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Gareth's body jumped out of bed at Loki's howl. Before his mind recognized the reality, his hands threw heavy cloaks across his shoulders and grabbed the first ax weapon he saw hanging upon the wall.
Gareth held little confidence in the gripped weapon. He feared to guess for how many generations that ax had hung in the keep. The fingers remaining on his right hand already cramped for the weapon's weight.
Gareth instead placed his faith his faith in Asguard, who barked and hopped at his side, anxious to answer Loki's howl.
“Slow Asguard,” Gareth commanded his dog. “Slow and search.”
The well-trained and disciplined Asguard slowed so that Gareth could follow his dark shape through the dim halls invaded by fog. Asguard detected the alien scent, the damp smell of earth and decay that the dog knew had no place within the keep of the Stonebrook kings. Asguard's instincts urged him to sprint into the dark, but the dog's training reminded him to keep Gareth at his side. For the two of them were a team, an army of two, and Asguard knew that together they offered the best defense.
They turned a corner and Loki's howling turned into a barking cacophony.
“Wren's in danger! Seek and fly, Asguard!”
Asguard bolted down the hallway. Loki's barks were furious and hardly a moment passed before Asguard's howls joined with those of his pack brother. Gareth heard the sound of men waking between the noise of the dogs, heard the shuffling of boots, the jostling of quickly-grabbed weaponry. Gareth pressed forward and prayed to the Maker that Loki and Asguard would be enough to protect Wren until the help mobilizing at his back arrived to face what lurked in the mist, what penetrated to the keep's royal chambers. Gareth swallowed for courage, failing to strike away the visions of his brother Luke's bloody chamber that tormented his worry.
Gareth faced the open doorway to Wren's chamber as he made a final turn in the hall. Framed by that room's threshold, Wren's face shuddered in terror. Gareth froze as his eyes struggled to focus upon the dark shape that shambled in the fog between himself and Wren. The shape shared a man's dimensions, but Gareth's failed to recognize the dark mass due to the number of appendages that sprouted from the thing's core.
The fog and the light shifted so that better illumination struck the mass. Wren screamed. Gareth heard the ax his right hand had held clatter upon the stone hall.
“Don't move, Wren!”
Gareth trembled as his mind stammered at the sight of the furious thing in front of him. Loki and Asguard circled a horrible, headless form of mismatched and motley arms and legs. Neither dog winced as their gray eyes glared upon the many mouths sewn into hands and feet, so that every limb swung at the war dogs was a weapon filled with snapping teeth. Though so terrible a form to pin mankind into stiff fear, Loki and Asguard faced the foul interloper without hesitation. The moment one of the creature's arms or legs swung at one of the war dogs, the other jumped and snapped at the animated mass of decayed flesh that invaded the Stonebrook keep.
The war dogs moved too quickly, with too much focus and confidence, for the ghoul to defend itself from their snapping bites. Asguard and Loki pulled away after each attack with shards of flesh gripped between their teeth. Gareth watched with a rolling stomach as the fingers and hands the dogs dropped before new attacks upon the ghoul fought to crawl back to the thing of arms and legs that had lurched through the fog to trespass upon the Stonebrook throne.
Asguard and Loki's attacks never wavered. Those dogs did not care that such a foul assembly of scavenged limbs upon an unnatural creature was evidence of dark magic. Monsters of terror and gore, of so many snarling mouths filled with chattering teeth, remained a threat, and so Asguard and Loki defended their pack against danger no matter its shape.
The creature's limbs had been joined to its core at awkward angles, and though so many arms ended in hands seeking to choke, none of those limbs could move quickly enough to deliver any defense or blow against the gray-eyed dogs ripping upon it.
Asguard and Loki's attacks grew more furious as the creature grew weaker. Gore covered both of the dogs. Mucous and blood dripped from their teeth. Still, Asguard and Loki fell upon the beast as their pants froze into vapor within the hallway's chill.
“Praise the Maker for such dogs!”
“Praise the crowning of the Dog King!”
The voices of the keep's guards at Gareth's back roused the new Stonebrook king to his senses.
“Asguard! Loki! Here!”
Though they attacked with such ferocity, the dogs instantly obeyed Gareth's command and bounded to his side. Loki still gripped a severed and writhing arm between his teeth.
“Out Loki!”
The dog dropped the arm and Gareth kicked the limb back at the stumbling, dripping thing of gore that shuffled in the hall.
“Quick! Grab the sconces!” Gareth shouted to the guards. “Set that monster to the flame!”
Fear had frozen them all that moment they looked upon the creature. But Gareth's war dogs inspired courage. Gareth stepped forward first and set his flame to the creature. The guards quickly followed their new king's example. The mouths sewn upon that monster of scavenged arms and legs howled and cried as the flames fed upon it. The creature that burned was the most terrible manifestation of the fog yet, but Asguard and Loki had not flinched, nor had Gareth's men hesitated to join those dogs in combat against the creature. That gave Gareth hope that he still had a chance to mobilize an army of dog and man to combat whatever ghouls and shadows the fog would bring them.
Gareth reached Wren as the burning creature writhed on the hall's stone floor. The smell of the smoke rising from the monster sickened the stomach, and Wren leaned against her brother as he stepped through her chamber's threshold.
“It's over, Wren. The wicked thing burns.”
Wren pressed her eyes into Gareth's arm. “And Loki?”
“He is unharmed,” Gareth smiled. “He proudly stands at your side.”
Wren pulled away from Gareth and embraced her black war dog.
“You can never leave me, Loki.” Wren cried. “I command you to never leave my side.”
Covered in gore, Loki smiled. Though only a few moments earlier he had engaged in deadly combat with a foul and wicked monster of reanimated arms and legs, Loki craned his neck and licked Wren's cheek before jumping back upon the warm blankets of the room's bed.
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