As the vanguard squad continued down the main cobblestone path, Varric shook out his hands with a low whistle.
"Gotta admit, Raze… the newbie's punch had a bit of a sting to it." He flexed his fingers experimentally, trying to get the lingering sensation out of his joints. "He's got a pretty crazy grasp on his darkness magic."
Varric was the squad's resident tank—he specialized in heavy, earth-based defensive magic.
His ass could absorb a ridiculous amount of punishment and dish it right back out, so the fact that he was actively complaining about a sting meant James's counter-strike carried serious kinetic weight.
While Raze's fists felt like they were trying to burn you alive from the inside out, James's punch felt like it wanted to pull you into a localized vacuum, maximizing the internal damage.
Raze's expression darkened instantly
. "Are you seriously implying that parasitic bug is a threat to me?"
He was thoroughly annoyed.
He refused to be outdone by a kid who had been a wolf for barely two weeks.
Alpha lineage or not—and he knew Alphas were biological anomalies who grew and mastered their traits at an absurd pace—he didn't care.
The boy might get stronger than him fifty years down the line, but he'd be damned if he let it happen today. "Do you honestly believe I would lose to someone who doesn't even know how to control his own form?"
Kael Ashfang simply offered a smooth, knowing smile, his amber eyes glinting in the twilight.
"In a real fight, Raze, anything is a possibility. Complacency is exactly how frontliners get turned into casualties."
"Tch. Shut the hell up, Kael," Raze growled, his bloodfire veins pulsing with irritation as the squad continued to bicker and argue down the path.
Kael wasn't just spouting random bullshit, and everyone knew it. Even Selka Frostfang—the usually cold, aloof girl of the unit—had noticed the anomaly.
It had only been two weeks, and this human kid was making mechanical progress that took natural-born wolves years to master.
He was out here collecting supernatural milestones like Pokémon cards. In this clan, that kind of monstrous growth curve was only ever seen in one other person: Lady Luna.
James was a certified monster in the making.
James watched the squad disappear around the corner, keeping his guard up just in case they tried to double back and finish off the guy on the floor.
He wasn't aware of it yet, but the vanguard would never do something that underhanded.
Pack law was absolute, and killing a pack brother without a direct, justifiable reason was viewed as a cardinal sin.
If you crossed that line without it being an act of absolute self-defense, the entire pack would hunt your ass down to the ends of the earth.
James dropped his defensive stance and looked down at the dirt. "Oh right, almost forgot about you."
He walked back over to the unconscious man, hooking an arm under his shoulder and pulling him up. "Come on, buddy. Let's get you sorted."
James hoisted the man up, draping the warrior's heavy arm over the back of his neck.
'He's surprisingly light,' James thought.
Then he corrected himself—it wasn't that the guy was light, it was just that James's new biological baseline allowed him to lift literal tons.
The warrior was completely out cold, dead to the world.
"Let's get you some actual medical help," James muttered, beginning the short haul toward Selene's boutique.
Reaching the rustic building, he turned the brass knob with his free hand and nudged the heavy door open.
The second he stepped inside, the familiar, rich scent of dried herbs and boiling copper hit his nostrils.
Selene was behind the curved wooden counter, right in the middle of grinding down an assortment of raw roots.
She looked up, her expression shifting from mild curiosity to brief confusion, before her eyes locked onto the battered, bleeding casualty James was hauling across her floorboards.
"By the spirits…." Selene dropped her stone pestle, rushing out from behind the counter to inspect the broken warrior.
"What on earth could have happened to him?"
The guy looked like he had barely survived a meat grinder, so her dramatic reaction was entirely warranted.
James dragged the man over to the vintage leather cot he had occupied just a few hours prior, gently laying him down.
"I don't know the full story. I was just walking down the hill when a tavern door came flying out into the street," James explained, gesturing vaguely toward the road.
"This guy came flying out right behind it and hit a stone wall hard. From what I gathered, Raze was using him as a personal punching bag because he made some comment about Luna dumping him. And instead of shutting his mouth when Raze got mad, this madman decided to talk even more shit."
The moment Luna's name left James's mouth, Selene let out a heavy, deeply disappointed sigh.
"That Raze kid is still throwing his pathetic little tantrums, I see."
