Years and decades passed, with the wind carrying different stories. Soren knew this, for he listened. Not with ears alone, but with the very essence of his spirit, attuned to the whispers of the ancient earth. He was a wanderer, a shaman among the scattered proto-tribes of wolves, seeking truth in the rustle of leaves and the roar of distant thunder. His pack, small and cautious, followed his intuitive guidance, but even their collective wisdom felt fragile against the raw, untamed wild that was their home.
It was during a migration, following the faint scent of deer across lands scarred by ancient ice, that the whisper changed. It grew deeper, colder, vibrating not just through the air, but through the very stones beneath his paws. It was the scent of something impossibly old, impossibly powerful. His pack, normally restless and chattering, fell silent, their tails drooping, their eyes wide with an unspoken fear that mirrored his own.
They found him by the great waterfall, where the glacial melt plunged into a churning cauldron of mist and primal sound. He was a silhouette against the perpetually grey sky, so still he might have been carved from the very rock face. His fur, a shade beyond mere black, seemed to drink the light, making him a void in the landscape. What truly arrested Soren, however, were the eyes. Even from a distance, across the roaring chasm, he felt their intensity. They were not the amber or gold of any wolf he had ever known. They were rings of deep, swirling crimson, like twin suns bleeding into twilight, and within their depths, he perceived intricate, shifting patterns, an impossible geometry that spoke of something far beyond the natural order.
Soren, the seer, the listener, had never felt such overwhelming awe. It was not the awe of a predator facing a larger predator; it was the awe of a mortal before a deity. His spiritual senses screamed of an ancient lineage, a power that predated even the oldest legends whispered around their dying fires. This creature was not just a wolf; he was the idea of a wolf, distilled into its most fearsome and magnificent form.
His pack whimpered, pulling back into the sparse shelter of the ancient pines. But Soren could not move. His gaze was fixed, captivated by the silent titan. He saw no aggression, no territorial display, only an immense, almost suffocating stillness. The air around the creature seemed to shimmer, not with heat, but with a palpable pressure that made Soren's fur stand on end. He felt a deep, resonant sadness emanating from him, a grief so profound it seemed to pull at the very roots of the world. It was the sorrow of total loss, of being the last note in a symphony that had played for eons.
Days turned into nights, and Soren lingered. His pack grew restless, urging him to move on, but he could not. He observed the black wolf from afar, watching it hunt. There was no struggle, no wasted movement. A single, silent charge, and the prey—a massive elk, strong and swift—was brought down with an almost surgical precision. What was most chilling was the efficiency of the kill, the lack of flourish, the almost mechanical process of survival. And then, the wolf would return to his vigil by the waterfall, resuming his silent, watchful presence.
One evening, as the moon, fat and silver, painted the landscape in stark monochrome, Soren saw him shift. It was a fluid, terrifying transformation, not a simple shedding of skin but a reweaving of form. The fur receded, the snout shortened, the immense paws elongated into what became limbs of breathtaking power. He stood now, tall and imposing, his naked human form radiating the same raw power as his wolf shape. His midnight hair cascaded down his shoulders, and those eyes, those terrible, beautiful crimson eyes with their intricate patterns, remained fixed on the churning waters, as if searching for something lost within their depths.
Soren's heart hammered against his ribs. This was beyond anything his ancestral stories had ever dared to describe. A being who could walk between the forms, a primal force of nature embodied. He was Varkolak, the dreaded name from the oldest whispers, the wolf who devoured not just flesh, but light, hope, and the very concept of defeat. Soren knew then, with a spiritual certainty that transcended mere thought, that he was witnessing the genesis of a new legend. He pulled a sharp stone from his pouch and began to etch, not on rock, but on the smooth bark of a fallen tree, the first crude symbols of what he had seen: the two crimson eyes, the swirling patterns within, and the silhouette of a being born of myth and sorrow. He would chronicle this legend, for the world needed to know. It needed to fear.