Simple Minded Beast

This is a work of fiction. No real people, places or events were used. Copyright ã 2011 Plot Roach.

Simple Minded Beast

By Plot Roach

A wolf bitch, alone and tired, paused for the night where the forest and the world of man met. There she spent the night with a farmer’s hound and knew love, if only for the moment. For the following day the farmer chased her back into the forest and she never saw the hound again.

Not long after, the woods rang with the howls of her children, still pups, that chased after her learning the ways of the wild ones. A prince, in search of a trophy to add to his collection, hunted those woods. One day he chanced upon the wolf and her children and killed them in their sleep, all but one. The last pup looked more of a hound to him than of the rest of the wolves. He thought it rather unusual and thought to keep it alive, to teach it to be loyal to him alone and to hunt alongside him and keep him safe.

So he took the pup and raised it as his own, and it stayed by his side no matter where he went. And when the time came for the kingdom to go to war, the dog followed and kept the prince company on the lonely marches as well as protecting him from enemies in battle.

But a blow landed upon the prince that the dog could not block and its master was taken from the battlefield and sent to the healer’s tent. The prince’s wounds were bandaged and he was left alone to recover, his trusted hound at his side. “You are such a simple minded beast.” the prince said. “And yet you are more loyal to me than any soldier in my army.”

No sooner had these words left the prince’s mouth then the beast leaped up upon the cot where the prince rested and tore out his throat.

For there were two things the prince had forgotten: the first being that a simple creature can be trained in any manner of tricks, but true loyalty must be earned through deed or by blood. And the last: it does not matter if one is simple or smart, for pain is felt forever in the heart, as is the thirst for revenge.