Werewolf the Podcast: A Werewolf Christmas Carol. (Episode 340)

So we did that thing where we rip off the classics. Enjoy.

The Professor's Pressing Matter: Episode 191: Werewolf The Podcast - A Serial Killer Drama (Short Stories for Halloween by Gregory Alexander Sharp Book 3)

Find at the link below.

https://amzn.to/47expjw

Please check out Odin Apparel for amazing Viking-themed kits and our T-shirts. Preorder it now at this link.

https://odinapparel24.myshopify.com/collections/werewolf-a-serial-killer-podcast

The Old Man's Podcast:

The writing duo speak to the Old Man himself. Go check us out on his award-winning Podcast.

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-old-mans-podcast/id1595940192?i=1000708626677

Grendel Press, our horror genre partner

https://grendelpress.com/

Grendel's very own cool Podcast.

https://grendelpress.com/sinister-soup. 

Buy us a coffee at this link right here:

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/Werewolfwil

Buy a book about werewolves. Here it is, straight from a fang-filled mouth.

Il Lupo

Greg's first Werewolf book. Brilliantly written characters in an incredible story. 

https://books2read.com/ILLUPO

A Werewolf's Story

https://amzn.to/3BjXoZu

Werewolf the Colouring Book.

What should I do this evening? Why not sit and do some Wonderful Werewolf colouring?  Red may be a theme.

https://amzn.to/40k93l6

Facebook Group

https://www.facebook.com/groups/werewolfthepodcast/

Greg's X profile:@SempaiGreg

Werewolf the Podcast:@AWerewolfsStoryWil

Intro partnership with Grendel Press.

https://grendelpress.com/

Outro partnership with Grendel Press.

https://grendelpress.com/

Transcript

Wil

I fucking hate Christmas.

Not in the theatrical, grumbling way that humans hate it—complaining about queues, or the music beginning in October, or the wrong sort of cranberry sauce—but in the older way. 

The way predators hated bonfires. 

The way gods hated prayers sung too loudly.

Christmas makes people careless.

And tonight, it made students drunk.

They spilt out of the university gates in a laughing, shouting knot of scarves and breath-clouds, antlers bobbing on heads that had never known hunger or terror or the sound of bone snapping properly beneath the teeth. 

I hated them. 

Not for any reason. 

I just hated them.

They sang badly, which I hated. 

They bumped into one another and laughed in response, which I hated.

Someone dropped a bottle and cheered when it shattered, which I hated.

I followed them from the shadows for fun, because I hated them. 

The hunter follows the prey. 

It wasn’t a challenge. 

I could kill them all quickly and quietly. 

Boringly. 

I hated that.

Fenrir followed too. 

He wanted to kill them. 

He did not care that it would be easy. 

He just wanted to kill them. 

‘Let me,’ Fen murmured from the back of my skull, his voice a low velvet growl threaded with ancient delight. 

‘They are loud.’

‘They are slow.’

‘They smell like sugar and fear.’

‘And I hate that...’  He was mocking me. He was the only thing that could. 

I smiled at his humour.

I flexed my shoulder out of habit.

The arm was slowly coming back—of course, it was.

Pale, newly grown, still faintly wrong in the way regenerated things always were.

It will feel good again. Soon.

It ached like a memory that refused to fade. 

The pain hadn’t dulled yet. 

It wouldn’t, not for a few days. 

I could still remember the sound made when Monty’s knife went through muscle, then bone. 

The smell of the blood as it hit the book, and the book drank it greedily.

The way they had watched.

My pain.

My sacrifice.

The students laughed again.

My fingers twitched. I so wanted to...

‘They don’t know, ’ Fen said softly. 

‘They don’t know what you gave today.’ 

‘They don’t know Hell is wobbling like a badly balanced crown.’ 

‘They don’t know angels are about, and that demons are playing middle management.’

‘They’re children,’ I muttered.

‘They are prey,’ Fen corrected, gently.

One of the students—a boy with a Santa hat slipping sideways—staggered slightly too close to the alley where I stood. 

He looked into the shadow that stood there.

