The Wolf’s Witch: Izzy

Every protagonist needs a mentor; someone that’ll tease out the wants and wishes buried in their heart while giving them the necessary skills to chase them. For Elke Wolf, that person is Izzy and they met, briefly, a long time before the events of Wolf…

Nobody knows Izzy’s full name, not even her closest confidant Karl Klausener. In-fact, it’s anyone’s guess as to whether Izzy knows her own name, but a name is only a title, not a life story. For years Izzy has visited Berges, on and off, where she would park her caravan not far from the town’s gates, throw open the doors at its back and peddle her services; tinctures for Gout, potions and brews for aches and pains — cures and the like. It was on one of these visits, no-less, that Elke first met her; waving with her tiny hand at the smiling Witch as her Father dragged her onward.

Funnily, it would be many years later that they would meet again (and a stroke of luck indeed that they had):

...At the terminal below was a gaggle of maids, chatting with hushed tones and darting eyes. I parted them quickly and made for the narrow, choking streets of the town, relieved to have her cobbled veins underfoot once more. A week had passed since my last visit for something I couldn’t recall, yet in my twenty years Berges had never changed, only the people had gotten older, gradually, almost painfully. The same fishmonger peddled his catch at the same rickety cart I would’ve passed as a child, the same smith hammered with the same tool, the same florist used her same shears in the same window, the same Witch...
	Witch?
	I... I hadn’t seen her in years, but still I remembered waving at her with my little hand at the time as Father dragged me onwards. Berges’ Witch had the cure for everything; piles, warts, thrush – you name it and she could quash it. She operated out of the back of her oddly decorated caravan that two fine, black horses would pull. It must’ve been at least six, maybe seven years since I last saw that wagon, last saw her in passing, and of all the faces that had grown older, hers had remained the same – youthful, scorned, dark-eyed.
	“Fine Morning, Elke Wolf,” she called as I tried to hurry by. “Have you a moment?”
	“For what?” I turned, still walking, and called back.
	A queasy smile lit up her features beneath her ragged-edged hood. “To discuss your funeral.”

An omen of things to come, Elke would eventually relive what Izzy had already gone through, though under far different circumstances. Still, it would be a bond shared by both and motivation enough for Izzy to take on with the life of the young Wolf. The scene below is from Izzy’s perspective and picks up after stealing a battered Elke away from Berges to meet Karl.

“No,” he said with an anger I’d never heard in his voice before. “You’ve got that right.” He paused then, staring into the quietly crackling fire. “Were there any others?”
	I threw another log at it and pulled my cloak closed. “Presumably. I saw them carry one off.”
	He grumbled. “To where?”
	“Who knows?”
	He tossed a bundle of sticks at the burning log. “For what reason?”
	“I have my suspicions.” Elke stirred, mumbling something. She stopped then, returning to whatever was going on under her lone eyelid. “Thank you, Karl.”
	“Anything for an old flame,” he smiled. “Have you an idea of what you’ll do when she wakes?”
	'Is there anything I can do?' I thought. When our lives go well, we don’t think of how we’ll handle the bad days. For Elke, two hours of a party had decided the rest of her life and she had no say in the matter whatsoever. Part of me wanted to let her die, let her fade away, to have been a few seconds late or to have not bothered at all. Though the other part of me knew she deserved more than that, she deserved a fighting chance at restarting her life, if that was what she sought – it’s what all of them deserved, but to her I was able to give it.
	I don’t know if she remembered seeing me all those years ago, being dragged along by her brute of a Father to the Tavern, but I remembered her and I remembered the little wave she’d given me as they went by. That wave stuck with me; a random act of kindness that a child had shown, not because she was told to, but because she wanted to. I think that’s why I saved her, why I fought to keep her alive; she’d only ever done what she wanted, at least until Drachenzahn sunk its teeth into her...
	Perhaps, perhaps I’d give the Wolf her fangs back; to fight, to maim, to kill.

Much to Karl’s veiled dismay, Izzy does exactly that. Elke’s training would be grueling, but in her heart she knew nothing else would do:

