The story thus far:

Throughout his submission-grappling career and his short time in the XWF, KnightMask, the enigmatic leg-lock wizard, has garnered a reputation not only as an oddity that chooses to hide his face behind a mask but as a man of honor, who plays by the rules and treats fans and opponents alike with kindness and charity.

However, a whirlwind of events in his life have, if not changed the public's perception of the masked warrior, at least challenged his own perception...of himself.

Seduced and bitten by a vampire, KnightMask narrowly escaped an eternity as a member of the undead when he willed himself inside an ancient church. The holiness of the House of God purged him of the curse...but the experience left him changed forever.

The vampire's fangs had punctured and destroyed his vocal chords, leaving him a mute. And though he had not been turned, he found himself tainted...with fangs and pulsing red eyes that manifested themselves at strange intervals.

However, the most horrifying of forces that had come to haunt KnightMask...was all too natural, all too human...in its origins. It was even more voracious and all consuming than the vampire's lust for human blood. It was an ancient, almost timeless desire that had manifested itself inside of KnightMask's soul....

...it was what had led Lucifer to forsake the role angel for that of usurper...and in his quest to ascend beyond the heights of the clouds, to fall like lightning from the Heavens...

...what had in turn, tantalized Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden...

"Ye Shall be As Gods..."

It was what had led to so many crusading knights to forsake their honor and their discipline and become the very pillagers and plunderers they had once been bulwarks against...

An appetite is what it was; insatiable, forever hungering after the object of its desires...and lacking that, devouring whatever else might come within it its path...

It was what led so many bright-eyed, innocent wrestlers to turn against one another, to connive, cheat, scheme and yes, even kill...

KnightMask, after toiling in near-obscurity as an amateur wrestler and then as a submission-grappler...had found himself wrapped within it, as if in the grip of a great serpent...

...his very soul squeezed, constricted...

...his mind blinded...

By the lust...for gold.

And though his inner struggle had perhaps not manifested itself before the eyes of the public, suddenly KnightMask found himself having to actively fight down urges to throw honor and chivalry aside...to cheat, to cheap-shot, to do whatever it took...to finally, at long last...wrap that precious metal around his waist...and claim it as his own, even as it claimed him, mind...body and soul.

The White Lion sensed the tempest raging behind the calm front of KnightMask's black mask and ruby quartz visor. In an attempt to reach out to his fellow masked wrestler, White Lion had removed his mask before KnightMask....revealing the face of one that was truly half man, half beast...

...and of one who had spent his entire life fighting the same battle against his own desires and instincts that KnightMask now found himself embroiled in...and teetering, teetering on the brink of defeat...

Really, we may as well have worn our masks.

For starters, the rest of the customers, staff, heck, even the pictures on the diner wall...ranged from pink to pale in complexion. And a couple of black guys wearing respectively, a Narnia t-shirt (that was White Lion, and yes, it featured Aslan, the Great Lion) and a Blind Guardian Nightfall on Middle Earth tank-top...well, that probably wasn't a normal site in any diner, anywhere. Throw our muscles into the mix--especially White Lion's, that guy is carved out of steel--and we were about as discreet as a flare.

White Lion was wearing sunglasses over those gleaming yellow eyes of his and his black mane--for lack of a better way to describe his hair--did something, though not much, in all honesty, to cover up his simian brow and the weirdly feline shape of his skull.

And then there were the guys that White Lion wanted me to meet--a trio of jobbers, by the names Leon, Chaney and Roland Hawkins. Hawkins, you might have heard of. He actually fallen to a few bigger names, Angelus, Mr. XWF, I think. Big, powerful guy. Almost like a Caucasian version of White Lion, but not as funny looking. Leon and Chaney, physically, were almost spitting images one of one another; lean and nimble, with builds somewhere between Bruce Lee and an Olympic gymnast.

They'd been initiated into some kind of gang at a young age, gotten hooked on...well, they wouldn't say what. Some kind of drug or other. Anyway, they'd broken away from the gang, was the point. Found God, found professional wrestling. And, I guess, they'd found inspiration...in me of all people. And White Lion's expectation, I guess, was that I was supposed to find inspiration in them.