Eyes met eyes.

For a moment, just a moment, I let mine glow gold.

I showed the wolf's stare.

I let my teeth lengthen a fraction so he would notice. 

I let the world sharpen.

Reality appeared but did not quite bite.

The boy froze.

The prey part of him froze.

I stared at him as a beast.

He stared at me as a... pathetic... kill... possibly.

I smiled.

It was not a nice smile.

The boy laughed nervously, mistook it for a joke, and hurried back to his friends. 

A killing joke.

I shook my head. 

The need to hurt was there.

Fens need to kill and mine to destroy those... nice things.

The group vanished down the street, singing something obscene about mistletoe.

The boy would forget that moment. 

His brain would clear it from tonight's memories. 

It did not go well with what the night really brought. 

Comfort, friendship, warmth, security and celebration. 

None of which are real.

The night closed around me again, somewhat like a favourite coat. 

The night was my world. 

I revelled in the chill: the smells and the opportunities it afforded.

Fen sighed, long and disappointed.

‘You are very boring now,’ the wolf said. 

‘Once, we would have worn their joy like a trophy. ’

‘Once,’ I said, ‘we were a monster.’

‘Once,’ Fen replied, ‘You were honest, and that was that we are a monster. Now we are fettered and pathetic.’ He spat.

That hurt more than the loss of an arm. 

What happened to me?

I turned away from the university lights, saddened, and walked back toward the Professor’s town flat. 

Snow had begun to fall—not enough to cover sins, but enough to soften them. 

Windows about me glowed warm. 

Lovely things were happening behind that glass.

‘Don’t forget that some horrors are happening behind that glass too.’ Said Fen.

I sighed.

Decorations blinked cheerfully, utterly indifferent to the fact that Hell was currently without its rightful ruler and an angel was standing in a room pretending not to notice the wrong questions.

I got to the door and turned the key.

Entering the warmth of the hallway as a damp shadow. 

The flakes on my jacket melted away, as did my thoughts.

The flat was quiet. 

Too quiet. 

The Professor was still out doing his usual saving of the world with heaps of patronisingosity.

Monty would be with him, pretending not to worry. 

No, he would not be worried; he had an inherent faith in the Prof that all would be okay.

Eleanor would be... who the fuck cared.

I kicked off my boots and walked to the drinks cabinet. 

I knew it well, and I knew the Professor better.

It would be sacrilege not to check out what he had in there to warm a werewolf's chilled heart and his angry soul. 

Ah. Just the thing, a Macallan 1977. 

This bottle must be worth 20 grand, and it was an everyday drink for the duke of whatever he had been prince of, Professor de Montfort. 

I took a long, stiff mouthful, which surprisingly emptied the half-filled glass. 

Good thing there was plenty more then. 

I poured myself another considerable measure. 

In my mind, I justified it by trying to put a price on cutting my fucking arm off for his magical fucking shite that he made me do.

A couple of measures of this delicious thing were worth a fucking hand. 

I smiled at my self-righteousness and sat heavily on the edge of the sofa.

Fen curled inward behind me, restless.

‘You could stop,’ Fen said. 

‘You could leave them to it.’ 

‘Michael.’ 

‘Lucifer.’ 

‘The Professor and whatever he is trying to prove.’

‘You could stop being... good.’

I lay back and stared at the ceiling.

I imagined it—no briefings, no rituals, no blood sacrifices justified by necessity. 

Just the wolf. 

Just the hunger. 

Just the old nights where morality was something that happened to other people.

My eyes closed.

The room grew cold.

Not draft-cold. 

Not winter-cold.

Time cold.

‘Wil,’ said a voice that knew my name the way steel knows the hand that forged it.

My eyes snapped open.

A man stood by the hearth, broad-shouldered and unmistakably solid, dressed not as a ghost ought to be dressed but as a knight who had refused to die properly. 

His cloak was travel-worn. His sword was peace-bound, but not forgotten.

Behind me, faint and enormous, I felt Fen stir—recognition flooding through him like fire.

William Marshal smiled.

‘Come on, lad,’ said the greatest knight who ever lived.

