Old Shit: Wolf, Legacy of a Werewolf

Author's Note: This is reposted verbatim, with no editing. This includes the rather obvious misappropriation of the senses at the end of the first part. Enjoy.


Wolf
Legacy of a Werewolf
--Zack Gilpin
Originally posted: August 11th, 2004

Part 1- Wolve’s Bane
[-HUNT-]

The night was full, the rain heavy. Thunder shook the earth with a deafening boom. Light emanated from the various homes along the streets, lamps mostly burnt out. The towering structures called skyscrapers loomed in the distance, contrasting the clouds with their ever luminescent high lights. Power was out in half the city, my half. This world is a strange one for me, but I live here anyway, defending those who are weak. I have my reasons. I came to this place to find a cure for my disease, and I received something else, something far better and far worse in equally as many ways. A reason. My disease is one that will only kill if you let it control you, if you let it go too far. I came here to end my lineage and erase its horrible deeds from the history of the world so I could go back to my home in the middle of the forest and live my life they way I had for nearly sixty years preceding; alone. I came here reluctantly, hoping the rumor was true. I meant to enter this city and leave within the sake of two, maybe three days. I planned on getting the cure and getting out, never looking back afterwards. Ironically, that was over one hundred years ago. I came here for my own sake, but I immediately saw the chaos and disorder of the world around me. Death was the name of so many, and those who were not plagued or poor were rich beyond imagination. To put it frankly, you were either rich or dead. Crime was rampant. The point is, I came here to end my disease, to end the most horrible chapter of my life.

When I came here, I called it a disease. Now, I call it a gift. I’ve been with this city through all its best and worst times. Had I not been here to protect it, this place would’ve fallen long ago. I am one that watches over this city like an angel, ending that which should never have started. At least, that is what many would say about me, if I allowed myself to be seen by innocent eyes. I came here bearing the weight of terrible sin, young though I was. I came to this city and saw its need for a savior, and I took up the mantle. It began because of one man who died because of me, one who trusted me. I protect this city now and forever because too many lives have fallen before my eyes, too many souls sent to heaven because of my search for the cure. Because when I came here, I started a chain of events that caused the city to be sent into this hell. I do this because of the simple rule of honor; finish what you start.

The night was full, the rain heavy. Thunder shook the earth with a deafening boom. Light emanated from the heart of New York City like a candle at the pit of the earth. The sound of glass shattering followed by the loud buzzing of a store alarm rang through the air from miles away so subtly that only my eyes could hear it. I stood from my perch on a four story building and unsheathed my sword, a katana, taking in a deep breath of the damp air. My sword glinted in the light of the city, reflecting that which is essentially the heart of the metropolis. Three words written in Japanese kanji shown eve brighter from their place near the hilt of the blade.

Fight.
Kill.
Repent.

I jumped from my perch and moved in for the kill, like a wolf on the hunt.

[-ORIGIN-]

My name is Jacob Wulfinger. My disease, my curse, my gift, my advantage, is something very simple and something so very complicated. Quite simply, I am a werewolf, a man who turns into a sort of man-wolf cross over by the light of the full moon, only there’s more to it than that. So much more.

First, there is more than one way to become a werewolf. Three ways, in fact. The lowest, easiest and least respected form of lycanthropy is no-blood. A man who kills a wolf, skins it, wears the fur as a coat. He takes many rare (and often deadly in the wrong dosage) herbs and makes them into a strange substance that he rubs all over his skin, then he makes a fire and dances around it, uttering a demonic chant. When this has gone on for two or three hours, he stops and offers up his soul to Satan in exchange for the gift of lycanthropy. As time goes on, the transformation becomes less and less complete. Eventually, the lycanthropy completely fades into a state of subtle insanity. The second way is half-blood. Basically, when one is bitten by another werewolf. This form is not only the most common, but the most hard to explain. Half-blood transformations rely on other werewolves, so the question is...who was the first? Many people believe that it was a full-blood that created the first half-blood, but the strange part is, the halves predate the fulls. As you’ve probably figured by now, the third is that of full-blood. These are the most rare, for they are werewolves born as werewolves. Born into a lineage of other full-bloods. If two halves have a child, the child is born a half. A full is created by only an insane man whose life is about to end. He pledges his soul to the devil for eternal life and becomes a sort of no-blood, except that it never fades and he never goes insane because he already is insane. His children, though, are granted full-blood lycanthropy and a very strange gift that is very hard to ignore; immortality. There are only three known families of full-blood werewolves, and two of them have been wiped out.

