As he bathed the dogs in the yard, Fabian was beset with several questions, the most pressing of which was about the last week, passed in a seemingly comatose state. Had he been able to best his transformative nightmare at last? If so, it would be the first month in ten years that he hadn't turned with the moon. His initial reaction was to yell with the dogs in excitement, but his inward cheering was dampened when he remembered: he didn't know what he remembered. For all Fabian knew, he'd murdered a slew of people and been caught, cleaned, and bedded before he could come to his senses.

The likelihood of being cared for instead of burned at once at the stake was ridiculous, and so Fabian, knowing he couldn't very well understand why he hadn't turned, or what transpired during his week-long sleep, took to caring for the dogs with all of his energy.

Gretchen had heard of Sir Willem's foul theory, but not knowing the man to be much of a liar, soon sought out Fabian for a panicked desire to know she wasn't infected with something he could have passed along. "It would be most embarrassing," she stuttered, turning an angry shade of red, "if I should be... blighted with something of this nature."

"Blighted?" She had the sense to look ashamed of the word when Fabian raised a honeyed eyebrow.

"Yes, it's not a perfect word, but I'm not a lord with a headful of fancy ones to use. At any rate, I must know if you've given me anything. To think, me being the bearer of... of syphilis, or something horrible, after just the one time...!" Wringing her hands together, Gretchen hopped over a loosened stone in the garden and looked pleadingly up at Fabian. "You don't have anything, do you?"

This line of questioning was annoying Fabian, so he resorted to not answering it. Instead, he pinned one of the village dogs to the ground and grasped her paw, rubbing vigorously at the pad where the toes connected. There had been a burr stuck in it for days now, and the dog was completely against being held long enough to have it removed, despite the discomfort it caused her. Dogs were funny that way - always whining for help, but biting whoever went near them. Fabian had been bitten at least a hundred times by the village dogs (the lord's never so much as pawed him without an express command to do so), but the wounds were never any worse than what Fabian had done to himself.

His thoughts had almost distracted him from Gretchen's presence, but then she struck him on the arm and shouted something that went unheard. The rush of blood to his head blinded him, and he was just as surprised as she when they wound up on the ground, his hands pinned down by her head. "Don't hit me ever again," he said calmly, after a tense moment. Tears had already begun to fill Gretchen's eyes, but to her credit, she didn't resist or argue back. She merely lay there, silently weeping.

Feelingly poorly for what was now an overreaction, he leaned his head down and bit her, very gently, on the shoulder. "I do not have anything you could catch," he whispered, before standing up and pulling her to her feet.

"You do have something, though, don't you?" Gretchen wiped at her nose, wincing as she moved the bitten shoulder. She prodded the skin for a moment, only to look back up at Fabian with her big, watering eyes. The similarities in her and the white dogs' appearances were uncanny in that moment, and Fabian was struck with the image of Gretchen, as murderous and violent as he was supposed to be now.

It was an exceedingly amusing image, and he began to laugh. The poor, beige-coloured waif, the boyish servant of a desolate little lord, ravaging the city below! He fell to the ground and pulled a rather muddy dog close. "I couldn't say," he laughed as he began to tussle with the dog, "you'd have to ask the Stranger!"

"The Stranger?" Gretchen bent her knees and stared into Fabian's face. Her expression was unreadable.

"He stalks the hillsides where the poorest of our lot live," whispered Fabian, only to yelp as the dog bit him on the arm, "looking for the families with the weakest child, the families with the sickest babes, the orphans with no families at all. He roams around their homes until nightfall, and then he steals the children, steals them right from their beds, their poor mothers and fathers dreaming of horrid things, but never waking. He delights in watching them sleep almost as much as he savours the children themselves, those poor, helpless children."

"What does this have to do with you?" Gretchen demanded, but her skin had already paled, her eyes already widened. She didn't know what he spoke of, but Fabian could smell it on her, that pungent odour of fear. He felt a twinge in his stomach, like the familiar urge to tear something apart with his teeth. Not his teeth, no, but the monster's.