‘Let’s remember who you were.’

I smell the battle before I see it.

Iron. 

Blood. 

Wet wool. 

Fear—hot, animal, bursting out of men who still believe they’re something more than meat in mail.

Fen stretches inside me the way he always does when history turns violent, pleased as a wolf at the sound of a door left open and a mewling baby within.

This isn’t memory. Its placement.

William Marshal has dragged me here by the scruff of the soul.

The field slopes gently, as if the land itself is trying to pretend nothing awful will happen on it. 

Banners snap in the wind. 

Spears bristle.

Men shout prayers they no longer believe in. 

Somewhere, a priest is already rehearsing last rites like a man warming his hands over a fire.

And there—Christ alive—there’s William.

Young. 

Broad. 

Glorious in the ugly way only the truly living ever are. 

His mail is battered, his surcoat torn, his sword nicked and hungry. 

He looks exactly as he should: a man built to endure horror and call it duty and loving every moment of it.

Fen snarls approval.

That one, Fen thinks. 

That one kills properly.

The horns sound.

The lines collide.

I’ve seen modern war. 

Guns, bombs, distance. 

This is different. 

This is intimate. 

Medieval violence is a conversation you have with someone’s body. 

William is everywhere—shoulder-checking a man into the mud, crushing a face with his shield rim, splitting another’s collarbone so cleanly I hear the crack over the screaming.

He fights like a storm with a moral justification.

And God help me—I understand it.

Every time his sword bites, something in my chest loosens. 

The world becomes simple. 

There is right here. 

There is now. 

There is the next man to fall.

Fen laughs, thrilled. Excitement ignites him.

‘This is honesty,’ he says. 

‘This is what we are.’

But then I see the boy.

He can’t be more than fifteen. 

Too big a helmet, shaking hands, eyes wide with the terrible realisation that legends don’t tell you how heavy a spear feels when you don’t want to use it. 

His boots are too big and are filling with his own piss.

The boy stumbles. 

William turns. 

There’s no malice in it—just momentum, training, survival—

And William kills him.

It’s efficient. 

Merciful, even. 

The boy barely has time to scream.

The scream still happens.

Something twists hard in my gut.

As William's sword twists in the boy's guts, releasing them to the daylight.

The battle drags on. 

Hours, maybe. 

Time collapses into mud, breath, and pain. 

William is hurt twice and keeps going.

Of course he does. 

He might look human, but in this moment, he is more of the werewolf than I have ever been. 

He is mortally wounded, then shakes it off with a laugh as he heals and kills more. 

It’s not fair on his foe.

It’s not fair. 

What fucking bullshit.

It is how it should be. 

Men rally around him because that’s what humans do—they orbit violence that believes in itself.

Eventually, the field quiets.

The dying don’t.

William stands among them, panting, blood-slicked, victorious in the way only the living can be while standing on the fallen. 

He squats and wipes his blade clean on a corpse's torn tabard.

Not blood.

Much more than that. 

Gore, guts and no glory.

And finally, he looks at me.

‘You see?’ he says, grinning like a man who hasn’t yet learned better. 

‘We held them. We stopped them.’

I look at the field.

Bodies everywhere. 

Men who won. 

Men who lost. 

Wives who won’t know which until someone counts. 

Children yet to be born who will grow up angry about today.

‘Stopped them from what?’ I ask quietly.

William frowns. ‘From taking more. From doing worse.’

Fen bristles. ‘Coward talk, Wil, he fought and won.’

I kneel by the boy William killed. 

His eyes are open. 

They don’t accuse. 

They don’t forgive. 

They just… are.

‘William,’ I say, ‘how many battles did you fight?’

He laughs. ‘God, I don’t know. Enough.’

‘And did it end the violence?’

The grin fades on those bloody features as he casts his mind into thought. 

I stand my question again. ‘Did it make the world better?’

He looks around. 

The field. 

The crows are already gathering like they’ve been invited.

He exhales—a tired, human sound.

‘No,’ he admits. 

Then, absurdly, he chuckles. ‘I suppose I thought it might.’

