Never in his life had he used a sword. It was completely foreign, even when he gripped it in his dominant hand. The weight was wrong, the methods for its effective operation were unfamiliar, and even the idea of a jeweled and carved steel weapon seemed superfluous. He could kill just as effectively with the passive bow while preserving his own safety, or feel the life ebb away from a target as he ended it with an aggressive knife, but a sword was some cowardly combination; too close to keep clean hands, too far to experience the opponent's death. At least, he assumed as much given the dimensions of his father's old weapon.

He was a child when they left, but that was in the past. Memories of the old place had not stirred, not even in the vague way that dream memories surface in one's subconscious, and so he determined that once everything had come to pass here he would return to the woods. There everything made sense, and no one was manipulative and the concept of love remained just that. He would leave his father's sword somewhere here, in the human world, and have no trace of the dishonored knight and deposed alpha left to make his mind whirl with morbid thoughts. He would live as he always had, in perfect silence and fellowship with the woods, and someday a creature would surpass his strength and become alpha through his death. Frigid, forgotten, his bones would rot in the snow and life would go on in the forest as always. The obscure notion that an outsider, one of the pretty, flowering, carefully cultivated outsiders could ever enter his woods and tear away his armor and coexist with him peacefully would fade like the memories of his childhood before the wild. As soon as he settled affairs here, he would return to nothing and remain there for eternity.

The castle loomed before him, almost a forest in its own right with all the turrets and spires and bricks carefully laid into walls. Moonlight glimmered between ramparts, and the banners and flags adorning the otherwise dire stone shivered in the chilly night. The gates were open and he detected no trace of guards, at least for now, though the torches lit within the building itself suggested there was more life to the structure than there appeared to be. Adjusting his grip on the sword and trying to convince himself it was perfectly natural in his hand, he crept through the great arch and found himself in a dim antechamber. It had exactly two candles mounted on opposing walls to give it light, and they flickered weakly with their wax already extremely deformed and dripping to the floor. Underneath both of them reposed his wolves, who turned their heads slowly to face him, as if enchanted. The injured one almost seemed disappointed. He forced his feet to march past them, knowing that facing whatever waited in the main throne room would set them free. The antechamber doors were not locked, but heavier than any door he had ever encountered, and he found it almost poetic that he would have to open the most difficult door in order to settle his civilized life. Briefly, while the door still shielded him from the sight of the room beyond, thoughts of Lucina crossed his mind and he pondered her role in the puzzle of his past and the grim certainty of his future. If all things went well, perhaps he would-

Would do what? What did he still need from her, and more importantly, what did he want?

All thoughts were hushed as soon as he laid eyes on the throne room. The kingdom's banners, which he knew only vaguely, were in heaps on the floor, cleaved from their supports in the rafters, and in their place flew flags of pure black, which shimmered with the ebony outline of a wolf. The two beasts from the antechamber darted into the room, slipping unconsciously around him, and he watched as they galloped to the ornate throne at the far end of the room, beneath once glorious windows now smashed so that jagged shards filtered the stars and natural air. He saw nothing of the seat itself, too busy trying to comprehend the figure in it. She was fancily clothed in mourning, but it suited her well and she carried it as a style rather than a mood, a dark veil over her face hiding any clues to how she actually appeared. On her throat was a jewel so large he mistook it for a shard of glass, and as if to lure his attention further she stroked each of his wolves with a glittering hand. There was aged skin there, that much he could see, but also power. When he lowered the point of the sword to rest on the ground she finally stood and lifted the veil.

"Welcome home, my son!" she declared in an eerily familiar voice, and it echoed across the halls like tortured ghosts. "All these years, your father thought he was sparing you from some sort of evil when you could have been king. I was prepared to make that sacrifice, you know."

"What sacrifice?" he asked, bypassing the reasonable question of her identity as he had already guessed it.

"The throne, of course! I would have let you have it, even if I was constantly whispering in your ear and telling you what to do. You were almost under my spell, too, until your father interrupted the ritual." She shook her head. "Ruined his own spell in the process, the fool. Made me change tactics. I did not want to resort to war for this, but alas, it was the only option."

"And the black?" With his free hand he gestured to the banners. "The wolves?"

"You've always felt a connection to them," she replied knowingly, casting an unsettling grin towards him. "The wolves that roamed your woods. I tried to kill you with the alpha so many times. I enchanted the beast myself, made him from the king that used to sit here, but he could not hold his own against you, my strong son."

"The king wasn't that wolf. That wolf attacked the-"

"The princess, I know. Also my doing." The witch rolled her shoulders and head lethargically. "He was a wolf, and she was a stranger. She too did a terrible job of killing you."

Narrowing his eyes and lifting the sword just a bit off the ground, he inquired confidently, "If you would have given me the throne, why kill me now?"

"Because now you are here, with your father's sword and the knowledge that I was the one who exiled you to the woods, and I was the one who cursed your beloved princess."

"She is not my beloved. I despise the princess."

"Good. Then you shall have no trouble killing her."

