The wind came off the black sea like a blade being sharpened.
It worried the long grass into whispers and pressed salt into the mouth of the night. Torfinn stood knee-deep in the tide, bare feet numb, the hem of his wool tunic soaked dark. He let the cold bite. He had learned early that pain could be a teacher if you did not flinch.
Behind him, the village slept in a huddle of turf roofs and driftwood doors. Smoke thinned into the stars. Somewhere a dog whimpered, then went quiet. 
The moon was thin as a cut nail, pale and unforgiving.
Torfinn held the knife his father had left him, bone handle polished by years of use, edge chipped but faithful. He pressed the blade to his palm and opened himself. Blood slid down and bloomed into the surf. He watched the red twist and vanish.
“Take it,” he said to the dark water. “Remember me.”
The sea did not answer. It never did. But it listened.

He had been raised on stories of wolves that were men and men that were wolves, of skins taken and never returned, of hunger that was older than fire. His father had told them softly, as if the telling itself could wake something sleeping in the rafters. Then one winter the stories stopped, replaced by silence and a grave under stones. Raiders had come from the north. They took iron and grain. They took Torfinn’s father and left his mother with a mouth full of blood and no words left to speak.
After that, Torfinn learned other lessons.
He learned how to stand still long enough that snow accepted him. He learned how to split a seal without spilling the oil. He learned how to listen to the old woman on the cliff when she said, You are not like the others. He learned how to drink the brew she gave him, lichen, bone ash, something bitter that made his teeth ache, and not retch.
“Do not beg,” she had warned, her eyes clouded like thawing ice. “Do not command. Offer.”
So he offered blood to the sea and breath to the wind and the memory of his father’s laugh, which had sounded like stones knocking together.
That night, he dreamed of running.
It was not a dream of speed or freedom. It was work. His lungs burned. His legs ate the ground. He smelled everything, old fish rot, iron rust, fear sharp as urine. He woke with his mouth full of saliva and his jaw aching as if he had been clenching for hours.
The next days came wrong. Meat tasted flat. The fire smoked. He found his hands shaking when the moon rose, a tremor that crawled into his spine. When he closed his eyes, he saw fur matted with salt, saw teeth breaking bone like thin ice.
On the fourth night, the raiders returned.
They came quiet this time, dragging their oars, blackening their faces. Torfinn watched from the ridge, his heart a drum too loud for his ribs. He counted them by breath five, six, seven, then lost the count as something inside him leaned forward, eager and mean.
He did not think of strategy. He thought of heat. He thought of mouths torn open in surprise. He thought of the old woman’s words: Offer.
He stepped down the ridge and into the wind.
The first man saw him and laughed. The laugh died half-formed as Torfinn’s body betrayed him. His bones sang, a sound he felt more than heard. His shoulders wrenched wide. His spine arched. Pain flowered and went sweet. The world tilted and snapped into sharpness.
When he screamed, it came out as a tearing sound that the night understood.
Fur crawled from his skin like frost on stone. His hands broke themselves and remade. Teeth pushed through gums, long and clean. The knife fell unnoticed into the grass. He was not larger than a man, not truly, but he was wrong, and wrongness carries weight.
The first raider did not even run. He stared, a child before a storm, and Torfinn was on him, a blur of salt and blood. The taste was copper and fat and fear. It filled him and did not satisfy. It never satisfied.
The others scattered. He chased without mercy, without thought. One slipped on kelp and screamed. Another made it to the boat and died with his hands on the gunwale. The sea took what was left, red and foaming.
When it was done, he stood panting, chest heaving, the night ringing in his ears. He smelled smoke and heard his own breath like bellows. Somewhere in the dark, a baby cried, thin and terrified.
That sound cut him.
He folded inward, bones grinding, fur retreating like a tide. He knelt naked in the grass, shaking so hard his teeth clacked. His hands were slick and sticky. He retched until bile burned his throat.
At dawn, the village found him by the boats. They did not speak. They did not touch him. They built a fire and pushed a skin toward him with a stick.
The old woman came last. She did not look at the bodies. She looked at Torfinn’s eyes.
“You offered,” she said. “Now you must keep offering.”
“What does it want?” he asked. His voice was raw.
“It wants you,” she said. “And it wants to be fed.”
They bound him with a cord of seal sinew and made marks on his skin with ash. They did not banish him. They did not welcome him. They set rules, thin as ice. He would go to the cliffs when the moon grew. He would not take from the village. He would not name the thing that wore him.
For a season, it worked.
He hunted the outer places, foxes, seals, the sick deer that limped into the rocks. He learned the edge of himself, the line he could walk without falling. He learned that hunger had a voice, low and persuasive, that sounded like his father when he was tired and needed help.
Then the moon grew fat and white, and a stranger came ashore.
She wore a cloak of raven feathers and carried iron at her belt. Her eyes were dark, her smile small. She smelled of old roads and smoke. She watched Torfinn with a patience that made his skin prickle.
“You are split,” she said, as if remarking on the weather. “You could be whole.”
“I am whole enough,” he said.
She laughed softly. “No. You are borrowed.”
That night, she followed him to the cliffs.
He changed under her gaze and hated himself for how easily it came. She did not flinch. She did not run. She sang, low, ugly words that twisted his insides. The wolf in him pressed close, curious.
“Wear it,” she whispered. “Do not fight it. Be it.”
He did. For a moment, it was bliss. The tearing stopped. The hunger smoothed. He felt vast, ancient, righteous.
When he came back to himself, his mouth was red.
She lay broken at his feet, her iron knife bent in half.
He screamed until his throat bled.
After that, there were no more rules that held. The village sent him away with a skin and no blessing. He went north into the basalt and fog, where the land itself looked wounded. He lived between moons and learned what he was.
He learned that the wolf was not a curse sent from outside. It was a remembering. It was the part of him that had watched his father die and had no language for grief. It was hunger given legs.
Years later, when ships came again, they found only signs, tracks that circled and vanished, bones gnawed clean, a smell of salt and iron. Some swore they saw a man on the ridge at dawn, fur clinging to him like frost, eyes bright and human and not.
The sea kept his offerings.
The wind kept his name.
And somewhere in the dark between man and beast, Torfinn learned to run without fleeing, to hunt without losing himself entirely. 
Not salvation. 
Not damnation.
Balance, thin as ice.