Fen goes quiet.

William wipes his hands on his surcoat, which is so heavily coated in red that it only adds to the mess on his hands. 

He suddenly spits. 

His eyes fall to the body at his feet.

History's greatest knight looks... older. 

‘Violence doesn’t finish things, Wil. It just… changes who gets hurt next.’

I wait. 

Let the words settle.

He looks at me gently now. 

‘You can walk away from this path. You don’t have to keep being what you’re good at.’

The battlefield fades. Mud turns to shadow. The screams recede.

I meet his eyes.

‘I don’t want to do good,’ I tell him honestly.

‘You kid yourself that you were.’

‘It is not our job to make the world a better place.’

Fen bares his teeth in agreement.

William Marshal sighs—not disappointed, just sad—and the world breaks around us.

I awake, I think. I try not to think of what has just occurred and close my eyes to readdress my rest.

Sleep does not come easily when your bones remember how to kill.

I am lying on the professor’s sofa—ancient, leather, faintly smelling of old books and antiseptic—and listening to Fen breathe inside my skull like a tide pulling at a shore it wants to devour. 

Outside, Christmas exists. 

Somewhere, there are more people singing badly, drunk on booze and optimism. 

Somewhere there is laughter. 

Somewhere there is a world that does not know how close it is to losing Hell, or Heaven, or both.

I close my eyes and imagine letting it all go.

Just once.

Fen perks at the thought.

‘We could,’ he whispers. ‘We were happy when we were monsters.’

That is when the room changes.

Not with light.

With absence.

The air grows thick, as though the flat itself has decided to remember something it would rather forget. 

The smell comes first—petrol, blood, old cigarette smoke, and slush-coated tarmac. 

Then the weight of another presence settles at the foot of the sofa, casual, familiar, unbearable.

I do not need to look.

‘Don’t,’ she says. ‘You always look first, and then you pretend you didn’t know it was me.’

I sit up anyway.

Sally O’Neil is leaning against the wall like she always used to—arms folded, head tilted, eyes sharp enough to cut guilt into clean slices. 

She looks seventeen and not a day older, which tells me immediately that this is not mercy.

This is memory.

She hasn’t changed.

Not really. 

Same battered jacket. 

Same boots that walked away from places that never deserved her. 

Same look that says she’s already worked out what you’re lying about.

Beautiful.

‘You’re not dead,’ I say.

She snorts.

‘Congratulations. Still as observant as ever, eh?’

Fen goes very quiet.

‘You shouldn’t be here,’ I say. 

‘You survived. You escaped. You built… something.’

‘I did,’ she agrees. 

‘And then I felt you were thinking about becoming a monster again.’

She pushes off the wall and steps closer. The room stretches. The walls dissolve.

We are no longer in the flat.

We are back on that petrol station forecourt where we first met, deep in the Scottish Highlands, in the fresh deep snow.

A younger me sits inside my Land Rover Defender, deciding how to kill a girl with a backpack and a bad attitude.

Not if but how.

Her.

‘You were going to tear my throat out,’ Sally says conversationally.

‘You’d already thought about it and how much you would enjoy it.’

I watch myself hesitate.

‘But you were fun when we talked. You made me laugh and smile. Humans can’t be fun without... dying.’ I mutter.

‘You liked that I wanted to kill my parents.’ She said with a big smile that did not reach her eyes.

‘That too.’ I hear a little shame in my voice. What... Why do I feel shame?

The scene shifts violently.

Her house.

The shouting.

The stepfather’s smell of sweat and entitlement.

Her mother’s silence—worse than screaming.

Sally’s voice trembles as she narrates it, though she stands steady beside me now.

‘You gave me a choice,’ she says. ‘You and Fen. You told me how. You stood there and watched.’

I see her break again—knife shaking, courage collapsing under the weight of being human.

Wil—me—does not hesitate.

I remember the sound too well.

She doesn’t look at that part.

‘I couldn’t do it,’ she says quietly. ‘And you hated me for that.’

Which I did.

The memory moves faster now, like it wants to get through this as much as I don’t.

I killed those she could not and left.

