Werwolf

They brandished steel to shine in the dim light of the forest, sun poking through the shrouds of branches and foliage reflecting where blades and barrels poked through, icy against the heat of the day. The men who wielded them were warmer than any of the rest, holding their ice aloft, a distance far enough to be removed instruments and never clutched close to the self, lest that temperature should fall back upon them and bring them down to the same fate they were meeting out, a coldness, of tiny little barbs of winter predating the whole domain of death in snow to fall upon the land when its life has been extinguished beyond their doing.

The men of autumn, the season of metal. When cold comes, after the peak of the parabolic arc of the year, leaves falling as trees wither, as ferns sink into the ground, those first little hints of cold, the cawcaw of a crow, the birds chirping as in flight, orange over green, darkening days, skies turning to clouds, streams becoming too cold to bathe in, winter ominous over the whole of the land. Summer had risen for them, same as it did for the rest of the world, flowers poking through corpses rotted to fertile soil, jungles springing up to shelter them. They drank, they danced, as the rest of the them, only returning to their gleaming teeth as the cold began to set in, as they saw it, in a way no one else could, when the year had peaked and it began the other end of its arc, that day of the 22nd when the days became longer, the first morning to come later, the first sunset to come earlier, a sigh of relief as they slinked away from the orgies of the sun to return to moonlit caves and castles where they were born and belong, to emerge with the early cold winds of August as the agents of that cultivated interior darkness.

A songbird was found dead on a fencepost, sacrificed at the altar of a smooth riverstone bloodied and spattered along the slowly quickening winds of the sheer mountainside, briefly granted a fast-passing grace of being bereft of its usual climate, grey skies with whipping winds over the deep mossgrass and stony rubbleslopes. No more songs were heard after the knife pierced it in the cold silence of the expanding morning, that deep blue of the moon and the cold staying longer and longer each day. The villagers began to hear crows and soon, formations of birds flying off to not return.

Some remained in denial, still clinging to the season’s assurances of staying. Not in direct lying or denial, but in fetishization, in hopes of sublimating the oncoming violence. They took its symbols and adopted them as if they were summer, joking and pretending the cold never touched them, pretending it was only a change in fashion sense, pretending the leaves were only cosmetic. Their population dwindled, though the cost they inflicted upon their comrades is immeasurable, wide holes of ignorance making the village a spongious membrane easily sliced through as more went missing, as autumn came mercilessly by black hands clawed in red from tangled brambles of ferns hardened into thorns, witch’s hats on the other side of the river, their cold feet crossing without any pricks of cold on their ghostpale skin.

When winter finally came, the men dispersed. When the season of death cloaked the land, countless froze, uncaring for the allyship of Autumn with the sweeping pains of frost. There was no reward, except one of allegiance. They brought forth the end, the one inevitable, and did so in a hardened acceptance of the inevitable. They brought force the end, without hope of recompense or sparing from its evil. They became death, accepting they were already gone from the world on that solstice night, when the first shroud snuck a little bit longer over the fleeting light of the morning.