Daily Writing Exercise: Baron’verse, Urban fantasy, werewolves. Anane talks about the Black family curse. In character world-building, yay! I really need to get some of this ‘verse up on Wattpad proper. *makes notes* 538 words.
There are only three people left in the world who know what the witch’s curse actually was, the rest is all speculation and misdirection.
Because only three of us were in that room: the Black Baron, whose true name was carefully lost to time, his adopted sixth son Christopher, and his fourth son… me. Everyone else in the dungeon died soon after the witch and the Baron’s other five sons were out causing havoc elsewhere.
My brothers are no more innocent just because they didn’t personally hold the knives, but we’ve never told them the truth and I think it’s because father thinks they are…. less, somehow.
I was the only one to inherit his full madness when I was born and while he found another kindred spirit in Christopher I think he would have preferred us all to be worthy of the curse.
The others are evil and cruel and callous… but only the three of us are truly insane.
Christopher is the reason the curse allows us to adopt new wolves into the family magic, but my blood brothers are the reason it didn’t work. Well, them and the wolves.
Because the witch who cursed us had never seen wolves, but neither had we. Wolves were horror stories told around campfires passed down from our great-grandfathers and travelers from distant lands. They were fierce giant beasts filled with an insatiable bloodlust, that killed without mercy or reason.
She meant to turn us into those mindless beasts for the rest of our human lives, but magic is… peculiar.
So when she said ‘be wolves as you are’ in a broken dialect of our unfamiliar language she meant ‘be the monsters I imagine you to be’ and the magic looked at us and looked at wolves and decided on something entirely different.
Maybe if she had cursed us in her native tongue…
Maybe if she had been able to concentrate on her meaning and not just the words through the pain…
Maybe if we had all been the monsters she thought we were and not just us three…
But that’s not what happened.
We’re wolves only some of the time because my brothers weren’t always evil and wolves never were. So the wolf in us ebbs and flows, depending on who we are and how closely our selves align.
We’re immortal because she meant monsters, not wolves, and the magic gave her that much. Living nightmares that can’t be stopped and can’t be killed, save with magical silver– that’s all we have left of the fairytale packs from the stories.
And our curse will last forever, the magic fueled by our own suffering… until it doesn’t.
Because that wasn’t all she said, even if that’s all we told the others.
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