Thread: Waking the Wolf

When Alex first saw the wolf's fur shining in the torchlight he wasn't sure what to think. At first he thought that she might be a statue. Polished obsidian and silver maybe. But that certainly wasn't like any celtic artifact that he'd ever heard of before. Not the obsidian anyway and certainly not this big. Which could have meant that, were she actually an artifact, she was stolen from some other civilization, and not one that they'd ever heard of the ancient Norse interacting with. Well, either way, he was going to be forgiven for busting that door open and he was getting an A on the paper he wrote at the end of this. He headed down the steps and moved up to the wolf. It was at that point that he realized she wasn't a statue. The wind that was coming in from the outside wasn't just making his torch flicker it was ruffling her fur. He nearly jumped back away from her and got the hell out of there, not wanting to piss off a wolf that was bigger than he was. Then he noticed that her hands were bound, and that her fur wasn't just being ruffled by the wind. She was breathing. He slowly moved over to her and poked her on one of her legs. He'd rather mess with the end that didn't involve a set of sharp teeth. When nothing happened he looked up to the ribbon that held her and once down the passage where, he could swear he heard whispering. He didn't want to fuck with that place if he could help it. He was looking at a thousand year old wolfhuman hybrid as far as he could tell. He kinda would have believed in ghosts, monsters, or bridgetrolls at this point. He pulled out his knife and tried to cut the ribbon. After about 5 minutes he gave up. New plan, go down the passageway and be ready to stab, burn, or scream at and run away from anything that he ran into. So, torch in one hand and knife in the other he descended down to the area where the gold box lay. He wadded into the stream and scooped it up, moving it back onto land before he started to look it over. This wasn't right. If the cave was closed this long the stream should have annihilated this gold chest. He sighed and decided it was more unlikely that she was still alive than the chest was still okay. Bumbling through runes was all well and good till you came to runes that couldn't be bumbled through. After a few minutes he gave up in disgust, blaming his failure on the poor light from the torch. When he looked at the contents of the box it didn't take him long to exchange the knife for his own and then take the rest of it as well. If he was going to go around horridly messing up ancient ruins he saw no reason not to do a little looting while he was at it. Maybe if he donated this stuff to a museum he wouldn't get in trouble for this. Nah, his professor would get to write a nice paper about it and get on TV, he'd probably still get in big trouble for messing with this stuff. Either way he found the plate with the picture to be a lot more helpful than the runes and went about making it a reality, pouring the wolf her drink and then gently opening her mouth, pouring it in and gently rubbing her throat to make sure she'd swallow it and not drown in it. He then sliced the tethers and waited, still holding the knife and torch incase this turned out to be a terrible idea.