He suppressed a long, low groan and continued, biting the dog back and shrieking with joy when it leapt on top of him. "He eats the children! He eats them bit by bit, but there are ones he doesn't... ones he saves just for the end, when they're surrounded by the bodies of the others. This one is cursed, was cursed the very moment he laid his rotten yellow eyes on them." He peeked up from between the tangle of muddy limbs and saw Gretchen flinch once she realised what colour his eyes were. "He does something to this little child, doesn't really know what it is, only that he has no choice. He must keep alive, and somehow, this is the way. He bites the child, pours something vile into its blood, and then... then he waits until the moonlight trickles past the trees and covers the shivering little child in its soft, silvery glow." Fabian paused. Even the dog slowed its attacks, panting over him as the air around the garden chilled. Gretchen's heart thumped painfully in her bird-like chest, and Fabian's body reacted as though she'd bared her breasts. "The child becomes something different, that night. It's something like the Stranger, now. It's rotten, too, weighed down by the unrelenting desire to bite, tear, eat."

"It eats the people, doesn't it?"

"It - What?"

Gretchen's face had become hard again, and she frowned. Though her heart still thumped, it had resumed close to its usual pace. "The child, it eats the bodies, and then? Then it becomes you, all grown up? You're saying that's what's infected you?" She stood, scaring the dog with the suddenness of her movement, and crossed her arms. "You are... insufferable!" And then, she had turned her back and was gone, angry for hearing a story Fabian had never told anyone else before.

Strangely hurt, Fabian pushed the dog away and rose, wishing he'd just stayed quiet.

"Places, places!" Lord Ulster, unrecognisable under his heavy coat and wide umbrella, was squeaking commands from his place on the edge of the garden. To be exact, he was above the garden, leaning out over one of the trembling towers that jutted forth from the castle. Swaying on his perch, he elicited the worry of everyone around him the longer the day went on.

A crowd of dogs was lined up beside Fabian, who had been gifted a new set of clothes, partially out of sympathy for his recent illness, and then mostly to make him presentable for the upcoming hunt. Fabian couldn't really remember if it was a race or a hunt he was training the dogs for, but all he knew was the lord wanted him clean, and Sir Willem wanted him as unnoticeable as possible.

A clear whistle sounded across the garden and the pretty dogs perked up, ears as far forward as they were able to go. Their legs tensed, ready to leap gracefully forward. Fabian whistled again, and everyone watching seemed to hold their breath in unison as the dogs darted across the lawn and attacked the straw dummies Fabian had constructed. From behind the kennel bars, the village dogs, scarred and matted no matter how often Fabian scrubbed their fur clean, bayed and yowled, desperate to join the game. As much as it broke his heart to prevent them from practising, the lord had been clear - only his dogs were competing. He'd been as kind and accommodating as he could be, and so Fabian found himself unable to harbour ill-will when little Lord Ulster declared "Beautiful they may be, only those beasts that have been registered with the city may participate." The notion that dogs had to be registered, reduced to names on a paper, confused and very nearly sickened Fabian. Dogs were wild, no matter how much wet food one gave them, and how many pillows one stuffed in their beds. Wild animals should not have been reduced to paper, but then, he found it impossible to picture the white hounds in the wilderness. The village dogs appeared feral at heart (as his many wounds could attest to), but their cruel treatment at the hands of the villagers had likely contributed to this.

Watching the dogs tear apart the straw in an impressive amount of time (apparently, they would be attacking a slower fowl in the next few days), Fabian found himself trembling. He may have been able to command the hounds with near-magical ability (watching him work with them gave Gretchen a renewed sense of suspicion), but his confidence in controlling himself waned with every minute. Every smell in the garden teased his senses; every cheer from the lord above brought on the urge to perform; even the disapproving grimace of Sir Willem seemed only to encourage Fabian to truly shock him out of that cold shake of the head.