Second, werewolves aren’t the emotionally tormented wrecks you see in the movies. There are plenty of things to get emotional about, and there is one or two truths to the movie werewolves. Yes, we do become wolf-men at the light of the full moon, but there’s an extrapolation on that; there are three full moons in a month. The night labeled ‘full moon’ on the calender is actually the second night in three night cycle. The night before the full moon is the night of the rising moon, the next is the night of the reigning moon, the following night the falling moon. Yes, life as a werewolf can be hell, but it can also become far more exciting than any mortal life ever could. As you grow older, you grow stronger, faster, much like vampires (and they, too, are as real as the sky is blue). From the moment you ‘become’, you already have enhanced strength, speed, sight, smell, taste. All the senses are heightened greatly.

Probably the most important detail is this: when we become wolven, we have no control over ourselves. It’s like a dream, we remember it all very vaguely, but we never forget it.

[-ORIGIN, PART 2-]

I was born on April 9th, 1908. I was born into the name ‘Wulfinger’, my parents had named me Jacob after my father’s great grand father, one who had fought in the Civil War. I was raised in a mansion of twenty three rooms, bathrooms, dining rooms, and various storage closets not included. The house was huge, as you can imagine, and looked as though any person would imagine a Victorian mansion from that day and age. I still, to this very day, so not know where the mansion was. I know it was deep in a forest, hidden from all humanity. I’m sure by now its been discovered, but that has no bearing on the current tale.
Like I said before, the mansion was hidden deep within a forest. This was because my father had something he wanted to keep secret. I never suspected anything like it. To me, the house, my parents and the various servants were the entire universe, nothing beyond the forest but plague, famine, and poverty. Though we were, by the standards of the day, very rich, money had no bearing on my life. The servants were not slaves, but people who also wanted to escape from humanity. My father provided them rooms in the mansion, gave them food for dinner, did everything that was necessary to keep them around. Not much was required of course. With the simple lie that my father had killed the former owners of the building, the servants believed that we were dirt poor, so they accepted a very small pay. Perhaps by luck of the draw, perhaps by divine intervention, all the servants were nice, thoughtful people, each willing to do his or her own share of work. Yes, there were women servants, too. Unlike the sexist, racist, war-mongering world outside, our home was a pace of acceptance. I don’t think either of my parents liked it, too many of the other sex that one could ‘play’ with, but I believe they did this to set a good example for me. To keep me from becoming like the normal people outside, to help me stand out and make something of myself if I ever wanted to leave.
And they knew I would want to see the outside world eventually. It was inevitable, so instead of filling me full of stories about how horrid the outside world was, they told me of the immense wonders nature had to offer. This always excited me, hearing of these amazing wonders. When I first heard of the ocean as a young boy, I almost died laughing!
“An endless mass of water!” I would shout, “Madness! If there’s so much water out there then why are we out of water here? Couldn’t you just take it bucket full by bucket full, if it truly is endless?”
And to this, my mother would reply, “Because, the water is filled with salt. You wouldn’t want to drink salty water all the time, would you?”
“Salty? Someone must have been massively bored to put that much salt into the ocean!”