Every day, they fought against the addictions and attitudes that had been implanted into them by the gang, they'd explained. When the going got tough in professional wrestling, they wanted to turn to weapons, wanted to return to the old addictions. But they didn't do it. KnightMask was one of the guys they looked to, Roland had explained. Honor to meet me, I didn't know what a help I'd been, blah blah.

I was struggling, really struggling, not to take the pen and napkin I was communicating with and write out that jobbers like them had no idea about real temptation. Guys that lived their lives out of view of Olympus...couldn't possibly fathom what it was like once you got close enough to the summit to really, really get a glimpse of life at the top. For them, XWF gold was an abstract concept. For me, well, it was something I'd touched, held...

It was all too real.

Kinda like the werewolves that burst into the diner, tearing through a side wall like it was made out of paper and then doing likewise to the people inside the diner. Their upper-bodies were like impossibly muscular, their legs a weird mixture of the canine and the human. They exuded--and demonstrated--a raw, explosive power that went far beyond physical bulk. Every movement was explosive, precise and lethal.

And their claws...those things sliced through human flesh better than a katana.

I'd like to say that me, White Lion and the Jobbers Three made like heroes and put a stop to things, but the fact is that what followed was a slaughter...and we were simply witnesses to it. Heads crushed like watermelons, or worse yet, consumed inside of huge, cavernous mouths. Limbs dismembered.

Witnesses is all we were. All we really had a chance to be...for the short time before the werewolves kicked the shit out of us, that is. Kicked, slashed, bit...point is, we got wasted.

When we awoke and found ourselves in a shallow crimson lake, amid the ruins--and I mean, really, ruins, as in, leveled--of the diner, me and The Lion knew with a single look between us what we had do to, full moon or not. There was no shortage of dead...Leon, Chaney and Roland...the three jobbers, were among them, they'd been slashed up so much it looked almost like the werewolves were trying to sharpen their claws on their flesh...but conspicuous by their absence were the kids.

Maybe they were dead, maybe they were hostage to the monsters, a lot of maybes. But what was certain was that we had to find them and the wolves both. Which, thanks to White Lion's nose, dumb luck and an abandoned warehouse outside of town is just about the only place to hole up if you're a pack of werewolves, we did in pretty short order.

This time, if you're curious, we were wearing our masks.

The voice that came from the door was hissing, inhuman and arrogant.

“Turn back now," the voice warned. "There is silver or garlic to protect you, no God to save you. Beneath that sun," and I guess he was talking about the moon, that was shining down full and bright, "We are like invincible.”


That was when Leon, Chaney and Roland Hawkins made their reappearance. Yeah, the same guys that I'd seen slashed up, disemboweled at the diner...? They were walking, no...striding down the road, towards the warehouse door. Suddenly, they seemed exactly like a street gang...and not just because of their matching leather jackets...or the unity of purpose they seemed to share. It was something else. They seemed bound up together, as though some sort of invisible chain connected each to the other.

Chaney was smirking ear to ear when he snickered, "Silver? We don't need no silver..."

Leon and Roland didn't say a word as they approached, but Chaney, he was cracking one joke after the other. He declared that they were pest control, there to get rid of a bunch of "furry little runts" that were crapping all over the town and had to be put down. He also asked who let the dogs out.

The moon was doing some funny things to them. It seemed to...well, it seemed like it was almost deliberately silhouetting them. As if it'd chosen them.

Then they were at the door.

The voiced seethed at them, at us, from behind the rusted steel.

"You pathetic fleshlings survived the first time...count it as a blessing...we've plenty of food to sate our hunger...turn back now and you'll be spared!"

"Yeah, you tore us up pretty good," Roland replied, finally speaking. "No excuses. I mean, it wasn't even a contest. But this here's the rematch...for the championship belt...and this time...we're pulling out all the stops!"

It was tiny, at first, the little red dot, in the center of Roland's eyes. It fanned and grew, like a star going nova, until it encompassed the entirety of his eyes. Then the fur was racing across his body, spreading out across his elongating snout, covering up his shoulders and chest that were growing even larger than before. The whole transformation lasted not much longer than it would take for a man to flex the muscles of his body.

