Before you read: Again, for people who aren't familar with the game, a balverine is a werewolf. There's information on my profile about them, as far as what they look like : )

Chapter 7

The following week was hard for Doumeki. At the warlock's insistence (and threatening, when it looked like that alone wouldn't be enough), the Archer remained for the time at the Rose Cottage. Watanuki helped him dress the bite and wounds down his back, strangely happy when he announced that they would all scar. He slathered the lacerations with a green paste that smelled strongly of mint. Doumeki slept, sprawled out before the fireplace, which the spellworker too late informed him was Mugetsu's usual bed. So it was expected the next morning when he woke with a displaced and thoroughly miffed fox glaring at him.

Watanuki was up and about early, when the sky was still grey and the air still damp with dawn. Doumeki spotted him blearily from the window, at the booth, laboriously grinding an assortment of seeds to powder. The Archer, for the most part spent the day watching the warlock dart about, preparing and working on a thousand different things that all confounded him, and staring at his fingernails suspiciously. Watanuki laughed at him and told him he couldn't eyeball the sickness into submission.

The second day passed much the same. Mugetsu appeared to have come to a decision and chosen his bed over his distrust of the lanky stranger, as the next morning Doumeki came awake to find the nine-tailed fox's head and forepaws propped on his stomach, and it fast asleep. At lunch break Watanuki gave him a tonic with the command to "Drink it all." The medicine had a slimy, congealed texture, a noxious smell, and a color like bloody meat. Doumeki downed it slowly and with difficulty, but the warlock smiled when he handed back the empty bottle.

On the third day his gums started bleeding, and before the end of the night his jaw ached fiercely. The unexpected symptoms puzzled Watanuki, and he consulted a dusty, moldy book. After flipping pages and reading for less than a minute, the spellworker launched into a furious fit of what Doumeki could only guess was quite foul language in his exotic tongue. He refused to relate the cause of the tantrum.

Doumeki worried.

Changes that the warlock had not anticipated continued to set in. Before they started to blacken, Doumeki's fingernails lengthened and grew harder. His ears developed increasingly pronounced points, and he began to lose his appetite for most anything but protein. Mugetsu refused to come near him, and retreated to his master's bed.

He couldn't keep Watanuki's disgusting mixture down. This, more than anything else upset the warlock. The caster spoke less, did not laugh, and rarely smiled. Rather, lines drew themselves across his forehead and scowl took to his features that Doumeki thought better suited his own. He plunged into his preparations, neglecting his garden and forgetting to break for meals. The Hero watched as he raked a space clear of leaves and debris behind the booth, and staked out a circle with fire-blackened sticks. The warlock dug two small, shallow holes, one inside the stick-circle and one out, and drew a white line of salt around the sticks. There was a gap between the two ends in front of the outside hole.

He finished as the moon took the sky at the end of the fifth day. That night, as Watanuki washed the sweat from his skin with a damp rag, Doumeki professed his confusion. Why the sudden urgency?

"We've two days still," He said.

Watanuki's stare shone with a strange intensity in the meager light. Sighing silently, he replied at length. "…the infection was more than I had originally thought."

Doumeki's spine tightened.

"You will transform tonight."

--

Watanuki spoke true.

The convulsions began few hours later. By that time, Doumeki had been situated in the center of Watanuki's stick-circle. The warlock had fastened inch think bands of copper, halved by heavy silver, at the Archer's wrists, ankles, and neck, and had himself donned a belt burdened by several pouches, heavy with unknown things.

It started with every muscle in his body going impossibly tight for several long seconds. His arms folded to his chest and his chin tucked itself behind his knees, his bloody teeth bearing in a snarl. Then, with a disorienting speed, everything loosened. Racked by seizures, his eyes rolled back into his head and foam gathered on his tongue.

Watanuki watched with an uncharacteristically blank face, the only expressive thing about him being his trembling legs. When dark fur began to sprout and he stepped forward, the knife in his hand was steady.

...I couldn't resist ending it there.

-Oceans