Blood.

The wolf who found it signalled the rest of the pack with a howl and they all rushed over, thinking that they had found the trail of prey. But as the alpha made his way over whilst doing an instinctive head count, he noticed that 2 wolves had gone missing.

He was confused at first but he quickly summarised that they had gone too far and were taking a while to get back, something he would definitely berate them for later. After all, it would be a hassle if they got killed and endangered the pack.

However, when he reached the sight of the blood, he immediately realised why the howl that had notified them was so filled with alarm. The blood belonged to 1 of the wolves in his pack!

His hackles raised immediately as fear coursed its way down his spine. Although he was just a Wolf, he was a very smart one as a result of the strange and painful things that the humans used to do to him before he escaped. So it wasn’t hard for him to speculate that whatever could kill one of his own without him even knowing, was something that he could not contend with. He quickly signalled the pack to be alert before they began to slowly pace their way to where they came from with their eyes scouting for any possible danger.

When they exited the vicinity of the crater, the Alpha gave one bark to his pack before legging it without any regard as to whether they were following him or not. But of course they did.

Roughly 5 minutes later, the pack had gassed out and they were unable to keep up their terrific speed. The alpha could have gone longer, but it was best to remain with the pack for now. Whatever danger was back in that crater should have been unable to keep up with them, but there might be other forms of danger if he abandoned his pack, and that was not something he could easily accept.

He ordered his pack to rest, and they quickly dropped to their bellies or sides with their chests huffing and puffing and their tongues lolling out. Obviously, they were quite tire-

‘???’

The alpha’s head snapped up to attention when he finally recognized something that made his heart skip a beat.

‘9… Only 9 left?! Were the others all killed?!’

That’s right. The group that had once consisted of over 20 wolves had been reduced to a paltry 9.

‘I must flee!’ the alpha inwardly screamed before dashing off again, abandoning the pack once and for all and only thinking about his own life. At the end of the day he was still an animal, and when it came to soul-stirring events like this, his intelligence was immediately flayed to the bone, and only his instincts would keep him going.

3 minutes later, he had gassed out completely like the wolves that he had abandoned, but even then, he still kept forcing himself to take step after step, fully intent on escaping the calamity that he was sure had befallen the rest of his pack. He didn’t even know where he was but it didn’t stop him in the slightest and he kept on going.

However, all of a sudden, he caught sight of something in his peripheral vision that caused his already disordered running to falter. He collapsed to the ground and rolled for a couple of metres, but the terror within his heart forced him to stand up once immediately.

He looked towards the direction of the strange thing that he was sure was hiding behind one of the trees, but he saw nothing. Yet instead of calming down, he was even more terrified than before and it was to the point that he started whimpering.

He swivelled his head every which way in an attempt to locate the terrible entity that was seemingly intent on prolonging his torment, but there was nothing to be found. Nothing to see, nothing to hear, and nothing to even smell.

‘But I saw it! It was black, and- and- AAAAAAAH!’ The alpha was inwardly panicking, but then roughly 10 metres in front of him, something warped into existence like a ghost, and he screamed.

It looked like a floating ball of darkness that had multiple wolf heads (of a slightly lighter shade) around its ‘body’, and it was around 2 metres tall and 1.5 metres wide. The eyes of the wolf heads were extremely horrifying, and they looked like black holes that wanted to devour everything.

On top of that, the alpha could finally smell the thing that had been haunting him all this time, and it was ghastly. It smelled like the dead, and yet unlike the dead. It didn’t possess the rotting stench that he was used to associating with dead creatures, but nevertheless, when he caught a whiff of the abnormal entity, the image of that one graveyard that he used to see when he lived with humans kept appearing in his mind, and it frightened him.

But nothing, and he meant NOTHING, was as blood-curdling as the strange… ‘energy’, that was wafting off of the creature like a mantle of evil. He couldn’t see it, but he was sure it was there, and its existence completely crippled his desire to flee.

He was weak. He was prey. He must not flee, and he must obey.

That was all that he could think about.

Even up till the moment that his entire body was devoured by one of those heads.

…

5 minutes later.

The alpha stepped out of what used to be his body and was now a dead corpse, and rose to his new height of 1.2 metres tall. His new form looked like his previous one, but it was not only completely black, but also slightly transparent.

And yet, despite his groundbreaking changes, his now non-existent heart was completely at peace. A peace that he had never felt before because of his previous daily struggles. There was no fear, no stress, no shock. He didn’t feel… anything.

He looked up and landed his sight on the figure of the creature that had done this to him. There was no hatred, no anger, no terror. Nothing.

=You must serve.=

A feminine voice spoke within his mind. It was somewhat like the way humans spoke, but… if something as incomprehensible as darkness itself was able to speak, he reckoned that it would sound just like that.

“Yes, sire.” He responded with his head bowed.

The only desire that he now possessed was the will to obey.

And nothing else.