The era known as Old Jantara marks the true moral nadir of jackal rule.
This was not a continuation of the ancient league, nor a legitimate successor state. It was a slaver kingdom formed by the bastard remnants of failed usurpers, ruling for nearly a thousand years through degradation alone. It is here that Jantara became a curse word among jackals themselves.
Old Jantara’s economy was built on enslavement, with dogfolk as its primary victims. The jackals of this age took particular cruelty in subjugating dogs, not merely for labor but for sport. New canine breeds were discovered, catalogued, and abused. Rebellion was answered with starvation, mutilation, and public degradation.
A grim biological fact shaped this cruelty: black jackals could not reproduce with female dogs. To the jackals, this was a missed opportunity. To the enslaved females, it was a narrow mercy. Better an unwilling plaything than a forced breeder to monsters.
Physically, the jackals of Old Jantara towered over their captives, averaging over six feet, while keeping subjugated races deliberately stunted through malnutrition. Power was enforced not just with chains, but with size, spectacle, and ritualized humiliation.
It was during this era that the Bantos Rebellions began.
There was no music in the Doglands that night, only the wind working through broken shutters, shivering the filth in the alleyways, and the slow splatter of rain against the cracked sign above “Red’s Hot & Mean”—the wind and the years had erased the letters, left only a streak of angry paint and the stink of badger rotgut strong enough to eat the enamel off your teeth. Inside, the tavern was a cave of sweat and sour smoke, sticky with spilled liquor and old fear.
Sir Petyr of Aros, once of the old order, now just Pete to the drunks and orphans, hunched alone at a corner table, nursing a bottle he could barely afford, his sword at his boot, his name already half-forgotten. A rebel’s night had never been darker. The last rally had broken beneath him like old bone, another butchered band left bleeding in the dusk outside the gates, and the jackals were coming.
The Barswine had warned as much, he knew. Everyone knew. That was the order of business. Fight back, fail, die trying. Stubborn old ‘Pete’, This one. The only other recognizable fighter in the area was there to guard the Jackals theft through tax, and even he had warned the old dog to sleep it off. “Seek tunnels, get lost, If you can walk the alleys then go, dog.”.
“Not a chance.”
Besides, it was too late for that now; They entered with the scent of oil and dust, half a dozen in all, in layered silks already muddy, their teeth bright, their eyes slits. Hacksbar and Vindurga took the lead—nobles by birth, predators by trade, each one bristling with knives, hooks, grenades, a few blackmarket pistols stuck in faded sashes. The room fell silent but for the rain. Aros had no more fighters, no more banners—only Pete, old and out of luck, drinking himself toward legend or oblivion. Hacksbar’s voice was all amusement, dripping with the false gentility of a merchant offering poisoned dates.
“Sir Pete,” he said, letting the title hang like a noose, “it’s over. You know this. We can gut you here or give you an ending. Choose.”
On the battered tabletop, they placed a brass cup. Poison, swirling oily and black, the same color as the rain that trickled down from Jantara’s rooftops, the same stink that haunted every ruined alley where the last resistance bled out. Pete watched the cup as if it were a mirror, as if he could see his old self in its surface.
“Are you a knight?” he asked himself, aloud or not even he could tell. His mind, empty for months, finally answered back—a rasp of laughter, a pulse beneath the scarred ear.
“No clue,” it said. “Let us find out.”
He drank. The taste was nothing, just a flicker of rot behind the smoke and badger liquor in his throat. A hush followed, the jackals grinning with cruel expectation. The townsfolk huddled in corners, eyes fixed to their boots, praying not to be noticed, praying not to be next. Pete let his shoulders sag, let his head hang. Then, as if to chase down death itself, he grabbed the nearest bottle of Red’s Hot & Mean, sloshed half of it down his gullet, and felt the world tip. Fire in the gut, poison on the tongue, his heart kicked against his ribs like a dying stallion. But some old fire—the last coal of Aros—caught. He did not fall.
Instead, he rose.
