THE COMPANY OF WOLVES

Title: The Company of Wolves
Author: inatrailoffire (on tumblr and twitter), or Scouse
Rating: T (subject to change)
Warnings: None (as of yet, though there may be violence and language in later chapters)

Pairings: Emma/Graham, others to be confirmed.

Status: WIP

Summary: His curse was broken, but that doesn't mean its over. Can Graham and a ragtag band of others who've escaped the curse help break it from back in a very changed Enchanted Forest? Can Emma, Henry and some new allies for Operation Cobra carry on without him there?

Notes: I've been thinking and thinking over the idea for this fic for a good week now and its snowballed into a mass of other fairytale characters and stories and a tangled web of ficness. Hopefully I'll be able to keep it going.

~oOo~

The Company of Wolves

Prologue

Death was cold.

Bitterly so. The pain of it bit into the tips of his fingers and toes, seeped into the very marrow of his bones. But he was no stranger to pain, nor the cold. He'd suffered worse pain than this. He had died because of worse pain. His memory of that burning clench as his heart was shattered into dust was more fierce than the hurt wrought by chill and ice and thus the ache in his hands and feet concerned him little now. He was dead after all, what did a little more pain matter?

Death was also dark.

So dark that he wondered if his eyes were open or closed. Was he peering deep into the shadows collecting at the backs of his own eyelids? Was he struck blind now that he was but a shade in the afterlife, alone and adrift in the vast nothingness? He knew not. He tried to blink, to peer out through that thick dark but the afore mentioned cold had made his features numb and unresponsive; he could not tell if he were frozen solid or if this was just how things were when one breached death.

One thing that he certainly had not been expecting was the noise. Death, by all accounts, should've been silent and still. Pardon his pun, but it should have been deathly so, and yet the creaking of wood, the snapping of branches, the whistle of a desolate and desperate winter wind was deafening almost, drowning out the last half-imagined half-remembered cries of a woman that wrenched in his heart like an arrow's head; snared, no matter how hard it was pulled in attempt to release it.

Emma.

The mere thought of her name made his chest clench and pull tight. That pain was worse than the cold. Worse than that which had killed him and he squeezed his eyes shut again (if they had been open at all, that was), groaning against it, the sting of her name, her memory, the realisation that he would never see her again. That he'd left her -no, that he'd been stolen away- just when he'd found her. He'd not wanted to leave. He would never have wanted to leave...

It brought tears to his eyes; the bitterness of loss, the emptiness, the concern for her safety now that he knew, now that he remembered everything. All released in a despair that welled and trickled a scalding trail from the corner of his eye, down the sides of his frost-bitten skin, dripping, falling against the shell of his ear before ending its sad life upon the unforgiving ground beneath him.

It took him long moments more before he realised that death did not have seasons or weather, did not have a howling wind that made the skeletal, naked limbs of forest trees rattle like bones from it's sheer force. It took him a lot longer than it should have to recognise that death did not smell comfortingly like bark and pine and snow heavy-laden in the clouds. It did not taste of mud and bog water. It did not feel like sodden soil beneath his palms and that seeped through his Sheriff's uniform.

Graham gasped a breath, choked on it as the icy air prickled at the back of his throat (hoarse from emotion and lack of use). His eyes shot wide and the darkness before him transformed, blearily, revealed itself to be the swaying of treetops of firs with needles so dark that they looked ebony. There was the odd flash of a steely sky beyond, glimpses snatched from between the clawing branches and, as he continued to blink and stare and squint through his confusion, flakes of snow fluttering their way down towards him.

~oOo~

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