Turning abruptly, he walked out of the garden, slipping under the kitchen door and past the calls of Boy! Once he was far enough inside, he began to run. Every muscle ached for him to release the pressure that had been building inside of him, yearning for something dangerous. He couldn't give in! "I am different," he cried, but still he ran, into the ever-winding castle, as though the darkness would stifle his agony.

A smell stopped him in his tracks, a wall in the carefully darkened house. He whipped his head from side to side, let his nose guide him. He prodded the walls, eyes unadjusted, and found a door where the smell was the strongest. What was it, he wondered, that could remain so strong in such weakened conditions? Had the smell been in the kitchens, or the garden, he would have understood the intensity of the... rot, almost, but here, in the belly of the house? He turned the handle slowly. If something had snuck its way into the castle and was feasting on, well, he didn't know what, but he surely didn't want to alert it to his presence.

The room possessed no lights of any kind, not even the sliver of a window to go by. Fabian sniffed. The stench was overwhelming, now, and he covered his nose with his hands. The misery of having such a nose! A muffled humming seemed to be coming from the room, as though the walls or the ceiling, perhaps, were filled with thoughts that could no longer be contained. Why did it sound so close, and so far away at the same time?

He took a step forward and nearly pitched into the ground; something dry and thin had cracked under his foot and revealed a messy pile of... straw? Fighting back a new desire, this one to run as quickly as he dared, Fabian reached his hands out and pressed them to the floor, before running his palms against the strangely warm ground. There. He curled his fingers around the thin device that had tripped him and brought it to his nose, his eyes. He could see nothing. Cautiously, he pressed his lips to it, hoping for a hint of the shredded hay outside.

What he tasted instead was the unmistakable touch of bone. It was fresh, picked clean as though it had just been ripped from an unwilling host. There was nothing in the world like that texture, that gnawed and knotted surface.

He threw it into the darkness and darted backwards, but the sound the bone made was not a clatter. Rather, it landed with a dull thunk against something undoubtedly... fleshy.

Being unable to see, Fabian found he was extremely uncomfortable. Only in the worst situations were his cursed eyes at a loss for sight, and such circumstances always filled his stomach with a burning, anxious lead. This was especially one of those moments, the lead increased dramatically from the fugue of waking up and not knowing how one got there. Despite that horrid feeling in his belly, he tore off his shirt, threw it by the doorway, and darted back into the fabric-like darkness of Kraken Keep in search of a light. Once he'd stolen one from the study where he'd first been welcomed into the house, he ran back to the mysterious door, his nose twitching as it located the shirt.

Once inside the room, door shut safely behind him, Fabian took in a deep breath, closed his eyes, and struck a match. Only when the sizzle of the stick caught the candle's wick and ignited did he open his eyes again.

Fabian wasn't sure what he expected to see, but once his gaze fell on the propped up corpse of what could only have been his predecessor, he realised he'd been afraid to find this sight before him. It was a familiar fear, the intuitive tickling of knowing what one doesn't care to know at all, but being forced to maintain the memory. He stepped forward and reached a hand out, fingers tracing the outline of a shredded ear, a missing cheek, the gnawed socket where an eye once rested. What cruel, cruel irony! "You should have just let me die," he whispered.

The guilt at having unwittingly killed the very kennel master that had him running from the gallows and the crazed villagers who'd condemned him to die soon turned into a passionate anger. It wasn't his fault this man had trod upon him and woken him from a more peaceful demise than Fabian deserved. Neither should he have held the blame for killing as he knew how to, for defending himself the only way he had ever been taught. The villagers catching him had been an unfortunate accident and the loss of an employee for Lord Ulster was cause for a spell of sadness (Fabian realised he was somewhat fond of the little lord and his undying optimism), but Fabian decided that he firmly refused to feel any guilt.

With his conscience brimming with worldly loathing for all he'd been forced to do, there was only one thing left on Fabian's mind, and that was to determine why the mutilated, dead kennel master was locked away in this dark, dirty room and not buried well underground. Well, two things: someone had escaped the village to deliver news of this man's death, and Fabian was going to discover just who that was. His life, after all, depended on it.