There was a hush, then a table kicked aside, and the first jackal’s face split open in a rictus of shock as Pete’s broadsword, snatched from its resting place, crashed across his jaw. The blade was old, notched, broad as a shovel, but still murder in steel. Blood spat across the floor, red and black, and the tavern’s stink turned sharper. Pete was moving—no thought, just rage and the memory of younger days, hands and feet remembering the weight of war. Another jackal lunged, dagger flashing, but Pete’s left hand, still clutching the neck of the badger bottle, drove it into the dog’s teeth with a crunch and a shriek. Glass, blood, and spirits gushed over the table. A third came from behind—too late. Pete’s boot cracked a knee, spun him against the bar, and a second bottle of Hot & Mean, flung with perfect spite, shattered across his snout. The fire caught. Spirits, blood, and spit burned on the wooden counter, and in the sudden guttering light Pete saw Hacksbar closing in, scimitar drawn, eyes gone mean as a pit viper.
Pete grinned—a broken thing, all jaw and shadow, Townshend’s own sneer born on a mongrel’s muzzle. He ducked the blade, twisted in, and the sword rose in his grip. The old steel was heavy, but Pete’s arms remembered the weight of banners lost, of fields surrendered. The flat of the blade smashed Hacksbar’s wrist, the scimitar dropped, and Pete drove the sword up—hard, pitiless—into the jackal’s groin. Hacksbar howled, white foam at his lips, as Pete shoved him backwards through a shower of glass, up onto the sill, and, with a final curse, pitched him bodily through the window.
The street beyond was slick and shining. Hacksbar landed hard, bones shattering. He fumbled for his belt, clawing for a grenade—one of the old lion-make types, cobbled from scrap and cruelty—and as he yanked the pin, the wet fuse fizzed. In the next breath, the grenade and Hacksbar became a single red blossom, spraying shards across the cobbles. Two of his lieutenants, racing to help, caught the blast and folded, dying with their master. The crowd outside—silent, watching—staggered back.
Inside, Vindurga tried to run, but Pete was already there. Poison, liquor, and old hate burned him hollow, but something in his spine kept him upright. He cut Vindurga across the arms, both wrists pinioned to the bar with twin daggers stolen from fallen jackals. The slaver-duke spat curses, writhing, but Pete, half-mad, tore a barstool from its place, swung it overhead, and with a roar drove it through the jackal’s skull, pinning him to a ceiling beam. Blood ran in a lazy spiral down Vindurga’s muzzle, his legs kicking, his eyes already swimming in another world.
The townsfolk gaped—first in terror, then in awe, then in a strange, half-drunken elation. Pete, now more myth than hound, staggered back, hacking bile and blood onto the floor, the poison and Red’s Hot & Mean fighting for supremacy in his gut. He vomited green-black, dropped to one knee, then forced himself up with a snarl. In the corner, a barkeep whimpered. Pete raised a fist, sword still clutched, voice guttural as thunder. “Well? Who the hell are you?!” The people stared. Then, one by one, the axes and the shovels came out. Someone yelled his name, not “Petyr”, but “Sir Pete,” and the chant caught.
“Sir Pete! Sir Pete! Sir Pete!” The call grew, swelled, battered the beams, swept through the streets as the news of Hacksbar’s death, Vindurga’s spectacle, and the ruin of the jackal enforcers caught fire. The failed rebellion—the one Pete had fought and lost and wept for—snapped into fury, the dam finally broken. The uprising began not in plan, not in law, not even in hope, but in a burst of tavern violence, an old dog’s last stand, and a moment when every soul in Aros remembered they still had teeth.
Pete, already sagging, was hustled out the back, body wracked by poison, blood, and the last fumes of his badger liquor. He collapsed in the arms of a pair of healers, who dragged him off as the town exploded in riot and bloodshed. By dawn, the streets were awash with corpses and hope alike, and the jackal banners smoldered atop burning wagons.
For a week, Pete drifted in fever, neither living nor dead, as the town he’d saved bled and crowned itself in fresh law. He woke once, to find himself swinging a club at raiders who’d tracked him to the healing house, then blacked out again, deeper than ever. When at last he came up for good, the Uprising was over. Calbara was being born in the ashes, and the bard’s scroll—half-written, half-burned—marked the beginning of Bantos, though Pete’s own name was already fading from the pages. He would pass into legend, his deed half-remembered, half-disbelieved, a question ringing out into the blood-soaked dawn.
The Later Jantaran Union was a kingdom in name only, ruled for nearly sixteen centuries by the so-called Pheryn Dynasties—cold, calculating warlords and sorcerers who claimed lineage from Elder Jantara without possessing its discipline, doctrine, or restraint. They adopted the symbols of the old league but not its substance, wearing masks as intimidation rather than ritual, hoarding gold instead of circulating it.
