To my giftee, Noxlee. I hope you have fun reading as I had writing. I hope it satisfies.
Also... to foxymoley, who introduced me to Discord. My writing would not have improved and I would not have been able to join this exchange without you.
Acknowledgments:
This isn't a big bang, but I always have a tremendous amount of help from people in the fandom when writing. So thanks always to my alpha reader Captainhetarede; my beta readers MaggieMaybe160 and Castiel's Carma. And the final read-through of heylittleangel.
I also used some German here so shout out goes to Alessariel and Jak_the_ATAT for the input. (As well as fighting scene advise). Thanks to Discord always for the times when I need a little writing boost, and for questions that go: how the heck is this gonna be a Destiel story with a Red riding hood premise? XD
Finally... a big shout out to Mods TobytheWise and JJ for setting up such a nice and beautiful exchange. Don't forget to check out the rest of the Fairytales from the PB exchange. Just in time for my birthday too! So I got one of the best birthday gifts ever: A fanfic of my favorite couple.
Prologue - Silver Ash Covert
Do not go into the woods, the grandmothers say, do not go when the moon is full and the wolf howls, hiding in the thicket.
The elders warned the children. Still, youngsters, as was their nature, would not heed the warnings and play there. They tested the limits of the woodlands around their little village, Chesterford. Their grieving mothers came to the barony of Silver Ash Covert, held by the House of Winchester, who protected their land. They petitioned help from the Order of the Hunters or the Men of Letters, and the barony dutifully sent out a search party, only to return empty-handed. What their wolf had gobbled down, did not turn back up.
And they tried hunting the wolf over the years. Both the Hunters and the Men of Letters had killed werewolves that prowled the night, but there were still children missing every two decades.
Sam and Dean Winchester were very small when the children of their generation were taken; Dean was barely five summers. Their parents had gone with the search party and found a single girl. The wolf had wounded her, and the markings on her wrists looked like marks from claws, scraped raw against her arms. She was frightened, spoke a different language, and they could only understand a few words. But for the first time, they learned that it was not a wolf they sought, but a giant bird. Around the girl, they had found feathers—dark as the night sky, but with a blue undertone—and crushed yarrow surrounding them.
That summer, it took no other child, but the village slew no large birds either. The "wolf" in Silver Ash Covert was not literally a wolf, but the legend surrounding the woods had been there for centuries so the name stuck.
As the baron's heir, Dean had become obsessed with the tale. When he was old enough to be apprenticed by the hunters, he learned things specifically to fight winged creatures.
His mother, who was a warrior before she settled down in the village and ordained by the Order of the Hunters, worried for her son's obsession, but they both noticed that the monster in the woods only took young children and only during the cycle of twenty years. His father, a Man of Letters through his father's side, armed him with all the knowledge he could give. Dean had vowed that he would end the centuries-old beast that was preying on Chesterford's youth, and his parents knew that he was stubborn enough to succeed.
Dean prepared what he could to hunt the wild beast. He learned traps and trained with the hunters, just as his brother studied with the Men of Letters. Nightly, Dean made his rounds through the woods, wearing a red hood and searched for the monster.
Dean had found the hood among the things locked up in grandpa Henry's chest. The old runes had "Hainariks" stitched on the cloak, and his father had told him once that it meant "ruler of the home." Old grandpa Henry was a ruler of more than a home; he hadn't been the one to found Chesterford, but he'd definitely been a great mage in his time.
The cloak was made of a deep red velvet to ward off the cold, with golden embroidery on its inner lining. Whoever made it heaped all the runes of protection that could be afforded a piece of cloth on it. He supposed grandpa Henry could have used it when he had been out adventuring during his time in the Men of Letters.
Dean used it because, with the hood up, it hid his chestnut brown hair when he was out hunting and the red was so deep, it was almost black, which afforded him some concealment under the night sky. Plus, all the runes of protection were great, too. It helped that it hid all sorts of weapons effectively: a bone knife at Dean's hip and a crossbow at his back.
And so, Dean hunted the beast in its forest with the hope that he would succeed where many had failed: killing the creature that has taken so many of their children.