Silver Creek interruptus

At last, the creek emerges within the foliage, growing from an impossibly tiny trickle of water to the steady flow with which she is more familiar. Addison follows it, nose low, her paws leaving faint tracks through the mud. The stream is her ticket home.

Addison does not remember how they took her, and she will never know why. One moment, she was quietly collecting herbs; the next, she felt a pressure 'round her neck, something bitter and cold forced between her lips—and then she awoke in a place she had never seen before, surrounded by unfamiliar, unsmiling faces. Judging her. Sizing her up. As if they were to make a meal of her.

Well, they did. They ate her soul.

Whatever dark magic they had worked upon her had wormed its way into her already-black heart and rotted it further. What was once cold is now dead. Her colorless gaze is glazed over, her once virtuous mind sullied. They gave her poppies to calm her, and did spells over her half-conscious form. . .and oh, these spells! Carnal, primal—violent spells.

A virgin of the flesh she may still be, but she is no longer pure. The Odolf witch—she once so fondly thought of herself as such, but it is no longer hyperbole. She is bewitched, ensnared, malignant. All who touch her shall die.

Will the children that grow within her womb fester in similar fashion? Will they emerge as demons, eager to consume, rather than the proud, handsome beings they should be? Part of her loathes the thought of bringing such evil to the world, and yet, the choice is not hers to make, if she is to return. Without the promise of pups, she is worthless to her brothers.

So the witches. . .or the Odolfs. Caught between two worlds, both unforgiving.

Addison stops by a bend in the creek and sends a howl to @Grayson, the sound of it unmistakably hollow, broken. Like a vase, cracked in two, put back together—but wrong.