He listened to the song of the wolves every night, allowed its wild, tuneless melody to enter his body, his mind. It made him feel complete, one with the savage side of the world but also one with its majesty. He never pretended that he could sing along, but his soul surely did. It was all well and good, to feel an imaginary connection to the very beasts that threatened his life every time he stepped into the woods to hunt and sustain what meager existence he had carved out in the heart of the wilderness. They had attacked, he had defended, but still he heard them by night and he felt as if they called to him.
He heard them lamenting one night. It was sad and sweet but full of mourning, tragedy, as if they beckoned the moon to them and it merely sank behind a ridge of stony clouds and hid, and refused them. But then they were broken off, and there were sharp yelps, and the chorus was replaced by a single, broken soloist. She sung of battle wounds—he was certain it was a she—and of a disgraced death upon foreign soil. Suddenly he was subject to the pull of her dying requiem and he dove into the woods in search of her. Perhaps she had come from a rival pack, and provoked those that he lived alongside, or perhaps she had broken a sacred code of wolves. He found her lying in a puddle of blood and moonlight, her dashing quicksilver coat stained and matted with splotches of deep maroon. She was unattended, and so he scooped her up and brought her back to his cabin.
There was not much space, but he tucked the creature amongst his blankets and bound her wounds, uncertain of why he felt so compelled to save her. It was some wolf bitch, after all, and would tear out his throat if she recovered, but at the very least her song need not be depressed any longer.
He slept the night in a chair, lulled by the pale whimpers of the moonlit wolf, dreaming of her sprinting at deadly speed through the forest, leaping effortlessly over creeks, narrowly avoiding the obstacles the trees attempted to lay in her path. When he woke, his first thoughts were of her, and when he dared to check, she was there but had changed. She had shed the gleaming silver pelt and donned the soft rosy flesh of a maiden rising from steaming water, and her hair was long and unkempt but wild and beautiful nonetheless. He reached to touch her, almost certain the wolf would reappear, but it did not and he placed a hand on her feverish back instead. Under his calloused hands was skin spun from the looms of the gods; she was flawless from head to toe, and naked as the day she was born. It was intoxicating. He had never seen a woman so naked, so close.
"You saved me," she breathed, her lips ghosting the words and her eyes remaining closed as if in gentle sleep. "Your name...?"
"Priam," he replied, too dumbfounded to question how she had entered. He retracted his hand so that she would not think him perverted. "Are-are you-"
"A werewolf?" Her laughter, the softest dripping of dew into a puddle, made his heart skip a beat. "I am. Your pack... defended you from me. But you came anyway..."
"You were hurt."
"And you risked a wolf in your home?" She had blue eyes, strikingly so, bluer than the lake reflecting the sky, a deep cerulean though, and they were kind. He realized she had opened them and was staring into his. "I admire that."
He had no answer, but his fickle woodsman heart, an organ so little used he almost had expected it to have died years prior, kept him rooted to her bedside. She smiled, returning to her dreamlike state with eyes gently closed.
"My name is Lucina," she continued softly, "and I am indebted to you, Priam..."