To her, a violent street brawl was just a child's temper tantrum.
Selene had been alive since the 1500s; with Raze barely hitting the 180-year mark, his angry ass was practically a toddler in her eyes.
James raised an eyebrow. Temper tantrums? Really? He decided it wasn't his place to question the scale of elderly werewolf perspective. "Does this kind of thing happen often around here?"
Instead of answering his question directly, she turned toward a high wooden shelf lined with various glass jars.
"Could you be a sweetheart and grab me my healing mush, munchkin?"
James walked over to the shelf, scanning the rows of identical dark pastes. "Uh, which one is it?"
"The one that smells like an exceptionally angry werewolf," she replied softly.
James blinked, leaning in to sniff the glass containers.
To his utter surprise, his nose instantly picked out the correct one.
He had no fucking idea how his brain knew what an angry wolf smelled like, but the distinct odor practically growled at his sinuses the moment he got close.
"Got it," he said, pulling the jar down and handing it to her. "This stuff smells wild."
"It's ogre blood," Selene replied calmly, unscrewing the lid. "Ogres possess an incredibly rapid cellular regeneration rate. While certain parts of their anatomy can be distilled into temporary strength elixirs, mixing their concentrated blood with the proper stabilizing ingredients creates an exceptionally potent health potion."
She reached for a small vial of glowing blue fluid, carefully counting the drops over the paste.
'One, two, three.'
"Though, a baseline werewolf cannot fully digest raw ogre essence under normal circumstances," she continued.
"Their natural healing is simply too fast. The werewolf immune system refuses to allow any foreign threat to remain in the body, so the moment ogre blood enters the tract, the system completely deletes it before it can do its job."
James frowned, trying to follow the supernatural biology. So it's lowkey like drinking liquid cancer. "Wait, then how does the potion actually work if the body just destroys it?"
"Luckily, that is exactly what we use silver for."
James blinked, taking a step back. "Yo, isn't silver like a massive, fatal weakness for your species?"
"Don't worry, only pure, concentrated silver poses a lethal threat," she said with a reassuring smile.
"I use a highly diluted, micro-dose of liquid silver to temporarily weaken the patient's immune system just enough to allow the ogre blood to bypass their defenses and knit the tissue."
"You added exactly three drops, though," James pointed out.
She smiled warmly at his observation. "I did. That provides a window of roughly thirty seconds."
"So... is it like ten seconds per drop?"
Selene let out a soft chuckle at his innocent math. "If only alchemy were that simple, dear."
She shook her head, her expression turning serious as she loaded the silver-imbued mixture into a massive, heavy-duty syringe.
"Hold him still."
James complied, leaning over the cot to pin the unconscious man's shoulders down, entirely confused as to why he needed to restrain a dude who was completely dead to the world.
He quickly found his answer.
The exact millisecond the needle pierced the warrior's arm and the fluid entered his system, the unconscious man's body violently convulsed.
His eyes snapped open, glowing a rabid crimson as his muscles expanded, his fangs tearing through his gums, and his claws extending wildly.
"AHHHHHH!" the warrior screamed, thrashing against the mattress.
James gritted his teeth, his arms tensing as he was forced to deploy more and more of his baseline physical strength to keep the shifting wolf pinned to the leather.
"Keep him down! Don't let him break the alignment!" Selene commanded, her voice steady as she steadily depressed the plunger, injecting the entire dose.
James slammed his knee down across the man's midsection, effectively trapping his torso and pinning his flailing wrists against the frame.
The guy's legs were still kicking like crazy, rattling the entire iron cot.
Selene swiftly moved back to her workspace, rummaging through a drawer of exotic powders.
"I'm not trying to rush you or anything, but he's actively transforming right now!" James yelled, his voice laced with genuine panic.
The guy was getting noticeably bulkier by the second, and James was having to exert serious effort just to keep from getting thrown across the room.
"Hold on for just a second longer, sugar," she murmured, scanning her jars. "Ah, there it is."
She hurried back over to the bedside, holding a small pouch of silver-flecked dust.
"This should help."
James's brow furrowed heavily as he struggled against the thrashing vanguard. 'Should?' Yeah, he really didn't like the uncertainty of that word.