This was a civilization of ledgers and lies. Its histories were self-authored, exaggerated, and mutually contradictory. Guilds recorded grievances instead of laws. Faith was replaced with mysticism weaponized for control. Its end came abruptly.
In a single mass poisoning—still unexplained—half a city died in one night. Thrones fell together. Rulers, courtiers, and priests collapsed in confusion and terror. The aftermath was not revolution, but slaughter. What followed was carved obsessively into frescoes for two centuries: betrayal, fire, beheading, and ritual humiliation of the dead.
Yet even this did not birth Bantos.
The usurpers who followed clung to the carcass of the Union for another three hundred years, until they too failed. Their fall left behind a vacuum, not a successor. For centuries after, the lands of ancient Jantara were little more than caravan corridors—crossed, exploited, and ignored by Zhuru’s wider powers.
By this point, even the jackals themselves admitted the truth: Elder Jantara had been real. What came after were not heirs, but parasites.
The fall of the jackals is not tragic because they were defeated. It is tragic because they fell so far, and because the descent took so long that its end was barely noticed when it finally came. Elder Jantara did not die screaming beneath foreign blades, nor was it erased by some singular cataclysmic betrayal. It thinned. It softened. It dimmed itself over generations, trading vigilance for refinement, ritual for repetition, certainty for indulgence. By the time its last true heirs vanished, the world had already grown accustomed to the absence of jackal greatness.
This is what makes the modern jackal such a bitter sight. The jackal grunt of the present age is a scavenger in rags, clutching a chipped blade, half-feral in speech and habit, bleeding on command for the amusement or favor of despotic kings who rule by terror rather than covenant. There is no philosophy left in him, no discipline beyond hunger, no loyalty beyond fear. He is used as expendable muscle, a body to be thrown at walls or into ambushes, promised scraps of plunder or access to rut as payment for obedience. He knows no law but dominance, no past but rumor, no future but the next wound.
The Starved Inhabitants of the Yorozhian Wastes
Against this stands the memory of Elder Jantara, and the contrast is almost unbearable. The jackals of that elder age were tall, composed, and unmistakably deliberate. They were mystics of trade and restraint, wielders of commerce as a civilizing force rather than a predatory one. Their discipline was not born of terror but of doctrine, reinforced by faith and symbol rather than lash. They governed themselves as much as they governed others, bound by internal codes that prized control over excess and reputation over conquest. Where the modern jackal lunges, the elder jackal measured.
Nowhere was this more evident than in the Elder Jantaran blades. These warriors were not mere soldiers for hire, but mercenaries of singular renown, sought across the southern realms for a loyalty that exceeded coin. They were bound not only to their pay, but to the spoken word of the lord or baron they served.
Once committed, an Elder Jantaran blade did not retreat. Accounts speak of them locking shields with their own bodies, standing firm beneath arrow fire to shelter those they had sworn to protect, dying in place rather than breaking oath. To hire them was to purchase certainty, not cruelty.
So trusted were the institutions of Elder Jantara that neighboring kingdoms entrusted their own offspring to Jantaran Bardasi 💎, the merchant-philosophers of that age. Sons and daughters traveled with jackal caravans not merely to learn trade, but to absorb a worldview that balanced honor with guile, profit with restraint, curiosity with discipline.
These youths returned changed, sharpened by exposure to a culture that treated commerce as both moral test and civic duty. That such trust once existed makes the present suspicion of jackals all the more damning.Even their physical presence has passed into near-myth.
The Elder Jackals were said to be arrestingly beautiful, the females statuesque and severe, the males exemplars of southern canine grace—lean, powerful, and proportioned with an almost architectural harmony. Their bodies reflected the same restraint that governed their culture: nothing wasted, nothing excessive.
Desire was acknowledged, not denied, and their society was open in its acceptance of bisexuality among both males and females. Love, rut, and pleasure were not treated as shameful impulses, but as forces to be understood, moderated, and woven into social order rather than allowed to dominate it.
The relics they left behind only deepen the sense of loss. Elder Jantaran sapphires and swords are artifacts of a craft no longer replicated, not merely because of lost technique, but because the civilizational conditions that produced them no longer exist. A single sapphire of Elder Jantaran cut is worth a hundred times its weight in gold, not for rarity alone, but because it embodies an ethic as much as a material mastery. These were not ornaments of vanity, but anchors of moral identity, symbols of restraint forged into stone and steel. Their blades, too, carry a balance and permanence unseen in ten thousand years of declining returns.
