Therion Chapter 7 - Travelers

 

Ben rummaged through his backpack and found a couple of granola bars. He tossed Tom one, and the two ate while Tom continued his story.

 

The forest swayed under the mighty wind. Sharku’s voice rose over the drumming rain, “You’re ready, Thomas.”

Tom shifted in his chair, both excitement and dread overcoming him. “When do we leave?” he asked.

“Right now,” answered Sharku from the window.

They boarded a small float plane and traveled over the great forest and around mountains that scraped the sky. Tom thought he saw something like a tower piercing through the clouds, but it quickly vanished as they changed directions. He grew hungry and cold as the day turned to night and back to day again.

The pilot landed on a glassy lake, and the surrounding landscape was frost-bitten and foreboding.

“Get out.” Sharku looked at Tom with a menacing scoff.

He surveyed the distant shoreline and noted the ice-cold water between them and it. Tom feared the old man more than the cold, so he took a deep breath and, ending the hesitation, stepped out of the small door and into the blue water.

Tom's chest tightened; all he wanted to do was inhale deeply, but he was a foot below the surface. He struggled for an endless moment and, at long last, broke through and found his breath. Taking a deep breath to steady his nerves, he started swimming purposefully toward the shore.

His muscles grew slower, the temperature restraining his every movement. The cold stiffened his drive. He concentrated on maintaining his momentum so the depth wouldn’t pull him back under. Dizziness danced about his head as all his blood rushed to his heart and lungs. He reached downward with his feet and found the bottom. He struggled upright, slogged the final ten feet, and collapsed onto the sand, exhaustion overtaking him as he reached the shore.

Static swirled around the blackness behind his eyelids, and ringing filled his ears. “Thomas Brown, GET UP.” Ordered Sharku.

With a few blinks, the old man came into focus, standing over Tom like an alpha wolf. Tom sat up, his hands on his knees. His sandy, wet t-shirt was already beginning to freeze.

“Breath,” Sharku commanded. “Land is not your salvation; the air is colder than the water.

The fire is within - close your eyes, imagine flames wrapping around your heart, the heat filling your lungs. Inhale the cold, exhale the heat.”

Tom focused on the old man’s words. He had to listen, or freeze to death. He breathed in and out, inhaled and exhaled, imagining the inner fire wrapping around his body like a fiery coat of embers.

Soon he was warm, soon he was dry. “Ha ha,” Sharku laughed. You did well, son; some of the others did not.”

Tom pondered those words for a moment, then let them vanish into the wind like an eerie vapor.

“Look around, Thomas, you’re in the wilds of the north. This will be more like home to you than any you have ever known.”

Tom stood taking in the mountains and the forest, the lake and the snow. “Where to now?” he asked.

With that, the two vanished into the forest, hunting the hunters, scouring the wildlands for any trace of the elusive apex predator.

At long last, they found the wolf pack and the dominant male. He was tall and black with searching yellow eyes. He had a knowing about him. Tom from the forest’s edge gazed at his target, and the wolf with all its keen awareness did not detect his scent, nor the old man's. They, too, had become one with the wild.

Their shoes gone, their clothes shredded and tattered, their humanity was left behind as the plane abandoned them to the cruel cold.

“He is yours, Thomas. With his blood comes his power.”

Tom was surprised by the pounding in his chest. That it was not fear but excitement. Longing and lust gripped his heart more than any drug could. He had been indoctrinated, the demon directed him.

He sprang like a cheetah from the brush. Under a cold steel sky, he rushed after the alpha, his long arms swaying, maintaining his balance. His bare feet propelled him over the rocky landscape. He did not feel the stones cutting his heels. He felt as though he were flying. He had no body, no limits, only energy, only hunger.

He leapt on the back of the wolf. Its strength and speed – its pack was no match for Tom. Under his crushing grip, the alpha’s life was broken. Tom lifted the creature over his head in a victory cry.

Sharku stepped warily betwixt the stunned wolf pack. “His life now belongs to you – drink.”

Tom took the knife from the old man's outstretched hand and pushed it into the wolf's neck. He drank. It was warm, it tasted like adrenaline, copper, and pine. As Tom lifted the wolf, memories flooded back. The animal’s muscles twitched, echoing the woman’s last moments. He saw the hidden scene from years ago: his hands drenched in blood, face and neck spattered. Not all the blood was hers—she had fought, she had drawn his blood, just as the wolf had lunged and bared its teeth. Tom’s blood mingled with hers, connecting them forever, souls bound by violence and memory. Now, with the wolf, he felt that same bond—forever linked to the wild, an alpha among beasts.

Tom was euphoric, in a high. It was analogous to meth or cocaine but different. Sharku chanted in a distant haze. He had begun the ritual, calling on the prince of the hunt to shift Tom.

With a roar, Tom leapt up and immediately saw Sharku writhing on the ground. The old man convulsed, his muscles tightening, tearing, bones breaking. In a moment, the man stood as a gray, scarred, ugly beast. It lunged at Tom, and that’s when he realized – I am no longer Tom.

With his long, razor-sharp claws, he tore open the gray beast’s back and drove his fangs deep into its shoulders, blood surging beneath his jaws.

There was no holding back; there was no preservation of life. He was free; he was born again a murderous beast, untouchable and insatiable.

He smashed his opponent into a tree, splintering it. But the beast stood up, its wounds healing. It grinned and ran at Tom, or what Tom was now. His ribcage fractured as he was hit, but with fierceness, he fought back, and as he clashed on, he felt his ribs pulling back into place.

“I am untouchable. I cannot be killed.”