Blood.

Tears. 

Horror on her part.

Me leaving.

Then—

The wolf.

Asa’s wolf soul. The wolf soul that belonged to the wife I murdered to protect that wife from me.

Silver and vast the wolf soul. 

And grieving, stepping out of death itself to sit beside a broken girl and refuse to let her be alone.

Sally’s eyes finally soften.

‘She saved me,’ she says. ‘Not you.’

She nods at the shining soul that sits by her now. Protective against me even in this dreamt moment.

I swallow.

‘I went to your tribe,’ she continues. 

‘Surgut. I tried to kill the wolf inside you because I thought that was the only way to stop the pain.’

Fen flinches.

‘I failed,’ she says. ‘Again.’

The world shifts once more.

The vampire queen’s lair.

Screaming children.

My children.

In my mind, I say her children.

Our children.

I feel my knees give way.

‘You didn’t try to save them,’ 

‘You did not need to. Luckily. They lived although you thought them dead.’

She says, voice steady but not cruel. 

‘But you avenged them. And you didn’t leave me that time.’

‘I left after,’ I whisper.

‘Yes,’ she agrees. ‘Because you love me.’

That hurts more than anything else tonight.

She steps back, beginning to fade—not into light, but into consequence.

‘You think being a monster means freedom,’ she says. ‘But all it ever gave you was survivors who had to live with what you did.’

She smiles sadly.

‘I survived you, Wil. That doesn’t mean you get to stop surviving yourself.’

The room snaps back into place.

She is gone.

Fen exhales slowly.

‘She’s right, he says.’

‘I know,’ I answer.

I stare at the ceiling, listening to distant laughter outside, and for the first time all night, I do not want to kill it.

But I still don’t want to be good.

And that—

That is a problem for the next ghost.

Lucifer

I span out of the nothingness at the end of my journey from the office of the Professor to...

Okay, where the fu...

I was discombobulated for a moment. 

A room. A normal room. An earthly room. 

Wherever it was, I did not plan to be here. 

That, more than anything, was what irritated me.

Hell was in administrative freefall. 

Astaroth was on my throne doing whatever that was. 

A mortal was somewhere he should not be, touching things that predate consent. 

Michael was above ground playing at righteousness with a man clever enough to make Heaven uncomfortable. 

And I right now.
I was supposed to be fixing it.

Instead, I was standing in a half-lit flat.

I turned, trying to work out what had happened, and ended up watching Wil the Werewolf sit on the edge of a sofa like a sulking child. 

I smelt his mind and emotions.

A bit like you humans sniff that packet of out-of-date ham from the fridge. 

I find sniffing a mind like his is better than getting right in there and digesting the contents. 

I might get the mental form of food poisoning if I dove straight into that head.

Especially with the mind that was in that container. 

His mind smelt of blood.

Blood on his conscience. 

Fresh blood and not enough rage left for him to... to enjoy it.

‘Oh, for the love of Me,’ I muttered to the air, without ceremony. 

I had appeared here.

No thunder.

No fire.

I simply was, arms folded, wings tucked, irritation radiating like heat from a faulty boiler.

Wil looked up. Blinked.

Then smiled.

‘Oh. You,’ he said. ‘Is this a festive visit. Unexpected and welcome.’

‘I do not do Christmas,’ I snap. 

‘Not really my holiday to celebrate.’

He smiled at this.

‘You’re not on my naughty list today, so this shouldn’t have been a stop for me.’

He sighs at that sentence—a sigh of sadness. Regret?

I carry on regardless. 

‘I’m already late, and frankly, you’re not important enough to justify the detour.’

‘I’m not important.’ He says forlornly, not to me.

I looked around for another soul I had not felt. 

There was none, apart from that wolf-soul thing called Fen.

Oh, he had said that to himself.

Bizarre, but this was Wil... he was bizarre.

Fenrir stirred behind him, amused. 

Amused. Always amused by me.

I slightly hated that. 

‘Okay, what am I doing here. I won’t ask how you did it. I have no time. I have a lot to do back home.’ I said quickly and tried to get Wil right to the point, which I knew would be an impossibility.

