Saban Wolf's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Saban Wolf smelled the dead before he saw them. Bone rot carried on the wind between the black pines, and he lowered his head close to the frost. He was a wolf, and he wanted the pack. The old alpha had told him the rule plain: clear the skeletons walking these cold woods, and the hunters would follow him. Fail, and another wolf would take the honor. Saban had run three nights without sleep to reach this clearing first. He could hear the skeletons now, dry joints clicking, feet dragging over ice. Six of them, maybe seven, moving through the trees toward the frozen creek where the pack drank. He broke from cover at a full run. The first skeleton turned, and Saban hit it shoulder-first, snapping the spine under his weight. His claws raked through the ribcage of the next one and scattered bones across the snow. He bit down on a skull and crushed it. A third grabbed for his throat with cold fingers, and he tore its arm off and shook the bones loose from his teeth. Then the trees above him came alive. A swarm of bats poured down from the branches, wings snapping, small faces sharp in the moonlight. They had been feeding on the skeletons, he understood, or nesting in their empty skulls, and now they wheeled around him in a screaming cloud. Saban ducked his head, snapped at the air, and kept killing. He worked through the last three skeletons while bats clawed at his ears. When the final skull cracked under his paw, the swarm lifted and vanished back into the dark pines. Saban stood alone in a field of broken bone, his muzzle bleeding, his breath white. He had done what the old alpha demanded. But the bats had come from somewhere, and something in these woods was raising the dead. The pack would want to know what. Tomorrow he would answer for the kill, and he would ask for his place at the front.