Selene leaned over and blew a fine mist of the powder directly into the thrashing warrior's face. Almost instantly, the man's frantic breathing slowed.
His features began to recede, the claws shrinking back into nails as his entire body went completely limp, slipping back into a deep, peaceful slumber.
"Oh, wow. It actually worked," James breathed a heavy sigh of relief, easing his weight off the man's chest.
Selene let out her own sigh of relief as the warrior's chest began to rise and fall in a steady, healthy rhythm.
Through his torn shirt, James could literally watch the jagged purple bruises and fractured ribs knitting themselves back together at a visible pace. The ogre blood was putting in overtime.
"What exactly was that powder?" James asked, thoroughly fascinated by the magical roofie she had just deployed.
"That was Queen Moth powder," Selene explained, storing the pouch away.
"The royal variants use it inside their cocoons to keep their targets completely sedated and relaxed."
"Oh, well that doesn't sound too bad."
"Yes, it keeps them entirely tranquilized so that even as their larvae slowly feast on the host's living body, the victim never wakes up."
The room went dead silent. James's expression flattened. And there's the horror movie twist.
"And let me guess... their preferred prey happens to be—"
"Humans," Selene finished his sentence with a pleasant smile.
"In fact, you would be their absolute ideal type, munchkin. They prefer their hosts highly active and physically fit."
"Great. Perfect," James muttered sarcastically. "But like, if they just want a massive volume of food, couldn't they just kidnap out-of-shape fat guys? Why go after the fitness bros?"
"While they certainly could do that, the moths don't just feed on physical meat—they harvest your spiritual vitality, your essence. The healthier and more vibrant a target's lifestyle is, the higher the quality of the meal."
She paused, checking the patient's pulse.
"And furthermore, the young require the host to remain alive for weeks during the incubation phase. A compromised, unhealthy human has a far higher probability of suffering a cardiac arrest under the stress of the sedation. It simply isn't worth the biological trade-off for the hive."
Note to self, James thought grimly, eat more bacon cheeseburgers and log a metric ton of cheat days.
Fitness is officially a survival hazard.
He shook his head, bringing his focus back to the medical lecture.
"Also, why isn't it as simple as just adding more liquid silver to the mix if you want to extend the healing window?"
Selene smiled softly, her eyes crinkling at the corners.
"Aren't you just a curious little munchkin?"
James offered a sheepish, innocent grin.
"It's a delicate chemical balance, dear," she walked over to her desk, taking a seat as her fingers traced the spines of her library.
"First, there is the issue of werewolf tolerance. Second, while only pure silver can inflict permanent, fatal damage, a micro-dose is still fundamentally toxic to our biology. If you exceed the exact threshold, the body stops reacting to the healing properties entirely and goes into toxic shock. And as for why we use silver instead of wolfsbane—wolfsbane burns and destroys the magical core, while silver merely dampens the physical immune system. There is a vast anatomical difference."
She slid a thick, leather-bound volume off the shelf and slid it across the wood toward him.
"Here. If you're truly this curious, I am certain you will find this an enjoyable read."
James reached out, looking at the faded gold lettering on the cover:
{The Internal Biology and Magical Anatomy of the Lycanthrope.}
"Wow. Thank you, Ma'am," he said genuinely.
"You're very welcome, dear."
James held the book under his arm, suddenly remembering their earlier conversation before the medical emergency broke out.
"Oh, earlier, you mentioned that Raze used to be much better at hiding his real emotions under a mask of discipline when he was younger."
Selene's expression softened into that same ancient, weary look.
"Raze has always been exactly how he is now. The only difference is the control he used to maintain. I warned Luna about his true nature years ago... but young hearts rarely listen to old crones. Oh well."
Wanting to steer clear of the toxic ex-boyfriend baggage, James shifted his weight from one foot to the other.
"Hey, Miss Selene? Can I ask you something about... auras?"
Selene paused, turning her head with an intrigued glance.
"Did Luna actually take the time to explain the concept to you during your training?"
James let out a deeply wry, pained expression.
Luna literally beat my ass into the dirt for thirty minutes straight, what do you mean 'take the time to explain'?
"Yeah, she dropped a few details between strikes," James mumbled, keeping it brief.