He tilted his head. ‘You’re doing the ghosts thing?’

‘The what?’ I asked, confused.

‘Christmas carol shite.’

My mind was ambushed at this point. Ghosts, Christmas carol, what the... hell?

‘You know what’s his faces Christmas Carol. You know, Charlie Dickhead wrote it.’

Still nothing came to mind... Oh!

‘I am not doing the ghosts thing,’ I said. ‘I have not got the time. This is just an unfortunate convergence of narrative tropes and cosmic obligation. Now—what do you want?’

He frowned a little, hurt at my lack of wanting to be there. 

Difficult to please a narcissist of his prodigious levels. 

‘You’re supposed to show me the future.’ He huffed. 

‘I don’t give a crap if you do or not, but this is what that story was all about, wasn't it. I never read it, but I think the Muppets version was a pretty accurate version of it, wasn't it?’

I could feel the rage start to build in me. 

I was here partly to do with the muppets. The Muppets. The Muppets. I was SATAN!

‘Right... Okay, right.’ I tried not to destroy the world in this moment with fire and pestilence. 

‘I’m supposed to be in Hell preventing a coup. So let’s be brisk.’

‘I would ask you to tell me what you have an issue with, but I can skim it from your big fat head very easily.’

*pause*

‘So... you’re considering going back to being a monster. Go for it. See, sorted now, I’ll just go...’

‘It’s not that simple.’ 

Oh my mind exploded. 

Millions burned in a greater heat in the pits of hell.

Demons screamed as I transferred my mental pain to them. 

Horror wracked the world, creating nightmares in minds that had been having beautiful dreams about puppies and kittens, throwing the dreamers awake, sweating and blubbering. 

*Pause*

‘FINE!’

‘Let's not worry about the end of hell, heaven and earth.’

‘Let's make this about you.’

‘Let’s see how this all pans out FOR YOU!.

‘For a self-centred egomaniac such as yourself.’

‘Is it going to take long. I am a bit tired.’

I can’t describe my reaction to this. Just understand that it was terrible for those it affected, but I snapped my fingers. 

And that snap caused the reaping of an untold number of souls.

A flash.

An arrival.

The world we arrived in did not burn.

That was the problem.

Wil stood beside me in a future city that looked depressingly familiar—taller buildings, worse politics, the same human misery repackaged with better screens. 

Wars happened. 

Famines happened. 

Pandemics came and went like seasonal fashion.

Hell still existed.

Heaven still preened. 

Humanity continued its proud tradition of almost learning.

Wil was not there.

Well, not, not there.

He was there, but...

Not in any visible way.

Not in any meaningful way.

He killed when it pleased him. 

Disappeared when it didn’t. 

A monster in the margins. 

No great atrocities. 

No great mercies. 

He mattered to exactly no one who mattered.

Lucifer—me—watched timelines cascade, adjusting variables.

The issues in hell were forgotten for a moment.

This just did not make any sense.

‘No,’ I said. ‘This is wrong.’

Wil frowned. ‘I thought it’d be worse.’

‘So did I,’ I admitted, annoyed. 

‘Usually when someone like you chooses selfishness, the universe responds with... the equivalent of another eternal scream.’

But it didn’t.

The wars still happened. 

The bombs still fell. 

The powerful still fed on the weak. 

Wil’s presence made no relative difference. 

Humanity destroyed itself at the same leisurely pace.

He was... irrelevant to its story.

Fen growled softly, wounded by the idea.

Wil swallowed. ‘So… I don’t make it worse.’

‘You don’t make it anything,’ I said sharply. 

‘You vanish. You rot quietly. History doesn’t notice. I don’t even get a decent catastrophe out of it.’

I scratched my head physically and mentally.

I disliked that outcome much more than I should have.

Wil looked at the city. ‘That’s… bleak.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Welcome to a world of indifference.’

I pinched the bridge of my nose. 

I looked at my wrist for a watch to check the time. 

One suddenly appeared. Its face did not tell me the time; it screamed at me to get on with it. 

Literally.

