Author notes

A somewhat bestial paladin

Hurricane Ivan

on May 22, 2011

This paladin, a holy knight of the Heliocentric order, though born a man, was inflicted with a terrible curse while fighting a demon.
One Samhain* night, early in his career, he was sent to investigate reports of a ruined temple being desecrated, and discovered a crowd of cloaked figures, chanting and circling around a shattered sun symbol. He leapt into the fray, sending terrified cultists fleeing in dismemberment and disarray, but too late, for as the last cloaked figure fled into the night, he turned to see a great horned demon rising from the shattered icon. Although the disrupted ritual was not enough to draw the terrible fiend fully into the real world, it was just complete enough to allow the demon to turn the full force of its wrath and disappointment on a brave but foolhardy paladin. The spell it cast reverberated through the night, and with
The paladin awoke the next day, in flesh alien to him, grossly transfigured into the shape of a beast. Through the strength of his faith, the paladin overcame this obstacle to become one of the most renowned holy knights in the history of his order. Because of the incident, however, he is remembered by history as the world's most influential wolf.


*The cultural ancestor of halloween, believed my miscellaneous Celts to be be a time in which the otherworld** could spill over into the world of mortals.

*Not a fun place in Celtic mythology.