Thus the tragedy is complete. The jackals did not merely lose territory, power, or prestige. They lost continuity. What survives today is not a corrupted version of Elder Jantara, but a negation of it—a people stripped of memory, discipline, and form, left with only hunger and cruelty where philosophy once stood. The world mourns Elder Jantara not because it was perfect, but because it proved that jackals were once capable of something far greater than what now stalks the dust.
The Ancient Jantaran League, sometimes called Elder Jantara, was real. Of this there is no longer serious dispute. Though poorly recorded and often mythologized, it existed as a concentrated jackal civilization spanning much of what is now central and southern Bantos, with reach into the easternmost margins of Bruwa.
Elder Jantara, Bayantia & Ruselon
Unlike later jackal regimes, Elder Jantara was not defined by constant raiding or slaver economies. Contemporary accounts describe a people who were strange, insular, and ceremonial, yet broadly non-hostile.
They wore gilded masks and long robes, spoke a language that resisted translation, and traded widely and fairly. Their caravans moved along stable routes, their camels bearing goods rather than captives.
Their southern settlements were built into rock formations closer to what would later become the Kartongan wastes, though the exact extent of these cities is lost.
The Merchant Class of Jantara lived in comparative luxury to later descendants.
Their rulers were described consistently: tall, piercing blue-eyed, deep-voiced figures whose presence commanded without brutality. They followed an esoteric religious order centered on gemstones, particularly sapphire, not as ornament, but as symbolic moral anchors. Later scholars argue this gemstone reverence functioned as a metaphysical restraint, a cultural doctrine that limited cruelty and enforced internal discipline. Whatever its nature, it worked.
The Cerulean Palace of Elder Jantara
Elder Jantara endured for roughly two thousand years after the Cataclysm, withdrawing gradually into decadent obscurity rather than collapsing in fire. Its neighbors prospered alongside it. Trade enriched surrounding regions. Stability followed jackal roads.
Then it ended.
The Western Border of The Elder Jantaran Realms
No heirs survived into the modern age. No dynasties persisted. The culture vanished not with a final war, but with a long extinguishing—like embers smothered beneath their own excess. What remained was memory, and the temptation to claim descent from something greater.
The lands now called Bantos were not born in peace, nor founded in idealism. They were carved out of a long failure, layered with lies, impostures, and the slow rot of a people who mistook cleverness for permanence.
Once, the northern expanse between the Doglands and the wastes of Kartonga belonged to the jackals. They ruled it with thin hands and sharper minds, cunning traders, sly governors, and merciless raiders who mistook fear for dominion.
To understand Bantos, one must first understand Jantara—not as a single nation, but as three successive conditions of jackal rule: the Elder Union, the Later Union, and the long, diseased husk known as Old Jantara. Only after these did the dogs rise, and only then did the land become something new.
Krothuum was a scar of stone and dust on the southern grasslands of Zhuru. Its walls were low, cracked things, more a mark of pride than a bulwark, and the gates gaped like broken teeth. Smoke clung above the city, not the holy incense of temples but the choking reek of coal-pits and forges, of fat burning on anvils, of oil dumped into the gutters.
The city lived on steel and mockery. Every forge was a rival, every hammer-strike a jeer against the smith across the alley. Hyenas laughed at each other across the streets, the cackling rolling through Krothuum like thunder. It was a city that thrived on humiliation — and where shame was remembered longer than blood spilled.
Into this dust-choked maze strode a she-wolf of the northern tribes, black of pelt, broad of shoulder, and proud of stride. Her amber eyes burned beneath the sweat-clumped locks of her mane, and her arms — thick with the sinew of war — bore scars that spoke of raids across mountains and the razing of caravans. She was not soft like the courtesans of Zarnack, nor sly like the thieves of Kansubar. She was barbarian stock: raw, bold, made for the clash of steel and the bite of blood.
Yet for all her strength, she had come to Krothuum weakened — stripped not of her coin, but of her sword.
It had been promised ready at dawn. She had paid for it with gold and a raided caravan’s worth of loot. A northern blade, reforged in the hyena-smith’s coals, tempered for the blood-feast she intended to unleash when she crossed the straits toward Drael. But dawn had passed, then noon, then dusk, and now the day waned while her temper flared.
She shoved her way through the market, scattering fox-hawkers and goat-wives alike, until she came to the forge of Rathgur the Smith — a thick-shouldered hyena with soot-blackened fur, known for his laugh and his treachery in equal measure. His rivals claimed he spent more time mocking than hammering, yet he never lacked for customers. For in Krothuum, the louder a smith’s laughter, the more certain folk seemed that his steel would not bend.
