My people, the Lycan, were a proud and ancient species. We resided in and worked these lands long before the humans arrived. When they did, we lived in peace and mutual prosperity for centuries. You must realise that my people are extremely long-lived, by your standards, and I was born during these times. I remember them clearly.

As your people’s need for ever increasing industry and cultivation, and desire to breed in excess of their means pushed you onwards, our peoples began to disagree and, inevitably, clash.

There was a terrible conflict, which lasted for decades, but my people were eventually driven from their lands. We were forced to retreat to forests and mountains, the places we knew your people could not readily survive and follow us.

We Lycans have been constantly vilified, feared, and hunted by Humans since then. With your short memories, it wasn’t long before my people had become little more than myth to you. A proud race, reduced to nothing more than stories and allegory.

With our numbers dwindling, particularly within our males, we were forced to reduce ourselves to inbreeding and, within a generation, the children born of such couplings became stunted and diminished. Little more than animals. Some even began interbreeding with common Wolves in their own inability to comprehend the differences between their own species and the mindless dogs of the woods.

I had peacefully lived in the forests surrounding the Human town of Ferndale, along with my mate and our young daughter, for many decades when a harsh winter descended. Everyone suffered through those times, with food becoming scarse and the weather cold, even for those of us covered in fur.

My daughter, driven mad with hunger, killed one of the village’s sheep. While I was hunting for food the next day, my mate took our wayward offspring in to the town to apologise and treat with them to learn the nature of her recompense. They were slaughtered by the villagers and eaten. As animals! My mate and daughter deserved a burial, they deserved their dignity! But they were denied that by the men and women of Ferndale and I sought to visit justice upon them as dictated by my people’s laws; blood for blood.

I sought out one of their young, the girl known as Red Riding Hood. I’m sure I don’t need to go in to detail, as the story is well known; the Woodcutter stopped me before I was able to kill the girl, and I was driven from the lands altogether.

I travelled then, seeking to find more of my own kind, so I might live out the rest of my days in some company, at least. I came to find that I was the last of my kind. When I did find any trace of a Lycan, it was one of the stunted, inbred, offspring who had bred with common wolves and joined their packs. These were not my people.

I came across a young female Lycan/Wolf half-breed some thirty years ago and, at first, simply sought her company. She was young, animalistic, and diminished, but she was like me. The only other one I had ever found. Eventually, the reality of our position as the last strong traces of our species set in and we produced a small litter of pups; two boys and a girl. These three were clearly more Wolf than Lycan; they would never talk, never walk properly, never reason, or learn, but they were my blood.

Five years ago, some Humans entered the deep woods we lived in and began a search for us. We had broken no laws, trespassed in no Human territory, these men were hunters, and they were after my family. They found us as my mate and I tried to lead our pups to safety and they attacked. I saved the pups, but as I returned for my mate, I saw that they had cornered and mortally wounded her. I watched as they slaughtered her, as nothing more than an animal, and took her skin!

I am ashamed to admit that, through the inaction of Lycan such as myself, our people allowed themselves to be exterminated by the Humans. Our once proud, noble, race has been reduced to savage, inbred, half-breeds, and myself. I am the last of my kind; King of the Wolves.

I have been pushed too and it is time for the Humans to pay for what they have done. I will remind them why they fear the howling in the night.

Lupus Rex will have his revenge.