The Black Wolf at the Writers Bedside

A silent townhouse, a sleepless writer, and a pitch-black wolf with amber eyes who seems to know exactly who he is observing.

The townhouse falls silent as soon as everyone leaves.

No briefing to run. No operation to control. No immediate disaster demanding a response. Only hot water, tiled walls, and the rare possibility of letting London—its alliances, dangers, names, and unfinished calculations—wash away.

But sleep brings no peace.

At some impossible hour, the writer wakes just enough to feel the atmosphere change. A presence waits at the edge of the bed: an enormous wolf, pitch black from nose to tail, with amber eyes fixed steadily on her.

He does not belong to ordinary London.

At first, she thinks of Asdar, the copper wolf of older stories and other but her reality. Yet this creature is larger, darker, and far more unsettling. He knows her. He reacts to her movements. He growls when she reaches toward her phone, then settles only when she lies still.

Most strangely, he rests his immense head across her lower belly as though standing guard over a threshold only he can sense.

“I fall asleep with a wolf’s skull as my anchor.”

By morning he is gone.

No paw prints. No fur. Only the cold hollow in the mattress and the faint wild scent left in the room.

Is he a protector? A prisoner? A warning?

The answer seems obvious in one sense: this is Wolfgang. But if Wolfgang has been bound into the shape of a wolf, then someone has changed the rules—and sent a message aimed at more than one person.

Some stories arrive quietly. Others climb onto the bed, growl at your phone, and refuse to let you look away.

Author’s NOTE

This excerpt belongs to an anthropological fantasy rooted in lived experience, memory, places, and the lived relationships that continue to shape a life across languages and worlds. Here, the familiar architecture of a London townhouse opens onto something older: a wolf with amber eyes, a transformation without explanation, and a presence that may be protection, warning, or both.

The story does not ask whether the supernatural is real in the abstract. It asks what becomes visible when memory, identity, ritual, and the unseen press against ordinary life.

I.Ph.

Start the Series here: https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/the-european-records

© 2026 I.Ph. de Lange. All rights reserved. Published by CYcrds OÜ.