I should really listen, but...

‘Let’s look at the other possible future. Because now I’m annoyed.’

Again, the stomach-turning spin, and we were here.

Somewhere.

This one hurt.

I did not expect that.

The year was fifty of them year things that you use from now. 

The world was scarred—but standing.

Different borders. 

Fewer nations. 

A fragile, ugly peace stitched together with exhaustion and memory.

And Wil—

Wil was everywhere.

Not statues. 

Not worship. 

Something quieter. 

More dangerous.

Archives. Footnotes. 

Declassified reports.

The Third World War had almost happened. 

Not the dramatic version. 

The real one. 

Sanctions. 

Resource collapse.

Autonomous weapons. 

A cascade failure of treaties and pride.

It had begun, as all good apocalypses do, with someone being certain they were right.

Wil had been there.

Not as a soldier.

As a messenger.

He had worked with the Professor—Simon de Montfort, older now, slower, still brilliant—to expose the supernatural influences nudging humanity toward annihilation. 

Angels whispering escalation. 

Demons feeding paranoia. 

Ancient systems desperate to force prophecy into completion.

Wil had helped tear those systems apart.

Literally, in some cases, with his teeth and claws.

He stood between missile silos and seraphim.

Between governments and things that wore righteousness like a weapon.

He bled in rooms where decisions were made.

He broke treaties with his hands and sealed others with threats no human could make.

Fenrir had roared in places that were never meant to hear myth again.

And when it came down to it—when the final escalation protocol triggered, when someone had to physically stop the chain—

Wil had done it.

Alone.

He had held a threshold open while the Professor dismantled a celestial failsafe written into creation itself.

A thing Heaven had buried in humanity’s fear of extinction. 

Wil had stood there while reality tried to erase him for defiance.

It killed him.

Messily.

Heroically.

Irrevocably.

The war stopped.

History rewrote itself around the gap he left.

There were books now.

Not flattering ones. 

Honest ones. 

He was remembered as a monster who chose better. 

A saviour who never asked forgiveness. 

A name soldiers whispered without knowing why it made them cry.

Wil stared.

Fenrir was silent.

Lucifer—me—felt something unhelpful tighten behind my ribs.

‘Well,’ I said carefully. ‘That’s unexpected and somewhat inconvenient.’

Wil laughed. It came out rough. ‘I fucking die?’

I ran my mind over all the living things of the planet and...

‘Yes.’

‘Saving the world?’ 

‘Yes.’

‘Typical.’ He laughed.

I scowled. ‘I don’t like it.’

‘Me either, to be honest.’

‘That figures.’

‘I expected corruption.’

‘Or tyranny.’

‘Or at least a decent body count.’ I waved at the timeline. 

‘Instead, you do the one thing that makes Heaven smug and Hell irrelevant.’

Wil looked at me. 

‘You’re annoyed.’

‘I am furious,’ I said. ‘Because this future works. And I don’t understand why.’

We stood there, looking at a world that had survived itself by the narrowest margin.

Finally, I sighed. ‘A lot to think about.’

‘I have to go. I have to save Hell.’

‘Weird statement. Save Hell’

I nodded. 

‘Thank you for... whatever this was,’ he said. 

‘It was a mistake.’ I told him.

I turned to leave, then paused.

‘For what it’s worth,’ I added, ‘if you do choose the good path… try not to enjoy it too much. It annoys everyone.’

I vanished.

Behind me, Wil sat alone, the weight of futures pressing down on him—

As I flew, I watched him disappear into the distance. 

He looked thoughtful, and I saw him laugh. 

Intrigued, I paused my journey to watch what he would do. I am Lucifer, the eternal voyeur after all. 

He spoke words I did not hear directed at Fen, his wolf soul. 

I watched them both laugh as he reached into his pocket and remove a coin, which he flicked into the air. 

I read his lips as he called it. 

I read the word ‘tales’ on those lips. 

Of course, it was tales.

He was a werewolf after all.

He caught the coin in a new, tight fist.

I smiled and continued my journey before he revealed the result.

Some things I shouldn’t know. 

I know that.