The wolf planted her hands on his counter, claws clattering against the iron-rimmed wood. “Where is my blade?” she snarled. “You swore it would be ready. You swore it with oath and coin both.”
Rathgur did not look up at once. He worked the bellows, smoke curling around his muzzle. Only when the forge flared red did he glance at her — a slow, toothy grin spreading across his muzzle. “Not here,” he said. His voice was rough, each word dripping with the slothful amusement of one who knows he holds power. “Perhaps you misplaced it.”
“Misplaced?” Her voice was a growl, low and trembling. “You think me a pup, hyena? You think I forget where I lay my steel?”
He shrugged, the grin never leaving his muzzle. “Perhaps you forget many things. Where you leave your weapons. Where you leave your coin. Where you leave your legs, after drink and whoring.”
The forge-hands laughed. A cruel, barking chorus. The wolf’s claws dug into the wood, carving furrows. Pride swelled in her chest, mingling with desperation. Her sword was not just iron — it was her name, her survival, her right to stride as a warrior. Without it, she was no more than a lost bitch wandering a city of jackals.
And in that desperate moment, her tongue betrayed her.
“Who,” she spat, her voice sharp enough to cut the smoke, “do I have to rutt with to find my sword!?”
The words hung in the air like a curse. The forge fell silent, save for the crackle of coals. Hyena ears pricked. Jaws spread in grins. Then the laughter came — harsh, howling, rolling through the smithy until it seemed the very walls shook with it.
Rathgur’s eyes gleamed. “Ah,” he said, drawing the word like a blade across her pride. “So that is the bargain you offer.”
The wolf’s face burned beneath her dark fur. She opened her mouth to curse him, to call him heathen, thief, and crook — but the laughter was already binding her, wrapping her in mockery. In Krothuum, a word spoken in desperation was as binding as an oath.
And Rathgur, hyena that he was, would not let it pass.
The headboard rattled like a war drum, a cracked plank nailed crooked against the stone wall of Rathgur’s forge-room. Every thrust set it hammering, every laugh of his made it echo louder. The noise carried through the thin walls into the market beyond, so that all of Krothuum’s dust-choked streets could hear the she-wolf’s shame.
Her claws dug splinters into the board, her amber eyes squeezed shut as sweat matted the fur at her temples. She cursed through clenched teeth, the words breaking apart into gasps and sharp yelps as the hyena’s bulk drove against her. His cock was thick, cruel, stretching her in ways that were no pleasure, only pain. He knew it, and he reveled in it.
“Bitch,” Rathgur snarled, punctuating the word with a slap across her haunch, the crack of palm to fur echoing like a blacksmith’s strike. “You thought you’d strut in here, north-blood, tossing your pride like coin. You thought you could mock me, eh? Tell me where my steel lies? Ha!”
His laughter rolled like thunder. His paw closed on her tail, yanking it back as he drove himself deeper, forcing a cry from her throat that no curse could hide. She trembled with fury, with helplessness, with the gnawing ache that each thrust drove into her belly.
“Curse you!” she spat, though it came out broken, half a whimper, half a growl. “Curse you, hyena cur! Heathen crook—”
Her voice snapped into a squeal as his thumb shoved rudely into her tailhole, pressing past clenched muscle. Her whole body jolted, shame burning hotter than the coals outside. He barked laughter, the cruel, barking kind that only hyenas could muster, and it shook the rafters.
Outside, the forge-hands and passersby heard everything. The rhythm of the rattling board, the hyena’s laughter, the wolf’s strangled cries. Krothuum thrived on spectacle, and today’s spectacle was the barbarian bitch who had demanded her sword. Already wagers were whispered, jokes flung back and forth — who would finish first, her pride or his seed.
She wanted to scream, to thrash, to claw his throat open. Yet the grip on her tail, the weight of his body, the cruel shove of his cock left her pinned and trembling. Her bosom pressed against the splintered board, her thighs shook with the strain of holding herself up. She tried to spit venom, to call him filth, to swear vengeance — but every word was broken by gasps and yelps.
And worst of all, she could feel her pride crumbling with each thrust. Not arousal — never that — but the bitter, soul-deep regret of a warrior undone. She thought of her sword, her steel, her lifeblood. Without it she was nothing in this city. Without it she could not walk the caravan roads, could not raid, could not fight. Without it she had no power.