 

“Okay, I think you’re getting a little too excited,” Ben interjected.

“It’s like a drug, and with any high, you have to come down eventually,” Tom replied. The fighting and healing, the extreme climate, and hundreds of miles of running all took their toll on me. I came to understand why those men came back sickly, pale, and exhausted.

“You think they all had the same experience as you?” Ben asked.

He sighed. “I wasn’t special. Each of us had a handler who took us north to kill a wolf. The handlers were always bigger and stronger than we were. If their incantations failed to control us, they’d shift and take us out themselves.”

“What happened when you got back?”

“I slept, and when I woke up, I realized I was just a tool. I was useless unless they wanted to use me. I went on a few hunts, ran with the pack.”

“Tell me about the last hunt,” Ben asked.

 

Tom started, “My heart was beating through my chest, the forest blurred past, I was flying again. The smell we were tracking was sweet; it was not usual. Sweet smells, to us, were so sweet they became putrid and nauseating. But this scent was attractive. So, we followed it all the more.

London James, our lead, dropped to all fours, slowing the pack. He directed us to take up formation. I followed the ridgeline through a labyrinth of shadows and positioned myself directly in front of the group.

 

“What group was this? Asked Ben, nomads?”

“No, these appeared to be just travelers passing through our forest. Men, women, boys, and girls.”

“What were you going to do – what did you do to them?” Ben didn’t really want to know the answer to that question, but he had to ask.

“They were trespassing, and we kill anyone who steps on our land unless there is an agreement.”

“How do you figure that it's trespassing? It’s a public forest.” Ben shook his head.

“It was never public,” retorted Tom. “This land was consecrated to the gods many years ago, and they will protect it.”

“Yeah. You were just a tool – a murderous tool.”

 

Tom leaned forward in his chair. “I was to go in first, not to draw first blood, but to distract while the others came in from the side and behind. But when I stepped from the shadows onto the path they were on, everything changed.

The man, their leader, stepped forward. He should’ve been struck with debilitating fear, but he walked toward me. He looked into my eyes as if I were human. No one had done that in years. Even as a normal man, I was a monster, and everyone knew it. I could hear the commands of the pack, their rage, their fear. I was frozen to the ground, locked in a trance with this man. Was he a warlock?

The werewolves jumped in from the sides with hatred, snarling and biting, but their claws and fangs just passed through the people as if they were ghosts. The light that emanated from each of them pushed us away. My cowering pack ran off in every direction, confused by the encounter.

Still, I stood alone before these peculiar people. My forest is full of strange things that you don’t know about Ben. But this was something different from what I’ve ever seen. The man walked slowly toward me. I desired communion with him, but the beast within desired to flee at all costs.

He rested his hand on my chest and closed his eyes. My panting slowed, and I felt the shrinking, the relocating of my disjointed body.

“Hello, son,” he spoke kindly.

My uselessness was replaced with something else – hope. My fatigue was wrapped in warmth and invigorated with love. “How?” I wondered.

Still, the question is fresh, and I often ask it, but the man told me the answer.

 

“Who was this man?” Ben asked. “Did he say his name?”

“Let me finish the story.”

 

He took me by the hand and led me to the center of the group.

“Unload your packs, people - make a circle, start a fire.”

We sat down around a crackling fire. The smell of meat and cheese, dough wrapped around sticks, and even s’mores permeated the air. These people had just been attacked by fearsome predators, and this was their next move? Astonishing.

“My name is Tick Tock.”

“And my name is Oscar,” spoke an elderly man. “And mine is Joseph Day,” another said with a handshake.

Tom looked around at everyone. How beautiful, he thought.

“Um, Tick Tock?”

A young woman on the other side of the fire quoted:

‘Therefore, rejoice O heavens! And you who live in the heavens, rejoice!

But terror will come on the Earth and sea, for the devil has come down to you in great anger,

Knowing that he has little time.’

“There’s your snippet from Revelation 12 quoted eloquently by my daughter, Shelby.” Answered Tick Tock.

“Hello, wolfman,” she greeted.

“Knowing that he, the devil, has little time to do his work on the Earth, he is very angry. I like to taunt him by saying, tick tock, tick tock. Then I destroy his work. So, those around me gave me that nickname.

Tom rubbed his forehead, squinting his eyes. “What are you, some kind of wizard? How do you go after the devil?”

“I’m not a wizard, Tick Tock answered. “It’s not what I am but who is in me. There is an evil spirit in you – the spirit of a werewolf. That spirit gives you power when you call on it, right?”

Tom felt very naked now. “Yes, that’s right.”

He went on. “I have the Spirit of God living inside of me, all of us here do. That’s why this group has no fear, because He is the greatest of all spirits.”

“The Spirit of – God?” Tom asked.

“Yes, the Holy Spirit of God the Father, Jehovah, Yahweh, the first Elohim and creator of the heavens and Earth.

“And he is more powerful than all the evil that’s in this world?”

“You saw it yourself. He is more powerful than the wolf, the lion, and the bear. He is coming to take out all the dark power very shortly. It’s my job to bring humans and every creature back to His safety before He brings the war against the dragon to Earth. All of us who accept His salvation and call will help do that work.”

Tom chewed on those words, not knowing what he should do with the knowledge.

Tick Tock popped a piece of delectable venison into his mouth. “Strong meat belongs to them that are of full age.” He held out a small plate of meat to Tom.

“Would you like to eat, Tom?”

He looked at the food for a moment and spoke softly. “No, not yet.” Tom stood, looked at the group, then vanished into the woods.

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