A third wolf, previously so still he had taken it for a misplaced statue, lunged towards him at full speed. He recognized the blue eyes, the slight limp from a wound he had treated, and he saw in her face that she recognized him too but this did not stop her. She lunged for him, and he threw his weight into raising the sword to block her attack. Its honed blade cut her chest and forced her back, and now apparently aware of the power Praim wielded, she remained at a distance, snarling ferociously nonetheless. He took a step towards her and raised the sword, but this was not the princess. This was the wolf, his companion and the accumulation of everything he appreciated in Lucina. He suddenly felt a stab of remorse for wounding her, the very thing he had come to save, and as an apology he pointed the sword towards the witch instead.

"I will not," he declared soundly. "There is only one thing in this room deserving of death."

A ray of dawn suddenly split open the dark sky emanating from the shattered window, and with it the she-wolf seized and morphed into a woman. She remained on her hands and knees, bowed under the increased weight of her curse and the pain of her wound, but for the time being she was still the creature Priam cared to protect. He stepped between her and the witch.

"You are your father's son," the witch mused. "Fine. I am prepared to offer you a deal. I can see you are still conflicted, and so you may see the genius in this deal. Join me, and I will lift the curse on the princess."

Removing such a burden would certainly ease Lucina's life, but it would also take away his tether to the woman beneath the titles and pomp. But he was starting to think of himself as his father's legacy: as a hero, and heroes would put the needs of others first. Lucina deserved to be free, no matter the cost. "Fine. I-"

"Don't," Lucina commanded suddenly, but he heeded because it was still the voice of his companion and not yet the princess. She stood, unashamed like the woman he loved, and faced him with the set jaw of a worker, a woodsman. "Priam, I can manage the curse. This monster needs to be destroyed, no matter the personal cost."

"Don't listen to her," the witch replied, as expected from an adversary. "This is the woman who was desperate enough to ask a witch for power in the first place. You know that the only reason you love her is her curse."

He tilted his chin up the way townspeople always did to him to seem bigger. "So I should kill you and let her be queen."

"You kill me and my magic is undone. The king will die somewhere in the woods, and it will look as if you did it. The princess will ascend but have no trace of the curse that made her the slightest bit likeable to you. She may even forget any affections she had, as well." The witch smiled grimly and crossed her arms. "Your options are this: kill me and face death, not to mention the doom of the kingdom, or kill her and stand a chance of saving the kingdom by my side."

At first thought the choice was still obvious. Kill the witch, and let the rightful heir take the throne. That would restore the order of everything, except she was right to say the kingdom would blame him for the death of its ruler when his corpse appeared, beaten, in his woods. And who was to say that Princess Lucina was worthy of the crown when his instincts disliked her so much? If the princess died now, it would save him the pain of ever serving the woman he hated. He could still protect the innocents of the realm if he was by the side of the witch, to soften her spells and redirect them when possible. And, like it or not, she was still his mother. He had never had a mother before, not that he could remember, but he knew enough about them to know how difficult it would be to raise a hand against his own. Alternatively, someday he could simply trust that the princess would turn into a fine ruler despite his misgivings. She would know from this whole ordeal that the witch was to blame for everything, and he would be free to live out his days in the woods no matter what. The people wanted this anyway, he remembered clearly from the paper they had accidentally given him, and Lucina herself told him the realm was more important than serving any one person. Suddenly his mind and heart had no more say in the matter; it was the kingdom and nothing else.

He lifted the sword. Both women stared expectantly at him, awaiting his choice. He looked his target in the eyes, unable to kill her without watching the life fade. He was a hunter, always had been, and he would not be passive about this kill. Before changing his grip and raising the sword over his head, he murmured, "I'm sorry."

Just before the sword made contact with her chest, she cried desperately, "I love you!" but then the blade opened a chasm of blood and bone and she was gone. He rescinded his thoughts about killing with a sword, for it proved incredibly personal as he watched her eyes glaze over. The body slumped to the ground, and he let the sword drop with it.

Lucina, the fortunate survivor, touched his shoulder. "You made the right choice."

Already he regretted the decision, though he knew deep down this was best for the realm. Consumed suddenly by the need to mourn, he sank to his knees and sat silently, observing both the body and the glimmering sun rising through the shattered window. Just before its light became blinding, he locked eyes with the two wolves from his woods and made his peace with the simple fact that he would never return to the woods.

"And you remember everything?" he inquired hollowly.

"Of course. And I remember one thing that I think you yourself forgot."

He glanced up at her, silhouetted in the morning light, one arm covering her chest while the other reached for him. "I love you."

"I..." His gaze flickered unsteadily between the corpse of his mother and the living, breathing flesh of his companion. In her eyes all trace of the princess was gone, replaced by kindness and empathy that only a hunter dependent on the woods knows. Without finery she was everything; her true curse had been broken at last. "I love you too."

He never did return to the woods, but the rest of his days were spent in that confusing but blissful gray, the silver lining between life and death that Lucina named love.