There was a small pond by our house, inside a natural clearing of trees. The pond, only twenty to thirty feet all around, was massive to me. Sometimes I would swim in this small pond, thinking that there was more water in that pond than in anything else. Naturally, when I first learned of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, I did not believe it. The largest body of water I’d ever seen in life was the pond, so the thought of a lake (and I was ignorant of the terms at the time, calling it a lake and not the ocean) so large, you couldn’t see land on the other side... Impossible! But inside, I knew it to be true, and dreamed of seeing both the oceans at least once before I died.
My parents also told me of the Indians, savage people who lived off the land and practiced a polytheistic religion. They told me of the Grand Canyon west of us, the Mississippi river east. It amazed me that these could exist, and that someday, I would get to see them.
I was told these things so that I would want to go into the outside world, but I was also given many warnings. I was told of how vicious people outside could be, killing you for your mere money, murdering you for fun. This was more than enough to keep me from running away on my own. Like I always had before, I patiently waited, knowing that, someday soon, I would move into the outside world and see these natural wonders. I would see them and love them more than anyone else could, because I was the only one who knew and truly understood their significance. It showed that nature had a plan for us all, whether it be becoming the President of the U.S., exploring the south, or embarking on the journey I was about to take. No matter how hard we tried to keep hold of the reigns, nature would always jerk them from our hands until we either gave up, or grabbed hold again, stronger for what you’d endured.

It was then on the week before my fifteenth birthday that I stumbled upon something. For a birthday gift, m parents and a few of the servants were going to go to the Pacific ocean, no matter what it took. This excited me more and more as I thought about it, and I suddenly found myself on the eve of my birthday, waiting ever so intently for my father to give me the news. It was the greatest day of my life. An irony, it seems to me now, that my last night of mortality would be the best. I don’t know why, but it almost makes me laugh whenever I think about it.

Because that would be the night when al my dreams were shattered, and a destiny beyond my comprehension was written. It was the night I ceased to be Jacob Wulfinger. From the night forward, for the rest of my life, I would be known simply as ‘Wolf’.


This was a story I worked very hard on, and unlike a lot of the things I'll probably end up posting, I remember most of the details.

The basic beginning to the story was not dissimilar to that of The Wolf, with Jacob Wulfinger being raised in a house in the middle of nowhere, isolated from the world, until he comes of age and painfully becomes a werewolf.

(It's worth noting that Adrian Quist was named Jacob in the original draft of The Wolf)

However, unlike The Wolf, here Jacob is found by his father, who subsequently tried to kill him. Jacob ended up shifting and killing everyone there -one of many holes in the story- and running off to live in the wilderness. He does this for upwards of sixty years, until he goes to a place to get supplies and is told, serendipitously and nonsensically, that there is someone in New York City who has a cure for lycanthropy. He goes, and finds the person who has the cure. He also makes a human friend, who he eventually is forced to kill for the cure. The friend becomes a werewolf and subsequently the main villain for the rest of the series. At the end of this first book, Jacob destroys the cure rather than taking it, so no one can ever use it against him.

The rest of the story is a blur to me, because it was very long, very epic, and little of it was ever actually written (something which is endemic to my writing history). Basically, Jacob went on to save NYC for years and years, fighting off his old friend. At one point he goes to Mexico and befriends a vampire, who he is subsequently forced to kill when he kills all the vampires (see a trend?). He then meets the last full-blood family of werewolves, and kills them too (or at least is the reason they are killed. Same guilt trip either way). At some point there is also a prophecy thrown about which says that Jacob will cause the end of the world, and part of the motivation for his travels is to prevent that from happening. He ends up, of course, causing it directly. The second half of the story occurs after the end of the world, dealing with... a lot of really ridiculous things, very little of which make sense.

There are shades of this story existing in a lot of my current works. I still gravitate towards the concept of the three day full moon, although I have omitted it in some cases as it adds unnecessary complexity to a relatively simple concept. I've obviously recycled the basic concept, although in its current form it is a character drama rather than an Underworld ripoff. This story is an excellent demonstration of my state of mind at the time: no matter how hard you try, no matter what you do, you will always hurt or disappoint the ones you love, and even if you devote your life to preventing the one thing you don't want to happen, in the end you will probably just end up causing it.