The Wolf Skull Helm

A Dark Sword & Sorcery Tale

The kingdom’s northern coasts had never been worth much. It was a no-man’s land of permafrost, shattered shoreline, and stones covered in poisonous black lichen. The ground yielded no timber, no gems, no ore, and no crops. Only the beasts of this region thrived: grey bears and large tusked cats that screamed in the dark with sounds like dying women. A hunter brave enough to traverse it could make a fortune in pelts. That is, if they survived.

Prince Anmar had ridden to the coast with three of his house’s finest huntsmen and a cart ready to be filled with their kills. On the third day, they tracked the largest bear any of them had seen, and it refused to die. It carried fifteen of their arrows in its hide and bled rivers as it ran. The men pursued the beast as it retreated along the coast, riding at a steady gallop, the icy wind off the green sea whipping their fur-lined cloaks around them.

The chase ended when they found the bear lying dead before a weathered stone door set into a hillside.

A burial mound, Anmar thought. He checked his map and found nothing marked on that shore, no sign that this barrow existed at all.

He dismounted and examined the door, brushing away frost and years of grit to reveal a sigil of a wolf’s head surrounded by thorns. He knew that symbol; the history of his house had documented it well. It was the sigil of House Varael, the sworn enemies of his own family. Three centuries ago, every last Varael had been destroyed by his ancestors in a single bloody encounter, an act so brutal that most historians and scholars called it an extermination rather than a battle. Every castle, temple, and monument bearing the wolf symbol had been burned or torn down. This Varaelean tomb, though, had somehow gone unnoticed and undisturbed. Until now.

He called his men over and ordered them to open the barrow. Using spears and lengths of driftwood, the men pried until the stone barrier slid just enough to leave a man-sized gap. Cold, stale air burst from the opening. Earthy smells of damp soil, wet fur, and old leather swirled around them.

The prince sent the men to take the bear’s pelt and dress the meat. He lit a torch and loosened his sword in its scabbard. You fool. The last Varael has been dad for three hundred years. A prince does not fear dust. He rolled his shoulders, raised his chin, and slid through the small opening.

His torchlight spread across the chamber. Skeletal faces emerged from the dark. Hollow black eyes glaring at him.

Anmar lurched back, blade half drawn, heart hammering, before his eyes made out what he was seeing. Corpses. A heap of them piled just inside the door. Their skin had gone brown and leathery, their lips shriveled back from their teeth.

He raised the torch and looked closer. The inside of the stone door was scored with hundreds of scratches. The fingers of the dead ended in split and broken nails. These people had been sealed in alive, had spent their final days in the dark, hungry and clawing at the stone until death claimed them.

Many of the corpses wore tarnished bronze symbols of the Varael wolf and thorns. Understanding grew, a blossom of revulsion in his gut. These damned souls had been imprisoned and left here to rot by his own ancestors; he could think of no other explanation.

Past the corpses lay rotted banners and broken shields. On a slab of dark stone lay a suit of armor, a single skeleton curled beside it. The helm was terrifying, black iron hammered into a wolf’s skull with bared teeth.

He lifted the helm, examining it carefully. The metal was so cold it almost burned against his palms. Dust sifted from inside. The design was mesmerizing, the most intricate smithing work he’d ever seen. And before he knew why, he raised the thing and set it on his head.

The visor slammed shut. A metal vine of thorns grew from the interior and sank into the meat of his throat like fishhooks.

Then came the voice, not through his ears but from behind his eyes, in his skull.

House Kharos blood. The words were slow and breathy, like a connoisseur sniffing a fine wine and naming its underlying notes. Your blood is the same as those that sealed us here.

The prince pulled at the helm, trying to yank it free, but it would not budge, the hooks digging deeper into the tender flesh of his throat. The voice came again, louder this time, tinged with hate. I have waited for so long in this ice and darkness, for someone, anyone, to come. And now I have an heir of my enemy’s house. How serendipitous.

“What are you?” Anmar’s choked voice cracked with pain.

Shall I tell you what your kin did to my people, Kharos? How they killed the children first, making the mothers watch. Should I tell you how they drove the men out onto the ice until it shattered beneath them, letting the winter sea finish the work? Do you want to hear how they sealed me and my family into this hole, to freeze and starve in the dark?

“Stop! Leave me be!” Anmar pulled at the helm again. Blood ran hot and wet down his chest as the thorns buried themselves further.

Silence! Put on the rest of the armor, Kharos. All of it. We have so much work to do.

His mind refused, but his hands moved in obedience to the voice. He lifted the breastplate from the slab and placed it over his chest, and he cried out as more steel thorns wrapped around his torso, ripping through his tunic to latch onto flesh and muscle beneath. Then he donned the rest, gauntlets, greaves, and every piece released more thorns, burrowing into his skin and locking into place.

