Chapter 44 Forbidden Fruit

• Mateo
• I sat on the castle walls made of ancient gray bricks. The winter storm had abated, and snowflakes flurried down harmlessly onto the ground. The Wilds were a far cry from my homeland – back home I had never even seen snow before. That was almost two hundred years ago, but the memories of my youth were still fresh in my mind. Maybe it was because I was relatively young, compared to the others. I still remember the taste and scent of fresh oranges. I remembered what a rare treat it was to rip their thick skins off and devour them like a barbarian. It was a pleasant memory that I still smile at. It wasn’t like that with the Elder Ones, but so it goes. All good and bad things pass away with time.
• I had a vellum notebook in my hand and a charcoal pencil to sketch out the castle battlements. Supposedly, I was to mark any problems with our castle’s defenses, but wasn’t that a bit of a joke? Torieux employed several human magicians to create a barrier that obscured the appearance of the Castel. If any werewolf was crazy enough to travel several leagues into our corner of the Wilds, I would commend them for surviving.