Quicunque

So it's time again already for PanErotica's annual Hallowe'en Drabble Challenge. The theme this year is "Dead but Dreaming" which is a hell of a tough theme but I have only myself to blame because I set it. Yes, I am slightly crazy...

This is my entry for this season's drabble challenge at Pan Erotica - 100 words on the theme of 'winter'. I based this on one of my collaborative fiction characters, a werewolf named Winter, whose story I wrote in 'Love Bites' in the Doors novel at PE a few years ago. It was nice to revisit him, albeit in a brief vignette.

Winter solstice; a far-off bell strikes the midnight hour.

Ash-grey and moon-silver, a wolf runs along the wood’s snow-shrouded edge. Pausing to snuff the familiar woodsmoke drifting across the frosted air from the tumbledown farm below, it raises its head to howl a night-song that pierces the glittering stillness like an arrow.

In the darkness of an upper window, a light flares up before banking to a steady glow. The wolf’s lover tends the beacon-torch that guides him home from his wilderness, until the night he too can shed his skin and dance with his mate in the moonlit snow.

A drabble is a literary form originating from the science fiction fandom of Birmingham University in the 1980s. It is a concise and self-contained story told in exactly 100 words, no more, no less. Drabble contests with a given theme and time limit are popular in fanfiction. Expressing a complete and meaningful story within the strict confines of a limited number of words provides an excellent writing exercise for authors wishing to practise brevity and is harder than you think it’s going to be!

This post (including the links below) is perfectly drabble-sized.

• The Drabble Project
• A Very Short Anthology