"I am ready to pay a bag of gold to the one who, having defeated the white wolf, will bring me his head!" The voice of a gentleman who arrived in Matariel last night from the nearby town of Moloch boomed over the square.

Hiding a grin under a thick mustache, he watched with delight the anxious crowd, who looked warily at each other. The white wolf was known for its ferocity, but poverty, spreading like a plague, forced people to take desperate measures.

At night, armed with pitchforks and torches, the newly formed squad went in search of the white wolf. Frightened, driven by a thirst for money, they wandered among the trees that looked like one. It seemed that the forest itself was protecting the beast, disorienting uninvited guests who had strayed into its territory. Impenetrable fog, feet sinking into the ground wet after the rain, tree branches reaching out to them like hands.

The wolf, slowly creeping, approached from behind. The desire to attack them was too great, but it was enough just to growl once, so that the would-be hunters, frightened, rushed in different directions. One fell with a screech, the second almost pierced the third with a pitchfork.

The hunt ended before it even started.

Few people knew about the real human nature of the wolf: two witches living in the forest, and several people from Moloch, the city where he was condemned to eternal suffering as punishment for a misdemeanor, turning the once famous Lieutenant Simon Riley into a beast. Into a wolf that could only assume human form when the moon was hiding behind the horizon.

Returning to the camouflaged cave hidden in the recess of the mountain, he waited there until dawn, not closing his eyes for a moment, listening. And at sunrise, when the wolf's skin was replaced by a human form, Simon, exhausted, fell asleep on a bed of leaves.

And when he opened his eyes only after several hours, the first thing he saw was a human shadow flickering on the wall.