Shenira leaned on her bow and smiled at the humans gathered around her in the frost-covered dirt square. They were a grubby lot, with clothes covered in patches, dirty faces and more gaps than teeth. They were superstitious too, and that was to her advantage.
"Can you really slay the great silver wolf, Lady Elf?" one of the old geezers asked, clutching at the sleeve of her fine leathers. They'd all been terrified of this wolf, even though it had only ever attacked livestock. Or the dogs they'd sent to hound it.
"I can, but they are dangerous beasts these siler wolves," she nodded at them wisely and pretended to know what the significance of the color of the wolf's hair had to do with anything. "Fear not, there is no beast of the wild that I cannot slay." She lifted her elegant yew bow for them all to see. They gasped, awestruck. This really was too easy. Very few of these villagers had ever seen an elf even once in their short, dull lives, let alone a lady as exotic and lovely as herself. She was tall for one of her kind, as tall as most human women, in fact, but as slender and graceful as a doe. Her skin was the color of polished bronze, her tilted eyes large and a shade of violet rarely seen even among her own people. She wore her long hair, as white as fresh powdery snow on a moonlit meadow, pulled back to accentuate her long, pointed ears. Most of the humans stared at her openly, as if she were some sort of monster herself.
"We would be so grateful if you would help us. The people of Crescent are afraid to go out at night. What if the wolf came upon us, or our livestock?" a wizened old woman demanded.
"How grateful, exactly?" Shenira smirked. She was confident she could stalk and kill whatever creature they desired. But she didn't do that sort of thing for free!
"We don't have gold," a man said, crestfallen. The crowd shuffled their feet and looked rather dejected. She resisted the urge to smack them all with her bow!
"Gold? I wouldn't ask such a reward from you good people," it curdled her tongue to call them that. This mysterious wolf hadn't even attacked one of their sheep, for the love of the Goddess! "Please, your hospitality before and after the deed, plus a few trinkets of silver or copper are all that I require. A little from each family, nothing much. That should do me nicely! I'd help you all for free, of course, but making my way through the world on my own is difficult, at best," she put on her best pouty face, trying to look sad. She even fondled the empty coin purse at her belt for dramatic effect. She had a couple of others tucked away in her pack, both bursting at the seams with silver.
"Thank the Lords Above and Below!" the old woman gasped, making strange signs with her twisted leather hands over her face and breast.
"The monster was spotted not two nights ago," a horse-faced man intoned. He pointed a claw of a hand toward a rugged rock outcropping a few hundred yards to the north, on the edge of the sprawling forest of pin and spruce. "Near as big as a horse it was, and when it howled at the moon-"
"It was full two nights ago. The moon I mean," the old woman interjected.
"I'm doing the telling Maisy!" the long-nosed man said indignantly. He drew up what dignity he could muster and continued. "As I said, the wolf was huge, and when he howled, the whole village did awaken. It was so loud, a fair number lost sheep or hogs when they broke their pens!"
"Terrible, truly terrible," Shenira muttered solemnly. "The moon should still be full tonight, or reasonably close to it anyway. I will begin my hunt tonight," she scanned the forest. The autumn was getting late, but perhaps she'd find a nice little cave in those hills to curl up for the night. She found it best to not stay too close to human men at night. Sometimes they got ideas. Who knows, if the wolf was half as big as they said, she might even find its tracks!
"Oh thank you, Lady Shenira!" the peasants sighed and grinned and came forward to touch her hand or arm in gratitude. It almost made her skin crawl!
"It is my sworn duty as a Ranger, think nothing of it," she nodded at them and narrowed her wide, purple eyes. "But if you could, perhaps, invite me to sup with you, so that I may have my full strength this night against that fell beast of the night?" They practically fell over themselves offering her a meal. The man with the long nose did so by explaining that since his wife passed, he had no one to share his table with, with his children all grown and married. She almost spit up on his tattered shoes. In the end, she followed the scrawny old woman to her hovel, already counting up the coins they'd give her.
***
Shenira stared at the enormous wolf tracks beneath her on the soft loamy forest floor. Those ignorant peasants weren't exaggerating much; the paw print before her was longer than her foot! She nocked an arrow and gazed out into the moonlit forest. There was a big wolf out there, and while it was rare for them to attack people, they could be extremely dangerous. Her sensitive ears caught the sound of a sniffing creature up ahead. She crept forward, as light and quiet on her feet as only a slender elf maiden born and raised in the forest could be. She could see in darkness better than most animals, but it didn't hurt to go slow and be cautious.
She peeked around a tree, and her breath caught in her throat. There it was, the biggest wolf she'd ever seen. A sliver shaft of moonlight filtered through the boughs overhead to illuminate the giant canine. It's fur was a mix of white, black and sliver, and seemed to glow faintly in the night. It raised it's great, long snout and sniffed the air before turning to face her. Its eyes glowed like shiny new gold coins. It lowered itself into a crouch even as the hackles stood up on its back. It had spotted her!
With fumbling hands Shenira readied her bow, pulling the black fletchings to her cheek. There was something off about that beast's eyes. It was as if it knew her, knew things about her. No normal animal possessed that level of intelligence. She gulp and loosed just as the beast sprang to the side, turned, and dashed away into the trees. Her arrow struck the bole of an ancient tree, quivering in the cool night air. If only she'd been just a tiny bit quicker!