She arched a silver eyebrow, a teasing smile playing on her lips. [her brown black]
"And why are you asking a frail old medic like me for combat advice? I'm certain you could find dozens of highly decorated vanguards down at the barracks who would love to flex their knowledge for the Alpha's new pup."
James's face instantly heated up, a prominent blush creeping across his cheeks as he nervously adjusted the collar of his shirt.
"Well... I mean, the whole aura thing feels incredibly spiritual. And, no offense to the gym bros downstairs, but you're like the most deeply spiritual person in this entire compound."
Selene let out a musical, delighted laugh at his flustered reaction, her presence radiating a warm, comforting energy that immediately put him at ease.
"Fair point, munchkin."
She leaned back against the counter, adjusting the fringe of her shawl. "Let me give you a foundational explanation. Every single living being in existence possesses an aura. Think of it as a unique spiritual frequency that your soul radiates outward. When a soul is born into the physical realm, Mother Nature imprints a specific baseline onto it. A human aura is the absolute foundation—the neutral canvas, if you will."
James blinked, his mind flashing back to his human life. "Huh. For real? Humans are just neutral?"
"Yes," Selene nodded, her expression turning slightly solemn. "And tragically, that absolute neutrality makes human souls incredibly useful for dark transmutation circles, blood sacrifices, and ancient bonding rituals."
James swallowed hard, a cold shiver running down his spine. "Ah... yeah. That tracks."
"To sum up the spiritual side of the equation," Selene continued, stepping closer, "your aura is essentially your spiritual core fusing directly with your physical biology. It is your inner essence—your very soul—manifesting as a tangible force field. That is precisely why your supernatural race dictates the baseline attributes of the aura you receive. A vampire's aura will always carry the frequency of stagnation and cold hunger, while a werewolf's aura is anchored in the primal heat of the beast."
To emphasize her point, she reached up and gently booped him on the tip of his nose.
"Understand, munchkin?"
Having an ancient, beautiful mystic tease him like a toddler did absolute numbers on James's blood pressure.
He blushed furiously, taking a half-step back while clearing his throat. "Yeah. Yeah, I completely understand."
"By the way," Selene noted, turning her gaze back to the resting patient on the cot. "Is this young man a close friend of yours?"
It was only in that exact moment that James realized something incredibly stupid. He blinked blankly at the cot. "...I don't actually know his name."
Selene stared at him, utterly amused. "You threw yourself between Raze Blackhowl's bloodfire fist and a complete stranger, and you don't even know who he is?"
"I mean... yeah," James said, rubbing the back of his neck.
Selene's pale eyes softened, studying his face with an intense, quiet curiosity. "Do you harbor a desire to be a hero, James? Is that what drives your spirit?"
"Not really," he said honestly.
"Are you certain?" she probed further, wanting to see beneath his casual demeanor.
"Positive," James replied, his tone perfectly grounded. "He was in danger, and I had the ability to help him. That's really all there is to it."
To the point, I see, she thought to herself.
"Still though... did you not think about the consequences? What could have happened to you if no one had stepped in?"
"Life is too short to live with regrets," James said, a genuine smile breaking across his face.
"I saved him simply because I wanted to."
Selene raised an eyebrow, her expression melting into pure amusement.
"Aw, aren't you just the most adorable thing?"
James groaned internally.
Wow, this lady is an elite tier teaser.
"So tell me," Selene leaned forward, her curiosity thoroughly piqued.
"Who taught you this philosophy? Was your family perhaps deeply religious? Christian, perhaps? That is usually the baseline rhetoric they preach, even if their history proves they act like monsters more often than not."
She narrowed her eyes slightly, clearly harboring some less-than-fond historical memories of old-world zealots.
"Oh, no, nothing like that," James clarified quickly. "My mom mostly just taught me to respect nature and the world around me. But my dad? He always talked about focusing on your own path and not letting outside voices dictate who you are."
Selene went completely still, her pale eyes locking onto his as his words hung in the quiet, herb-scented air of the clinic.
The sentiment was completely unique compared to what she was expecting.
A soft, deeply nostalgic smile slowly broke across her face, and she patted him gently on the shoulder.
"You must have had an absolutely amazing family, James."
A/N Selene is a black woman, who was alive during the 1500, she does not have the best of experience with Christianity.