The entity was in his mind now, sifting through his memories like someone searching for an item in a messy drawer. And the connection went both ways. Memories that weren’t his own flooded through the psychic link. He saw a Varaelean castle burning. He saw naked men herded by spears onto grey ice until it cracked and the sea claimed them. He saw a kneeling lord with his hands on a suit of empty armor on a black slab, whispering an enchantment with his dying breath. Hatred swirled like a maelstrom through three hundred years of icy dark.

Now you understand, boy. Take me to your house. The keep of your father. Does it still exist on the shores of the sea? Take me there.

“No!” Anmar tried to refuse, but his legs were already moving.

The voice laughed.

His huntsmen were waiting back at camp. The wolf helm’s visor was up, and they stared uncertainly at the sight of their prince’s face in the bizarre suit of armor. Each died by his blade before they could draw their own weapons.

Anmar rode south, staring blankly from the iron wolf’s face, until his father’s keep appeared on the horizon, the ocean’s icy teal waves crashing against sea walls covered in brine and frost.

The guards at the gate readied their spears at the approaching knight in black wolf-armor. The rider raised the visor, revealing the prince’s face beneath. His countenance startled them: pale, dark veins visible beneath the skin, eyes wide and bloodshot.

“Open the gate,” Anmar demanded.

The guards glanced at each other, hesitated, then raised the portcullis.

He dismounted, not waiting for a stable boy to take his horse, and strode into the keep. The voice breathed heavily in his skull. Yes. Yes. The night of reckoning is upon House Kharos.

Tears formed in Anmar’s eyes as his legs carried him forward against his will.

His brother Horis saw him first in the main hall. “Anmar! Back so soon, man? Did you freeze your balls off?” He chuckled. “How was the hunt? And… why are you wearing that ridiculous armor?” His smile faded into a perplexed frown. Anmar’s enslaved arm opened his brother’s throat in a flash of steel. Blood spilled out in a deluge, and Horis fell forward, convulsing.

“No! Please! I beg you! Stop!”

The prince stepped over his little brother’s corpse and continued down the hall. His own voice screamed in protest as the one in his head laughed in perverse delight.

He hadn’t made it far before his parents appeared, candles in hand, following the sound of his screaming. Two guards stood before the king and queen — Anmar’s sword took both their heads in a single stroke. His mother screamed just before he drove his blade through her heart. He left the blade embedded there and seized his father by the throat, both clawed gauntlets squeezing as he forced the old man to his knees.

Their eyes met, Anmar’s full of tears as he took his father’s life with his own hands. Yet his lips curled into a sneer, and an alien voice came from his throat. “The Kharos king dies by his own blood. How delicious. A fair trade for what your family did to mine, don’t you think?”

His father’s face turned purple, his eyes bulged, and the thrashing slowed, then stopped. He released his grip and the king’s body hit the floor

Pulling the sword from his mother’s bloody breast, he walked down another hallway. Anmar’s mind exploded in primal terror. “No! Not them! No! Helena! Helena, run!”

He reached a large oaken door and kicked it open, splinters spraying through the air. His wife, Helena, stood in the far corner, arms outstretched, their two small children hiding behind her back.

The voice panted, whispering darkly. And now you will snuff out the last of your bloodline. Do it!

Helena stared at him, wide-eyed, jaw trembling. “Anmar, my love. What are you doing? It’s us. Please stop.”

Anmar’s legs took him one step toward his family, the bloody sword dripping in his hand. He heard his children crying.

“No,” he said, and this time it was not a plea.

Summoning everything he had, he forced himself to turn the other way. His body moved like a man wading through mud. The voice shrieked in his skull. Kill. Kill them as they killed mine. The thorns tightened, steel points sawing deeper into flesh. Pain like molten lightning tore through him, searing every nerve. Still, he pressed forward, away from his family, toward the open window and the breeze blowing in off the sea.

Obey.

His bones cracked. His teeth splintered and shattered. Blood poured from his nose and ears. One eye bulged and burst in its socket. He kept moving towards the window. The entity screamed into his marrow, forced him to bite off his own tongue. He spat it free, swallowed his own blood, reached the window, and pushed himself through.

He plummeted down the face of the cliff, the cold and salty ocean wind rising to meet him.

The water hit like a blade of ice. The armor pulled him down, heavy as an anchor. He sank fast, fathoms of black water closing over him. The voice was begging at first, then screaming in its own terror, offering to set him free. Anmar’s lungs filled. He felt the undertow pull him out, deeper, farther, until he settled into silt and the crushing dark.

Blind, pale things struck at him, testing this strange new creature.

The soul of the last lord of House Varael screamed into water too deep to carry the sound, locked inside the black armor like a dungeon cell, wearing a drowned man’s bones, knowing it would never be found. It had waited three hundred years for its revenge and would now spend eternity in the watery abyss.

On the face of Anmar, eldest prince of House Kharos, was fixed a smile. In the end, the final command to his body had been his own.