammed back into me and we hit together with a hard smack of my belly on her ass.

Caught in my desire to cum, I felt odd thoughts flood me. Things I normally don't consider. Thoughts of what life would be like with a woman in my life, as a constant, was one among them.

Again the wolf howled.

"He is ... so close now. The death of all life approaches!" She hung her head and shook for a second then moaned. Then screamed.

Her orgasmic cry of lust was too much for me to take. I felt my body tighten, a powerful flow from within me began and then....

... Stopped.

Sudden, as if a switch thrown, it halted in mid-sensation. I had but a moment of listening to her moaning cries of pleasure, the deep howls of the no-longer-distant wolf, the sounds of the wind outside, and the creaking grown of the roof timbers strained under the snow load. All of those sounds in that single moment were crystal clear.

Then there was pain!

I gasped as it felt like a fire had been set in behind my belly button. Clutching my stomach, I fell to the side, curling up on the cold hard floor. Weeping, child-like, at the terrible sudden intensity of it.

Bernadette sat next to me simply looking at me. Then her hand came out to brush my sweaty hair back from my eyes.

"The first is always the worst. I don't even feel the change anymore. When you awaken the first time the soul hunts the spirit animal, tracks it down to learn its form. Then the body changes to fix that form, but till then there is the hunt. And the hunt hurts. Your soul and spirit are separated by the needs of the body and they are many. YOU NEED TO AWAKEN!"

I reached for her leg, but couldn't control that hand well enough. I clawed at the hard floor instead. Anything to give some purchase, some purpose to this agony. I now hurt everywhere, but my belly was still the center.

Then the pain dropped lower.

I screamed in agonized fury as I felt my tentacles grabbed by her!

"Awaken! Awaken! He comes for you, my lover!"

Then her hand was gone but the pain remained. Shaking, weeping, feeling as if a hook was buried inside me and being pulled free, I watched her get to her feet. Bernadette looked down at me, uncaring or concerned with the pain I was in.

"I will keep him at bay, till the change is done, but I cannot escape him, or evade him for long. Come quickly, lover."

Before eyes weeping rivers, I saw the impossible. She held out her arm, looked towards the sky and began to chant. Her words were in a singsong dialect, the type copied by so many Western movie directors in the sixties. It didn't matter that I didn't know the words to her prayers; very soon they were not words.

She was speaking in growls, chuffs, and huffing throaty vocalizations.

Then dark black hair sprang from her every pore!

As I struggled to stay sane under more pain than I had ever endured, I watched--watched the woman I had just been with--become not a woman. Her body thickened with amazing speed and she twitched, her body spasming, as bones shifted under her skin.

When she dropped to all fours and looked back at me she was no long human. If she had ever been that.

The black bear sow gave a chuffing sound and then lumber over, shoulder the front door open, and went outside.

When the distraction of Bernadette was gone, I felt again the full agony and screamed like an animal trapped. And that was just what I felt like, like I was trapped but within my own body.

I felt my mind flee the pain, taking flight in terror at something hurting it so badly.

** ** ** ** ** ** **

The world was smoke. The world was mist. The world was snow.

And I was the earth that walked.

Common dirt, given form and shaped by a Creator, that was what I had been taught as a child. I had always believed that. Ash to ash, and dust to dust. To the ground from which you are made shall you be returned.

There was the sound of voices chanting all around me.

Within the smoke, the mist, the snow I was all and I was nothing.

The chanting was a blend of tones. Old, ancient, and far older than ancient. Words that had been heard around cave fires in times when the world had been ice ... as it was now ... and not heard sense came to me then. I listened and I understood those words. I saw the speaker then. Saw a face, a face not to dissimilar to my own. He was the one chanting, but he did not chant alone. A dozen times a thousand years' worth of similar faces were chanting the same words, no matter the language used.

My ancestors?

Yes. The line of my people back to the beginning, but even as I thought this I saw that this man, this fur draped primitive was not even himself the beginning. He could see farther back than myself, but even he could not see the very beginnings.

But he could see me!

His face lifted to look at me. He smiled. Large flat teeth, similar to mine, his eyes twinkled under a brow only a little heavier than my own.

The world was smoke.

As I watched him unable to speak because of the pain that I still felt, like ghostly shadows of agony, he took a burned branch from the fire before him and crushed it between two flat rocks. The black char he mixed with animal fat, took in his cupped hand and arose to his bare--callused till harder than leather--feet. He crossed to the cave wall and began to draw upon the stones.

The light of his fire against his back, shadows alive dancing with every flicker. Under that spectral light my ancestor showed me his magic. He brought to life again the animal whose fat he was painting with.

The world was mist.

A hundred times a hundred voices chanting prayers, praying to gods old and new for the passing of the summer into winter. Asking that, on the equinox, the gods spare the world one more time. To not punish it with endless cold. With a winter that would never end.

From outside the cave I heard a familiar sound. A Wolf's howl. Too strong and terrible to be a common wolf. Even here, in this distant time, the great Fenrisúlfr, Lord of all Wolves was alive.

My ancestor did not fear the wolf.

I heard quavering voices from his time onwards though, others in my line had feared the fen walker. Their prayers, be it pagan chants during Samhain or Christian prayers at All Hallows, trembled under the sound of that wolf.

But not the throaty chanting of this man, this fur-covered, cave-dweller, working his primitive magic. He respected the wolf ... but he feared only one creature that walked the earth.

And that one he drew upon the walls of his home to ward off the great wolf.

The world was snow.

He turned from the wall, looked at me. Looked into the eyes of his descendant so many eons later. There was a father's pride there. He smiled. He returned to his fire, and left me looking at the wall, and the huge shape he had drawn, that the fire light and his magic was making live again.

It turned it massive head, looked across the millennium at me, and lurched from the wall into my soul!

