Work Text:
The bite, of course, catches him off guard.
It was his first training day, the courtyard’s shiny bright flagstones glowing in the new day sun, as he practiced new magic spells and incantations. The day had grown with potential, as the formative years of his training slipped away towards these new possibilities. The visiting wizard, someone Caleb hoped to call mentor, was just a casual watcher from the sidelines, offering minor corrections, mild criticism, but was seemingly supportive if taciturn.
It had been the best day of Caleb’s life.
But that night, oh gods, that night changed everything.
That night was fateful, cataclysmic, a tale woven of hubris and despair.
Only one other night would ever compare, but that would come much later in the shape of a small goblin girl with a painted on smile and an outstretched hand saying “I’m not afraid, I can help”
***
The Empire was not an easy place to grow up, much less for the bastard son of a noble. It was a place of harsh edges and muddy footprints, a mish-mash of tucked together towns huddled along mountain ranges that stood tall and foreboding rather than protective and welcoming. It was dappled with swamps made mad by fairy lights and bog witches, their crooked teeth snapping children’s necks, their hands wrinkled grey and spattered in blood and mud. It was a land of well-guarded secrets cloaked in uppercrust sniffles and finely chiseled jawlines, blonde beauties covered in jewels bartered for with stolen lands and stolen coin. It was harsh, a thin whistle of wind the only thing close to a lover’s call most people could find.
But it was home.
***
At twelve Caleb started asking questions, vexed his tutors with endless strings of queries about the nature of the world, the nature of magic, the nature of the underlying thrum of energies stitched into the tapestry of the worlds.
He had always been curious in general, of course. First asking questions of his mother (which always resulted in downturned lips and put upon sigh), then his tutors (they did not appreciate having to answer the vagaries of numerical realities), and finally his cousin (anything relating to the Academy was off limits which made him want to know it all the more).
Eventually though, ah eventually he wore Cousin Kari down. She started teaching him the magical equivalent of parlor tricks, mostly just to stop the incessant chatter but also because, surprisingly enough, Caleb actually had some aptitude for the craft.
It wasn’t long before he was transmuting tea kettles into apples and evoking small pockets of ear-nipping cold. The spells were by no means as advanced as he could have learned at the Academy, but they were his and his alone and no one could take them away from him.
He began to scribble and scratch each spell into one of his mother’s discarded ledgers, careful to copy every stroke from his cousin’s notes, eager to fill the book up cover-to-cover. Eager to be the best.
***
His parents, of course, could not afford any actual lessons at the Academy, let alone any lessons from real magic tutors. He made do, over the years, writing in his book until the cramped handwriting bled together and the spells became more like watercolor shapes rather than instructional blueprints. It didn’t matter for most of them, he’d memorized the flittering hand movements and murmured words long ago.
On his eighteenth birthday, his mother – his sweet, kind-eyed, well-intentioned mother – surprised him with an actual tutor, a real wizard who was traveling through, offering a few lessons for room and board.
It had seemed a boon from the gods.
The man – Garrick – was, well, stoic was an understatement. He had a grizzled look to his skin, sun-weathered and tan from years on the road, with pockmarks of plague from his younger days. His green eyes were sharp, constantly darting around the table that night at supper, but his words had been kind.
And he had been thankful. So very thankful.
Caleb could hardly concentrate that night at the dinner table, his mother reprimanding him for splashing soup three times and accidentally dropping his dinner roll as he’d tried to scribble notes from the lesson and eat simultaneously. He can still remember how everything had tasted faintly of ink but it hadn’t mattered. He had a real wizard for a handful of days and he wasn’t going to waste a second of it.
He had asked questions around mouthfuls of lamb, anything approaching manners flying out the window. His mother also scolded him for that.
Garrick answered it all easily, albeit gruffly, and in short staccato between bites of his own stew.
“Can I see your spell book?” Caleb eventually got around to asking, a shyness creeping along his cheeks. From what Kari had said, spell books were guarded secret things.
Garrick had coughed, sputtered and almost choked on his food. His mother had politely passed the water pitcher over, a concerned look creasing her brow. It wouldn’t do to accidentally kill a visitor.
Finally Garrick recovered, looking sheepish. “Unfortunately not,” he had eventually rasped out and that was the end of that.
***
The thing Caleb regretted the most about himself was his willful determination.
Everything could have been so different.
Everything could have been so much better, his parents-
The rest of his years would see a heaping portion of regrets shoved onto his plate, but his actions that night were the ones with the most lethal consequences.
***
He had resolved, quietly, furtively, and only after returning to his room still eating a lemon bar for dessert, to steal Garrick’s spell book.
