aesthetics –––

old flannels and worn leather boots, running barefoot through the woods, the sound of laughter in the leaves, a hunger you just can’t satiate, swallowing abandonment like blood, seeing the moon turn red, old wounds that you can’t quite place, your own visage on a wanted poster, callouses on your feet and hands, restless and relentless, blood beneath your fingernails

biography –––

One must always wonder if monsters are born, or if they simply become. If they emerge from the cavernous void of creation with teeth bared and claws sharpened for the ripping, or perhaps if they come about like every other sad child with no mothering touch to teach them what it is to be human. No one really knows where monsters come from, and perhaps that is what makes them so terrifying. Or perhaps it is the inevitability that, no matter what we are inclined to believe about the nature of creation, all monsters were children once. 

No one knows where he came from, for he will never tell them. There exists a certain mythos about the wolf, the Greyback wolf, whose reputation precedes him, that he simply appeared in the gutters of London one night, dressed in rags and wielding a thigh bone as a club, blood upon his cheeks as if he had bitten into something far too large to chew. He was a feral child who lived between shadows, inhabiting the old, dilapidated flat that had once belonged to a mother and father who had never truly loved each other, had never truly loved him. They had left him, after all; he’d never even known their names. Beggars, they had been, lowlifes who exposed their child to the worst sort of people - but, perhaps they themselves were the true monsters, packing away their things and leaving him to rot when he came home with empty pockets and a profusely bleeding bite-wound upon his shoulders. They had looked upon it with horror, for it spanned the length of his arm, half his chest, as if he’d been plucked up by the ankles and dipped gently into the jaws of the beast. He knew not what it meant - but his parents certainly did. Perhaps he would have hated them less if they had told him what he would become before leaving him with nothing but the clothes on his back and the mold-touched bread on the table. Perhaps he would have been less frightened had he known, on the following full moon, why it was he lay upon the floor, captured at the base of the window by a single shaft of moonlight, tearing limb from limb and growing upward, outward. 

Perhaps he would not hate them so, had they told him that he would feel more himself as the beast, and that they had left him for becoming who he had always meant to be. Perhaps so. Perhaps. Perhaps if he had torn into them with freshly grown fangs, and not the carriage driver in the park he’d have felt their debts paid. 

He was a beastly wraith, inhabiting the streets of London, the gutters and sewers, stealing what he could and taking what he must. There were whispers that the old landlord had died, that the dingy one-room flat in which he’d been born was to be abandoned fully, along with the rest of the building. And so he was truly alone, a lonely and feral monster with nothing to lose and everything to gain. Even as a young boy scrounging for scraps and fumbling halfheartedly through the discovery of magic he knew that mortal flesh was not meant for him. He yearned for the change, for the animal that shared space with the scraps of a human soul deep within his chest. His was a lawless upbringing, a ruleless world which belonged to him and only him. He never questioned why he was made this way, nor who it was that made him; as far as Fenrir was concerned, it was the closest thing to a gift from a divine presence that someone so close to Hell as he would ever receive. A divine gift, but not one without its temptations, its pains, its suffering. But is that not the defining quality of all things divine? 

But he possessed magic just as greatly as he possessed monstrosity; the magic was much more clumsy in his hands, secondary to the newfound animalism which drove him to hunt, to stray from the city and travel north, to become more nomad than wraith. Far from the city, Fenrir found himself in foreign territories that did not take as kindly, or as nonchalantly, to abandoned adolescents who took their meat raw and slept with one eye open. Those in smaller towns chased him into the wood with angry words and angrier spells, for they who held magic in the palms of their hands wanted not to allow a monster into the fold. It was much harder to steal from these smaller villages, to pillage from the humble houses, and so he learned to hunt - both as man and beast - to fish, to chop wood, to build. He was a man before adolescence, an ancient soul before all else. 

At the age of thirteen, he found himself settled quite comfortably just outside Druskininkai; the Lithuanian people, he’d found, seemed more likely to leave him be than most, when encountered in the wood. Perhaps the folk in the city had heard the howls at night, the cries of pain and splendor with each full moon. Perhaps they knew that to leave their chickens in the cool night air and to lock their doors was a safer homage than to try and engage the monster directly. Or perhaps they knew that to offer him still-living stock to drag back to the shed he’d taken to inhabiting in the woods would be better than to allow him to continue to lecherously observe the girls who played in the wheat fields, watching them as if they were his next meal. 

He was not ashamed that he had once tried to make a girl - blonde, with pigtails and freckles like full-moon stars - like him, once. But he was too young, and she too frightened. They’d found her arm first, for he’d done his best to bite her in the same pattern that scarred his shoulder; but she’d jerked from him, screaming, howling, and it had all come apart far too easily. He’d not bothered to wash his ragged trousers in the river until the next morning. 

It was here, in this village where his reputation was not quite so terrible yet, that a traveling scholar with ties to the Durmstrang Institute dared approach him, dared speak to the feral boy who knew so little of humans, but so much of humanity. At first, Fenrir wished nothing to do with the man, or with the school of which he spoke. After all, Fenrir had known nothing but a self-sufficient life of nomadic survival, living off the land and off the people intelligent enough not to fight back. At first, he thought it frivolous, silly. But then the scholar had produced a wand from within his traveling cloak and had set him ablaze with curiosity. 