And so she endured. Teeth grit, eyes burning, heart pounding not with lust but with rage and shame. She endured, even as his thumb worked cruelly in her tailhole, even as his palm cracked against her flank again and again, even as he laughed like a jackal feasting.
“North-blood bitch,” he jeered, his breath hot against her ear. “Regretting your adventures now, eh? Regretting your big mouth? You’ll think twice before you wag your tongue in Krothuum again.”
His thrusts grew harder, faster, each one shaking the board, each one driving her claws deeper into splinters. Her tail jerked in his grip, her body jolted against his weight. She tried to curse him one last time, but it broke into a strangled yelp as he shoved himself deep and spilled into her, the hot flood of seed sealing her shame.
He laughed again, louder than ever, the sound rolling out into the street so all could hear. He slapped her haunch once more, as if to mark her, then pulled free. She collapsed against the rattling board, chest heaving, bosom slick with sweat, fury and shame burning her amber eyes.
And still he laughed.
“On your feet, bitch,” Rathgur said, buckling his belt as if nothing had happened. “I’ll show you your precious sword.”
Her breath hissed through her teeth, her pride torn raw. Yet she dragged herself up, tail low, fury trembling in every limb. She needed her sword. She needed it more than she needed her pride.
And so she followed him, half-dressed, into the daylight of Krothuum, where the crowd was already gathering, already laughing, already hungry for the next stroke of her humiliation.
The forge-door creaked wide, and daylight cut across the soot and smoke. The she-wolf staggered into the street behind Rathgur, her mane damp with sweat, her chest heaving. Her fur clung to her body where his seed still dripped, her tail limp, her pride raw. She had not bothered to dress, only clutched her loin-wrap against her hips as if to guard what little modesty she had left.
But modesty was nothing in Krothuum. The laughter had already spread.
Hyenas lined the alleys, forge-hands leaned from doorways, merchants paused mid-bargain to jeer. Even the mongrels and half-breeds of the market were grinning, for nothing in Krothuum drew a crowd faster than shame. They had heard the board rattle, the wolf squeal, the hyena laugh — and now they saw the proof stumble into the dust.
“Show me,” she hissed, dragging Rathgur by the arm. Her claws dug into his soot-stained hide. “Show me my blade, you bastard! Now!”
The hyena only grinned wider, throwing a look to the crowd. His laughter was louder than the forge-bellows. “Aye, I’ll show you. But perhaps you’ll wish I hadn’t.”
He turned, slow as a priest delivering judgment, and lifted a paw to point across the street.
There, standing smug in the doorway of his own smithy, was his rival — a thick-armed hyena of equal girth, holding a longsword aloft in one hand. The wolf’s longsword.
“There you are, wench!” the rival bellowed, his voice carrying over the dust and din. “Your sword’s been ready for hours! And here you are — fucking around like a common whore while I waited!”
The crowd roared. Hyenas doubled over, their laughter sharp as knives. A pair of foxes howled and slapped each other’s backs. Even the slaves hauling coal grinned as they trudged past.
The wolf’s face burned hot beneath her fur. She wanted to scream, to deny, to kill. Instead, she turned on Rathgur and struck him hard across the back with the flat of her paw. The blow cracked like a whip, but he only threw his head back and howled with laughter.
Her rage boiled over. She charged across the street, snatched her sword from the rival’s paw, and lifted it high. Its weight steadied her, its steel cooled her trembling. At last she felt whole again — at last she felt like herself.
She spun back, amber eyes blazing, and stormed toward Rathgur’s forge with murder written in every stride. The crowd parted, eager to see blood, eager to see the story end in violence. She raised her blade, teeth bared, ready to carve his head from his shoulders—
—when the heavy door slammed in her face.
The clang of iron bolts drove home her defeat. Behind the shuttered timbers came Rathgur’s laughter, louder than ever, echoing through the alleys like a curse.
The wolf froze, sword in hand, fury quaking in her chest. The crowd laughed on. Some mocked her with barks, others with obscene gestures. None offered pity.
For this was Krothuum, dustiest of Varduun’s cities. Here, humiliation was currency, shame was spectacle, and the tale of the black she-wolf who rutted away her pride would be told in taverns from Gorzanth’s barracks to Zarnack’s brothels.
She clenched her sword until her knuckles ached, then turned away, vowing vengeance. But vengeance is long in coming, and laughter travels fast.
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