August 27, 2025

The Revenant
by KDP Wildwood

When I was seventeen, I lost a sheep from my father’s flock, out at the edges of the summer pasture. I was up watching over them, as I always did, every year, since I’d been twelve and old enough to lift the oversized shepherd’s crook my father gave me.
I didn’t see it happen. I hadn’t heard it in the night. All I found the following morning was blood and fleece, leftover from the attack.  It was scattered over the rocks at the forest’s edge. One of the sheep had wandered off, all the way there, and been taken, presumably by a wolf.
This wasn’t how wolves hunted. I stayed up late and made sure the sheep were within my sight the next few nights.
That was it. I kept a closer eye over them that year and lost no others. “It happens,” my father told me. “Don’t let it happen again.”
When I was eighteen, I lost four sheep from my father’s flock, out at the edges of the summer pasture. I was not careful enough, and every morning I found their blood and their fleece scattered over the edges of the trees. Flung into the branches, spattered over the trunks.
I asked for help. I asked for someone to hunt the beast. But no one ever came up to the high pastures, because they were haunted.
My father was angry. But he couldn’t afford someone else to watch over them; he couldn’t pay a hunter to search the alpine slopes for a lone wolf, and he couldn’t pay a stonemason and his apprentices to build a fence that would stop the wilds from coming for his flock. So he had to settle for me, alone, with a shepherd’s crook still too large for my hands and an oil lantern that sputtered when I swung it too hard out towards the dark.
There were sounds in the hills. I told myself it was the wolf, out there, somewhere. It had to be. A wolf, alone, screaming in the night.
When I was nineteen, I lost six sheep from my father’s flock, out at the edges of the summer pasture. My father did not notice. Five people went missing from the tiny village nestled between the sheer shale slopes, and the town huddled in on itself. I only knew because a messenger came to tell me, far up in the mountains, that my father wanted me to stay there, for it was too dangerous to return to the valley.
“But,” I said to the messenger, “there is a wolf up here.”
“There’s worse down there,” she said, and nothing else. She watched me carefully, through the corners of her eyes. She knew who I was. She knew of my past. She was frightened of me. She knew I was bad luck.
Two nights after that, I lost three sheep in one attack.
I gathered the remainder of the flock and tried to keep them safe, hidden from the wolf. But you can’t escape the eyes in the dark, the nose of a wolf, not alone in the mountains. That is its home, and you are a trespasser, no matter how long you’ve been there.
I lost two more sheep. I had no choice. I had to find the wolf myself, and kill it, or it would devour my father’s livelihood, piece by piece.
What worried me most was their behaviour. Even as their number dwindled, the sheep were not afraid. Whatever was killing them did not frighten them. Something had to be luring them away without scaring the rest of the flock.
This was no wolf. It was far too intelligent and long-lived to be a single beast, flesh and blood and teeth.
I waited, putting out the lanterns, to see it, know it. It did not come while I watched.
The messenger returned. Three more people had gone missing from the town. Two bodies had been found, skulls caved in. She did not look at me as she spoke. She kept her eyes down and twisted her hands together and never got too close.
I did not make her stay.
This was not the hunger of an animal. This was wanting, hunger, unceasing, unsatisfied by the warm blood of my father’s flock.
It never came while I was watching. But it stole three more sheep away in the night, under my watch; once I even chased after a shape in the dark to find a dead trail, and when I returned to the flock I found another one of them missing.
The messenger came back a third time, to tell me my father had vanished along with three others. Four were found, all killed the same way, crushed. Faces battered, bones broken. Beaten to death as though by stones, even though they were found on a grassy hill.
I returned to the flock, and wrapped myself in my cloak, and gripped the crook in my hands until I could no longer feel my fingertips pressing into the smooth wood.
No one else pastured their sheep up here, in the high valleys. No one was willing to do so; these places were sacred, and evil, and haunted. All of these, and more, and I, already cursed, was the only one who could walk this desecrated ground, because I could do no more harm to it – but more importantly, it could do no more harm to me.
The spire-spines of the mountains could not tear me apart. The unhallowed wilds held no sway over me; I, a tainted soul, could not be pulled away from truth, from good. I have already fallen, and will never be able to rise. The closest I can get is to stand on the peaks.
When I was fourteen, I killed my only friend in a narrow valley, scree-rock slopes and precariously balanced boulders on the slipping mudstone. He fell into the ravine, and could not escape, for the sides were too slippery.
He was not friendly, but he was all I had. He gave me marks of his affection - bruises on my arms, shoulders, sometimes on my face. But it was only ever in good fun.
In the ravine, he begged me for help. He said to go and fetch a rope and call his father, who would pull him out. Instead I walked along the edge and pushed the rocks in, one by one, and eventually he could not dodge them swiftly enough, and they broke him to pieces and buried him.
I told the village he had disappeared. I told them he had fallen into the stones and vanished. They found him, and they never forgave me.
There are no wolves up in the mountains this high, up at the summer pasture. Even they fear to tread the unhallowed ground. They do not walk this grass; only the sheep are stupid enough to follow me up past the watching-stones that guard the path.
These places are haunted, and so am I.
I waited until I could see him. He had always been able to play tricks on people, stealing things from them, setting little traps. When he appeared, at the edge of the woods, I only watched.
He touched a sheep, and it followed him away from the flock to the edge of the trees. He ripped it to pieces with his hands - fingers like claws, stronger than any beast, tore the legs from the body and hurled them into the trees. He shoved the flesh down his throat, and he had to move his jaw with one hand, for his skull was too broken and misshapen for him to close his mouth without it.
When he had finished shoving fistfuls of raw, steaming mutton down his throat, he let his jaw hang slack again from his lumpy head, points of bone poking through the gray skin – falling open all the way, so I could see where his tongue hung limp and dry, and his teeth gleamed slick with blood in the moonlight – and used both hands to haul the corpse away into the trees.
It is vengeance that he seeks, a repayment in blood. Not the blood of the animals. It never was. It is mine he wants, mine he needs. He cannot rest while I walk. Where he steps, the grass crumbles to dust, like the dust that coats his hair and rests on his glazed eyes.
If I do not follow him into the woods, he will break my father’s skull to pieces, and take those from the village until they are all gone and only I remain, alone. Either I will join him, or he will leave me but take everyone else. As if I am not already alone because of him.
I have driven the sheep down towards the valley. They will go, as I have sent them; this pasture is no longer safe. It is too cursed even for them. It holds only death.
As it will for me. I have left my father’s shepherd’s crook planted between the watching-stones as a warning. Do not follow. Do not come this way.
There is nothing for you here. There is nothing for anyone here.
Now I go back up to the pasture, to the tiny wooden hut where I would sleep, and I will blow the oil lantern out, and leave it on the window-sill, next to the glass, and I will close the door and make sure it will not blow open, and I will turn, and I will follow him into the dark.

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K. D. P. Wildwood is a trans Midwestern author living in Ohio with his husband and their cat. He enjoys tabletop games, observing the weather, gardening, and horror media.