Well, okay, he wasn’t going to steal it, just get a little peak, copy as many spells as he could and then politely slide it back into place in Garrick’s room without the man ever being the wiser.
Caleb knew their small estate like the back of his hand and he knew which steps would creak and what time his parents fell asleep, when their two servants would be distracted gossiping about the day’s events, and how to best not to be seen. And, he rationalized to himself, it wasn’t like he would keep the treasured tome.
Most importantly, it wasn’t like he’d ever get the chance to learn anything like it again. This was it, the only opportunity to find out expert ways to make crops flourish or banish a rainstorm or protect the estate from raiders. He really was doing the right thing, honestly, figuring out how to protect the small scratch of land his family called their own.
It would be wrong not to borrow the spell book.
And so, after outlining the quill strokes of his new spells for a fifth time, he watched the inching line of wax on his candle drip and drab down to the mark of midnight.
Slipping on his cloak, he squared his shoulders and slipped out of the room, a full moon lighting his way.
***
He took quick quiet steps down the hall, feeling the hair on the back of his neck stand on end, his ears perked and his back tense. The passageway was bathed in pale blues and silvers, and as he made his way towards the guest room, past his mother’s study and his parents’ bedchamber, he began to have second thoughts.
What if Garrick was still awake?
What if Garrick found out?
What if his book was cursed or spellbound, what if it erased his mind, what if it made him forget about magic, what if his parents found out, what if what if what if-
The swirling clatter of his mind finally stopped as he found himself right outside Garrick’s door, hand already on the doorknob, his breathing heavy and scared.
Caleb hesitated, biting his lower lip, the cold press of metal against his palm.
And that’s when he heard it, a scratching whine from inside, followed by a thud of something like a body.
It was instinct then, really, that made him open the door, concern and confusion for Garrick twisting his gut as he pulled sharply on the handle.
The glowing green eyes that met his were like Garrick’s, but not. They were crueler, ringed with yellow, and surrounded by grey-white fur.
There was a snarl, a swift blur of movement, and before Caleb even knew what was happening, the solid weight of this thing had slammed into him, knocked him down, cracking the back of his head against the solid wood floor.
As the world blurred and faded away, etched in pale greys and dark shadows, Caleb felt a sharp pain at the base of his neck, against his collarbone, a raking jagged pain.
The bite that followed, of course, catches him off guard.
***
That was the night he lost his family.
No-correction- that was the night he killed them all.
That was the night he turned.
***
He’s careful then, afterwards, after fleeing, escaping, forgetting.
The two spell books are all he takes, are all he has left besides the ever-present taste of their blood in his mouth.
He travels, buries his past deep and doesn’t look back, can’t look back.
He vows to find Garrick, vows to kill the man.
He vows to find a cure, even if he doesn’t deserve it, if only to stop himself from hurting anyone else, from turning anyone else.
He vows to never let the curse take him unprepared again.
He takes precautions, buys heavy iron chains and sharply pointed traps, learns runes of ensnaring to carve into delicate dirt, gets collars of silver that burn his fingertips as he purchases them, and stocks up on sleep draughts strong enough to put down a goliath.
He sticks to the side roads, tucks himself away into the woods and dirt and talks to no one, feels the itch of moonblood coursing through his veins like the constant flitting hummingbird. He takes his fair share of small game and the lust for the hunt is sated.
And it works, for a long time, he keeps everyone safe from himself.
***
The thing they don’t tell you about becoming a lycan though, is that sometimes, when the lay lines between the feywild and this plane shift into just the right alignment, and if you’re in just the right place at just the wrong time, well, then the barriers between can weaken with the onset of the winter solstice.
And as the planes twist and warp around each other, well, this can make the transformation erratic, untethered from the moon as the power of the feywild slowly seeps into this world to claim its creatures touched by that wild magic.
***
Caleb, unfortunately, doesn’t know any of this the night he checks into a small room at the Nestled Nook Inn. All he knows is that he is relieved for the hardest days and nights surrounding the full moon to be over and tankful that he could finally get a real shower (he won’t, of course, too tired to make it to the baths but there was always tomorrow).
Caleb, also rather unfortunately, doesn’t know that tomorrow’s bath would be left wanting as he will shift that night beneath a waning gibbous moon. He doesn’t know that the biting snarl of fangs will be the first sign of the change.
He doesn’t know that right as yellow-brown fur will start to ripple across his arms and face, a small goblin girl will also be breaking into his room in the hopes of stealing a few coin.
And as he sits down at a table and orders hot food and strong ale with a weary sigh, Caleb doesn’t know that the girl three tables over with the bright yellow eyes will be the first person to save his life.