** ** ** ** ** ** **

"YEAGGHH!"

Writhing on the floor, I felt bones move; I felt a fiery agony ripping at every muscle. I wanted to claw at my own face my teeth hurt so much. To tear my jaw free to stop the pain it was giving me. I could do nothing but scream. Scream, and listen to the sounds of an agonized animal whimpering. My mind was too far gone to recognize myself as the source of that painful sound.

The wolf howled ... then there was a snarl that set the hairs on my spine on end. Deep, evil and filled with hate. Hate of all things. Hate of life itself.

It was answered by Bernadette!

A heavy, bearish, chuffying sound of contemp. Then there was a terrible sound. Two huge animals coming togtheer in a clash of teeth and claw, fang and muscle.

I clawed at the floor, digging deep gouges into the wood, trying to pull myself towards the door, to get to the side of my mate. The agony I was in increased seven fold, but I fed on that pain, using it to drive me an inch closer. The long ago screaming voice of my Drill Instructor came to me then, a man tough as raw boot leather, commanding me to do what could not be done. That man had demanded the impossible.

Then make it look easy when you couldn't do it.

I began to mumble under my breathe a marching song he had taught us all, if by taught you consider demanding we sing along with him as we ran the deserted back roads near Camp Lejeune to be teaching.

"Follow orders as you're told. Make their yellow blood run cold." Clenching teeth together, I climbed the door frame to get to my knees. "Fight until you die or drop. A force like ours is hard to stop!"

Looking through the open door, I saw Bernadette just barely dodging the vicious attacks of the monstrous wolf. He was easily four times bigger than her and she was the biggest black bear sow I had ever seen.

"Close your mind to stress and pain. Fight till you're no longer sane!"

I opened my mouth and let all the agony I was feeling out in a scream of rage directed at the wolf. Great Fenrir stopped and turned to look at me, then snarled.

"Let not one damn cur pass by." My words were no longer made by a human throat, simple growls, but from within my mind I heard a thousand generations of my family take up the last line.

"How many of them can we make die!"

Dropping to my paws, I charged great Fenrisúlfr. All four legs pushed my ton of weight forwards to speeds an elk could not match. As I closed, my pain had been buried under a wall of red rage. How dare even fen walker come for my mate!

My paws wide, claws bared.

Our teeth dripping anticipation we came together with a sound to rival the very storm! Trees shook and splintered when we crashed into them. He, like all his kind, kith and kin, went for my throat, but my thick ruff of fur thwarted that attack. I had tried to bowl him over, but even as huge as I was, he was still bigger.

For a second we stood snarling at each other.

Then my mate tagged his rear and he instinctively tried to turn for her.

My paw sent him to the ground and I was upon him. Both claws slamming over and over into him; I bit deep feeling canine blood wash my fangs. He turned under me, snapping snarling at me, his teeth trying to find purchase on my face. I shook his loose each time and bit him again.

Then he was free and, chuffing laughter, I chased him a few feet before he turned and came back at me. Now it was me that got tumbled. But my shoulder turned the roll bringing me back to right and I batted at his muzzle to keep him distant.

The Lord of all Wolves snarled at me. He was hungry for this fight. He was the death that walked on four legs.

But so was I!

I rose to my back feet towering over even him for a moment, then used that height to slam back into him as he charged for my bared belly. Growling my contempt, I used my full weight to drive his nose into the snow and then landed on his back. He again turned under me and then he was free and running to get clear.

When he turned and circled, trying to get behind me, I chuffed and simply followed his movements. Foolish, Loki-spawned, beast! Mindless of anything but his instinctive attacks and mindless fury. It had been endless eons since he stood before something he could not kill with ease. Too many centuries chained as a dog in its kennel by the Sons of Heimdallr had robbed him of much of his once unstoppable strength as well.

I growled low in my throat, egging him to come at me again.

To try it again.

He snarled his rage, unafraid of me, but stalking me with more respect now. His head turned to track my mate as well. He didn't fear her at all but knew that she could give me the seconds I need to tear his throat bloody.

But I had no delusions as to the end of this battle. Fenrisúlfr was the Hate of Old. He was the Hammer of the Gods. Thunder, Wind and Rain given form. He was as unstoppable as the blizzard that howled around us in envy of his voice. Oh yes, Fenrir would take my life, of that I did not doubt. But I was going to leave him very bloody.

And he knew it.

Then a great horn was blowing! It shook snow from the trees around us.

Within me I felt shivers from a thousand ancestors at the sound. They knew it, knew what it portended and they shook in fear. And joy.

In the wake of that horn the very snow storm held its breath and the world fell silent. Silent save for the enraged howl of Fenrir as he saw, silhouetted in the moonlight, surrounded by rainbows of light, a bearded man upon a horse.

In that second I saw Luna's light glint off a raised silver spear, lifted in honor of me, I perceived. Then again that horn sounded and the great fen walker shook with rage at the taunting challenge of it.

It was far louder than his howl.

Faster than thought the Lord of Wolves went towards the rider in white, but faster than the fleeing shadows the horse the bearded man sat upon sprang away. It raced at Fenrir, but dodged past him, making the big wolf circle its own tail to continue its pursuit. In that time the horse was nearly out of sight.

But not out of sounds ability to carry. That powerful Vallhallan horn blew contemptuous laughter back to the wolf trying to give chase.

A warm shoulder pushed into my side, and I turned my head to look at my mate, Bernadette. She rubbed her dark head against my flank and I pushed my much shorter muzzle into her black fur. I breathed in her scent.

My mate.

Around us the last moonlight of summer died and, on this Samhain night, the Fimbual winter took full hold of the world of men. But I cared not. My mate and I shook the falling snow from our fur and went to find us a place to sleep away this endless winter ... together.