The bird she kept in a cage suddenly grew silent. Out of the window of her cabin, above the dark shadows of the treetops, she could see patches of a pitch-black sky. The buzz of the torchbugs had died out, and it seemed as if the wind itself had ceased. A deep silence in the dead of night.
“This is good, this is why I came here.”
She hid her graying hair under her hood and felt her chest: under the loose robes, she could feel the weight of the cold metal against her breast. It had taken three nights of baiting, but she knew it would all fall into place tonight.
“Tonight, I am tricking Hircine.”
She smirked.
The first growl was barely audible. Had she not been holding her breath, she would have missed it. It was there, behind the sturdy beams that held her cabin together. A low growl, and the surrounding bushes hissing in a ghastly harmony as they brushed the hide of the prowling beast. It was probably smelling her. Did it sense her, or her power? Was it the reason why it did not try and burst through the door?
“Come in, beast!” she bellowed in a voice surprisingly powerful for such a slender frame. This seemed to provoke the werewolf who roared back at her from the other side of the wall. A strange sound, really, that seemed to start low before growing more shrill as the air blows through the monstrous throat of the beast.
The caged bird had died of fright and the werewolf was now smashing through the door, the thinnest piece of wood it could find between it and its prey. She laughed maniacally as the claws of the beast started to pierce through the wood, which angered it even more. Each new blow to the door sent shards flying to her face and robes, and yet she laughed louder as she stepped back further inside the cottage.
The solid Nord ironwork of the hinges finally gave up and the mangled door just laid open, anticlimactically.
There was a bizarre pause as the wolf looked at her instead of leaping at her and clawing his way through her tired old body. She looked straight back at it, unafraid. As the werewolf took a first step inside the cabin to finally rush to its prey, it stepped on the rune she had set. A gray explosion ensued and the wolf froze in place.
She had read once about a sea so salty that the wind around it turned everything into statues of salt. This came back to her in the few seconds she stood in front of the petrified predator. She had no time to waste and therefore stuck her hand in her collar. She reached out for the amulet she couldn't afford the wolf to rip out, and began to recite. The incantation seemed to oscillate between different tongues, none of them native of Skyrim.
The amulet itself was a small square-shaped locket of gleaming Dwemer metal. She had not taken it from her neck and she started to feel it buzz with power. The spell was working, but the wolf was also beginning to move again. It seemed to be fighting a tremendous force to merely snarl in defiance, but it wasn't ready to give up the fight just yet.
It eventually attempted a last blow to the sorceress but the hold of the rune was still too strong. As he did so, she uttered the last word of her eldritch monody. Perfectly synchronized, the spell from the rune wore off and the spell of the incantation sent ripples of magical energy at the beast. The werewolf's last gesture, carried so slowly it looked as though the air itself had thickened, brought its entire body to the ground, like a dwarven machine losing its steam.
She looked at it with more disgust than pity. A faint smell of burnt flesh rose out of the morphing corpse. Smoke was still escaping the mouth and ears of the creature when the body came back to its human shape.
It had been a well-built man, blond with strands of red hair, his chest adorned with warpaint that read as an impressive record of his battle feats. And she had defeated him, or perhaps freed him. She would never know and she didn't care.
Now she had what she wanted: its soul trapped in the amulet. She went to the cage and took the dead bird out of it. With a precise gesture, she twisted off its legs and proceeded to throw the corpse in a pot that was simmering over the fire.
By the time the stew was done, she would have disposed of the body and delved back into her old tomes, to her quest to unlock the magic powers of Potema, the Wolf Queen of Solitude, the matriarch who wore an amulet filled with the soul of a werewolf.