But the scholar, this man with ties to the school, also made him bitter. You’ll never be like them, he’d said, But you can pretend to be. 

He did not want to pretend, to hide, to lessen his monster for the sake of those who did not understand. The way the man spoke, Fenrir thought that perhaps they, wizards, thought him less for his condition. The man had called it an ‘affliction’; Fenrir knew enough of men, however, to disagree. He had never known anything but this life upon the outskirts, but he knew enough of the world to see the opportunity presented to him. The young boy, all rib-bones and dirty feet, knew survival to be paramount. Survival, freedom; acceptance meant nothing, but power was another story. 

He lasted but a few years at Durmstrang, but what little education he received was invaluable. They’d cleaned him up, with pity on their faces and determination in their heavy hand, and had taught him - too little too late - all they could about ‘playing nice’ with the others, about becoming a part of a community which required social skills he had thus been lacking. Of course, what need had Fenrir had for the precarious intricacies of social politics? The children in his year had all come from lily-pure stock, and made no secret of looking down their noses at the raggedy boy who disappeared once a month, who was taught to eat with utensils, who ran in his sleep. They looked down upon him, but he cared little for their opinions - only for the practice they gave him. He learned to duel with words just as quickly as with wands, sliding comfortably into a human facade which would be passable at best to most who scrutinized him. He realized that he was quite good at slipping into the facade, at playing into their brutish perception of him, for his greatest power, it seemed, was being underestimated. 

After a time, Fenrir felt as if he had exhausted the use of formal education, and left Durmstrang - though some might argue that he was encouraged to leave. At the age of fifteen, he struck out on his own once more, though this time with the skills, mindset, and determination to change the way in which he cut his monster’s path through the world. Where once he had been aimless, his time amongst the Pureblooded wizards - and their talk of purity, and the desire to reign supreme, and a movement in the name of all of it forming to the south - he now quite liked the idea of a superior regime. But, of course, he did not subscribe to the ideal that Pure magic was might, that it was superior, that his own blood was less than those without magic at all; no - he knew better. He almost felt sorry for them, the misinformed bigots who thought of him as an animal to be tamed, to be collared into too-tight robes and taught party tricks. 

No - his kind was superior. And they deserved to be free. He deserved to be free. 

And so he returned south with the intention of settling near his once-home, to grow his family (family, he called it; this was almost humanity), to mark themselves as a presence worthy of overtaking the lesser witches and wizards who underestimated the vitriol of the truest predator. Fenrir saw the undeniable benefit in doing so on the precipice of a war; it was a war fought by men in studies, haughty chess-makers who thought one spilled blood better than the other. He observed the brewing storm as he roamed about the countryside throughout England, Scotland, Wales; were he to have a stake in the rearranging of the world order, were he to put his hand into the fire that stretched even as far as Durmstrang, he would need not be alone. And besides, what better gift to bestow upon humanity than that of his secret weapon? 

With enough of them, with enough numbers behind him, he could eat the men in their studies, and leave the bones with which his children could pick their teeth. It was a lovely thought; it was purpose. 

It was not long before Fenrir had cut enough of a path through the community to be considered both a threat and something to be feared; he took children from their homes and brought them into his fold, where they could not be abandoned, where they could not be left to turn feral in the wilds. He thought it a service to them, knew it to be a gift that they could only repay by acting in his service. But he was determined to treat them in a way much different than his own upbringing; they would be an army as much as a community. A presence to be feared - but soon to be respected. He could not deny the thrill, the utterly bloody satisfaction he felt at growing his number, for violence had always been his bread and butter. And soon others saw it his way - and those who did not were quickly eliminated, for monsters of his breed, no matter their beliefs, belonged to him, with him.

Theirs is a lawless existence, this life of the Greyback pack. His body count has a body count of its own; the pack shares his taste for an almost pirate-like lack of regard for the laws of humanity - or of society, for that matter. Fenrir has made it quite clear that he is neither their father nor their master, but that they owe him the debt of their lives. They know all too well that it would have been all too easy to simply destroy them; many are beholden to failed turnings just as often as they are privy to successful ones. They live upon the fringes; rarely do any but Fenrir mingle with the common folk of the wizarding community. They seem to know not, or care not, Fenrir included, that they are uneducated, that they are anomalies, that they are a third horse in a race run by political players, for Fenrir has instilled it in them that they exist here, in this war, in these circles, to accompany the victors to the other side, where freedom awaits. He tells them only enough of his life, of his struggles, of what he has seen to instill in them a confidence that he can, in fact, see the freedom which lies just beyond the horizon of the war. In the service of he who calls himself the Dark Lord - at which Fenrir scoffs, and the pack laughs - they are allowed to indulge in their intrinsic tastes for blood, for violence, for chaos; they are allowed to be themselves where Fenrir was not, at their age. He ushers them into a new age where they will not have to hide, where they will not be forced to live in the hollows and cracks of a society that does not want them - for this is what the world has owed him from the very beginning. 

This is not the becoming of a single monster - this is the heralding of their true and deserved age. A dynasty of monstrous creation, a lifetime of retribution. Monsters will be monsters, after all.