Minutes turned to hours, hours turned to days and days turned to four weeks. Four long weeks and seven graves dug for each one.
	Izzy woke me every single morning by pulling me out of the caravan and attempting to beat the shit out of me. That lasted for a week until I surprised her on one of those cruel mornings by making up the caravan as normal and sleeping elsewhere. While she wasn’t happy about the beating she’d got, she was ecstatic that I was starting to learn, to think for myself, to anticipate and react. By the end of the third week we had started practicing with knives; four hours every morning, giving me the evening to tend to my wounds under Izzy’s instruction, dig that day’s grave, to practice shooting and the rest to sleep away my fatigue.
	Karl had been teaching me everything he knew about guns, ammunition and the proper handling of both in between. Being left with only one eye made disassembling and reassembling harder than everything else combined. Though by the third week I could nearly – nearly – strip my C96 down and put it back together again without looking. It was then he let me use the rifle and, once I’d gotten the hang of it, we ate like the King and Queen’s of the forest, thanks in no small part to my quick hands (my aim be damned).
	By that fourth week’s end I was ready. Ready to put that laughing knot in one of those graves.
	Between that hateful pine and I was at least forty, maybe fifty strides; long ones, too. Karl and Izzy sat somewhere behind, waiting, with a pocket watch shared between their cupped hands, waiting, for me to miss just as I always would. In one smooth, quick and satisfying motion I pulled, aimed and fired. The resulting smoke wasn’t long clearing.
	“Well I’ll be...” Karl whispered.
	“Did she?” Izzy asked.
	Surrounding the trunk, lying scattered across the dew-dripped blades of grass were shards of darker, veined, still-smoking wood, wood that had been blown clean from a knot that had never been hit before (granted, the rest of the tree had; many, many times). The pistol twirled back into my holster and I grinned, no, I smiled bloody stupid at what I’d done. “How fast was I?”
	They stood up, staring in disbelief at the watch’s face. “Less than a second,” Karl said, shaking his head. That, that small utterance made the last four weeks worth it. “She’s done it.”
	“That she has,” Izzy shook him excitedly. “Then it’s time.”
	“Time?” I asked.
	She moved and began gathering whatever she could carry in her arms. “Time to meet a man about some guns.”

From concerned bystander to unwilling teacher, Izzy has a monumental task ahead of her; Elke more-so, but her and Karl are coming along whether she wants them to or not. Izzy isn’t nice, but the world, her life experiences, her own journey made her like this and, seeing little in the way of an alternative, she must remake her Wolf in the same fashion she herself had been — it’s the only way she can be sure that Elke will be fit to survive:

In such a perfect world, Elke would’ve, could’ve been our daughter and we may have run an Apothecary. I would mix tinctures and tonics while Karl and Elke went off to gather the ingredients. In the evenings, after we’d close for the day, we’d sit around the hearth in our cosy living room and share dinner, share supper, discuss our wants and wishes, our dreams and desires... But that wasn’t to be for any of us – no matter how much we each wanted our own version of paradise.
	Karl, I think, was unable to let go of that dream, not that exact one of course, but the dream that Elke was ours and that we’d share our little corner of the world. That aspect of his being, it got on my nerves at times, but I admired him for it. Maybe he was right after all? Maybe we had pushed her too hard? In my blind quest to keep her head busy, did I go too far? I had only taught her what I had to teach myself...
	No.
	Many see the world as cruel, but it’s not, not really. Apathetic, more-so. It doesn’t care about us and that’s why those who care so little of others do so well in it. The Reimstadts, those brigands at Abel’s house, the men who stole me away in the dead of night and forced themselves on me, the thing I was offered to afterwards... They cared little about the girl, only the use she had for them. Elke was the exact same and I couldn’t bear to see the uncaring claim another bright future, not on my watch and certainly not on Karl’s. But they did, in the end.
	That’s why I had to, to teach her all I knew, train her to fend for herself. I gave her the tools to take back what was stolen from her. What was stolen from all of us. And as mad as Karl was with me, he surely knew in his heart of hearts that I was right to do what I’d done, what we had both done. Elke, in time, would see it too and, whether she hated me for it or not, I would be happy that I’d given her such a gift; the same gift no one gave to me.
	Another thought entered my mind, strolled its borders, glanced and nodded at the pictures and ornaments and finally smiled with a devilish grin. Her graves were dug, that was it, that was the goal I’d set for her and, if she was anything like me, she’d now be inclined to sneak away in the dead of night and venture to Berges; as if she was doing us a favour by going it alone. She’d need a map and a fine horse to take her the two hundred-odd miles; both of which I had...
	It saddened me to think of her leaving us, to think she wouldn’t want us to come with her, to think of her heading off into the darkness, into the unknown, into the maw...
	Of course.
	The sudden reckoning I felt forced me to steady myself on a shelf of ointments. It was a spark of worry that made me stop her in the street, a spark of fear that told me to tell her what I knew, a spark of pain that sent me into that ballroom to save her; only this was no spark, it was a roaring blaze. I felt, I felt as Karl did about her. I remarked once that it was good that they were bonding, yet all this time we had been bonding too – imprinting like a wolf to her cub, my cub, my Elke.
	Our future remained uncertain, but I knew in my bones that there were many sleepless nights ahead.

When writing ‘the mentor‘, it’s difficult not to wander onto Gandalf Boulevard or Obi-Wan Avenue. But, the mentor in your story doesn’t necessarily have to be nice, do they? So long as they provide wise, storied advice from a place of knowledge and, ultimately, help your protagonist in their journey, isn’t that mentor-y enough? With regards to Wolf, it’s certainly something I’ve never tried before…

Auf Wiedersehen.