Officially, Overseer Kaleb’s soldiers at Arn Griishank were Dranathess Ground Troopers undergoing advanced environmental training.
Unofficially, and considerably more accurately, they were the surviving results of a program to build soldiers out of engineered lycanthropy – grafted or injected with a refined formula pulled from Kortagor Karver’s own blood and saliva, the one true-born lycanthrope on site and the only one who could reliably hold his shape without losing himself to it.
The ones who took the formula cleanly got exactly what Kaleb promised: a wolf’s tracking, senses, speed and stamina, resistance to ordinary weapons, and a body that shrugged off wounds a normal soldier wouldn’t survive.
It was the failures that told the real story of the program – deformities, incomplete changes, uncontrolled transformations, psychotic breaks, and at least one subject driven suicidal by what amounted to sharing a skull with something else.
Every subject still in service was kept charmed for the duration of the experiment, less for their own comfort than because an unreinforced casting was the difference between a soldier and a problem.
FILE NOTES
It was this pack – a full squad, moving as wolves – that ambushed the Agents’ carriage on the road back from Lord Valden’s dinner, on Karver’s own orders. They fought as a unit, took the Agents alive rather than killing them outright, and changed back to human shape within minutes of the fight ending – dressing from spare packs, tending each other’s wounds, entirely unbothered by what they’d just done.
At least one prior “success” had gone the other way: a subject who learned to change at will, then turned arrogant and psychotic once his charm lapsed, killing for food rather than orders before he was run down and retrieved.
Desertion, when it happened, went differently again.
A soldier known only by the dog tag around his neck – “Devon” – ran three nights before the Agents caught up with him, after a hunt for the jungle’s trolls left him unwilling to keep killing his own.
Officer Karver dismissed him afterward as never having been up to the task in the first place – some candidates, by his account, simply can’t endure the tour, the pace, or the environment.
The Agents found him holed up wolf-shaped beneath the floor of an abandoned cabin, and by the time the fight was over he was dead and human again, the dog tag the only thing left to identify him by.
Most of the pack scattered from Arn Griishank not long after Kaleb and Karver fled the ruined lab.
Whether that means disbanded, deserted, or simply relocated with their handler has never been confirmed.
STATUS: Filed under People as a species/unit record, not individuals. An engineered soldier program with a documented failure rate that never seems to have slowed it down, and an unknown number of successes still unaccounted for.