Montag der 23. März, 1220
My hunt was more fruitful tonight. I asked Abarath to accompany me, as I no longer trust the streets of Cologne not to unleash strange animal beasts on me. As it happened, his presence was not truly necessary. I found a pair of seedy-looking men in an alley, and made a meal of one of them without further incident. We then rejoined Katherine and left Cologne behind, making our way to Krakow.
Nearer then land of my birth, we became aware that we were being followed. All of us, whether vampire, wolf, or hapless pathetic kine, could sense it. It was that sudden movement in the corner of your vision that is gone when you look. Shortly after we became aware of them, they began to howl to one another, and the wolf pack closed in.
There were five of them surrounding us, melting out of the forest like feral shadows, and snarling at us as though we were demons on Earth. Perhaps animals truly are more perceptive…
The wolves wasted no time pressing the attack, and killed one of Katherine's kine with their first assault. Were they merely wolves, such an act would have sealed their fate, as Katherine seems to frenzy sooner and sooner, and with less provocation each time, and her increasingly animalistic appearance is making her a far more intimidating presence.
As it was, only two of these wolves were true wolves. The remaining three revealed their true forms when Abarath buried his axe in one of their canine brethren, and rose up into their raging battle-forms. The one nearest me charged at me, and I did the only thing that made sense to do.
I ran.
With the devilish hunter bounding after me, I tore into the forest's undergrowth, slipping through the smallest spaces and tightest nooks I could find, my size my only useful asset.
Searching desperately for a place to hide, and ignoring the strange sense of déjà vu I felt, I found a large hollow log, and dove into it, praying the creature wouldn't find me.
I considered drawing on my thaumaturgical flame, to be ready should the beast find me, but I knew my only hope was to not be found. My realm has ever been books, not battle.
In the end, it didn't matter what I wanted to do; it was mere moments before I could hear the creature sniffing the log in which I hid. My dark little hole then exploded in a shower of splintered shards as the mutt rent it asunder with its terrible claws and grabbed me by the shirt, lifting me high into the air, where I could see into its eyes. I was certain now that I was going to meet Nora in Final Death, and felt a strange calm come over me. The beast, however, seemed to lose some of its blind rage. It sniffed at me again as its eyes softened slowly into confusion. "Udo?" it asked, its voice a rough growl.
The beast set me down as it shrunk into a human form, and I recognized it. "Alex?" I replied. Oh, the wondrous cosmic joke my existence seems to be. Alex, my true friend from the days in which I lived. Alex, who was a Sarafam knight, who found me the night of the raid, and bought me the precious few moments I needed to fade away into the night. Alex, who though he doesn't know it, and most likely never will, helped me to finally bury the night terror Neuntöter, who had terrorized our village for more than five years.
Here we were, face to face after so many years, and yet held away from a true reunion of friends by an almost tangible barrier of war, writ in centuries of blood. We stood there deep in the woods and spoke, the fight gone from either of us. Truth be told, we should have fought. We were obligated to willingly expend our own lives to assure that the other didn't walk away. We didn't. With what we once held as the truest of friendships reduced to now an uneasy truce, we parted ways. I had him stab me with his spear, so that he could show my blood as "proof" he had killed me, and he then used a mutt ability I'd always dismissed as a legend and nothing more: He simply vanished into thin air.
Just before he left me, though, he put his hand on my shoulder, and looked at me with a sadness in his eyes that I am no longer accustomed to seeing in anyone. "You were supposed to be one of us," he told me. Then he was gone, and I was alone to reconsider what I'd truly lost to the Lady d'Lars.
I pondered his words all the way back to the original scene of the fight. I was careful to avoid being seen as I approached, but the massacre that greeted my eyes told me that my coterie had won. Perhaps not truly my "side" anymore, but my coterie still, for good or ill. We were not without casualties of our own, of course. Katherine had lost her blood-lackey, narrowing her herd down to but a single kine, and she was forced to transform her remaining wolf into a ghoul to prevent it from dying outright. I noted that Alex was nowhere to be seen, as a corpse or otherwise, and wondered if he had returned to the battlefield at all. When we moved on, I lingered behind just a moment, and whispered a quiet prayer for the souls of my fallen brothers.
Udo der Tote