The doors to the warehouse were no match for their unleashed fury, exploding into hundreds of metal shards under their force.

Roland was huge and gray, Chaney was silvery, lean and wiry. He had a hunched back and a thick mane that gathered around his shoulders almost like a coat. Leon was brown furred, also lean, but upright.

Long, white claws extended out from their fingers. Razor sharp, like a blade that had been folded over a thousand times at the forge. The three of them threw their heads back towards the sky, joining in harmony for a single, anguished howl. Then they turned and faced the opposition...dozens of pairs of burning red eyes, peering out hatefully from the shadows of the warehouse.

They faced them, three werewolves, two semi-human wrestlers against a blasted army. And you know what the first thing they did...? After they got done barking at the moon...?

All three of them...clenched their fists shut. Yeah, that's right. They closed their hands. They played their fists, their skills...against the small army of fanged, clawed killers on the other side. Here in, in pitched life or death battle...they were abiding by principles.

I'd say they fought with passion, but it was something more than that. It was like, in their movements, and man could they move, I could see their lives unfolding before me. There was something coursing through their bodies, coming out in every somersault, every flying kick of Chaney and Leon...in each clothesline and power-slam that Roland dealt out.

And I guess it was their souls. Souls that had spent a lifetime being trampled under. Always holding back, and in holding back, getting beaten down.

They wouldn't be werewolves, at least, not in the same way that the guys they were fighting were. But they couldn't really be humans either, not when they had to live their whole lives boxing themselves in. So they went on, living like outcasts, losers. Dropping matches, watching life pass on before their eyes, unable to really participate...taking one blow after another, getting hammered and hammered.

But I guess souls and swords weren't so different. Time put in at the forge, underneath the hammer, that was what made them hard, what sharpened them. And I realized, I was getting the rarest of front row tickets...to just what three souls that had spent a lifetime at the forge could really do.

One of the wolves broke through Chaney's defense and sliced out with his claws. The slice was so clean, so fast, it looked at first like it'd missed. Then a cut opened up on Chaney's torso. Blood flowed out. Chaney looked up. Growled. There was a blur of fists and feet. The guy who'd cut him dropped to the ground, out like a light.

The guys on the other side...they'd lived it up, indulging their unholy appetites in feast after feast of human flesh...driving their enemies before them, crushing them under their furry heels. They'd done a whole lot of killing, given plenty of beat-downs...but they'd never really had to fight. For the first time, they were forced to dig deep...and they were coming up empty.

Well, all except the guy that Roland had locked up with. That one, he was tough. Him and Roland were locked up collar and elbow, crashing through one wall after another like two gray furred, fang-bearing titans. He managed to lift Roland up by an arm and a leg and swing him like some kind of living club into whatever he could find to smash him against...pillars, walls, shelves...before he finally flung him loose.

Roland staggered up, then collapsed to a knee. The great werewolf loomed over him. Grabbing him by the head, he growled in his ear before sending a knee into his chin. Roland toppled over. Again, he struggled up to a knee.

"You disgusting coward...you should be begging for the end. Do you realize how fortunate it is that I'm now going to bring an end to your pathetic life...? How can you choose to live this neutered existence, forever a pathetic shadow of what you could be....? How can you forever denying your own nature...?"

The werewolf brought his hand down. His claws hissed through the air as they arced down towards Roland's exposed neck. And then their song was cut short. Roland got a hand up, catching the werewolf by the wrist.

"The way an alcoholic puts down the bottle...the way a fat kid decides to stop eating all that candy...people do it all the time, pal...ain't no secret...sometimes, you just gotta..." Roland's voice devolved into nearly a growl, "Push!"

By this time, he had raised himself up to standing, looking into the werewolf's eyes as he tried with futility to free his hand. He was stuck on the tracks...and the train was baring down, full speed ahead. Roland's blow sent him hurtling like a living missile through each wall of the warehouse.

White Lion emerged around that time, carrying a couple of armfuls of wide-eyed kids, with more sitting atop the expanse of his shoulders. More yet trailed behind him. In the same day that they'd experienced their taste of real, palpable, twisted and bent evil, they'd also gotten a glimpse of real-life superheroes, made from the same material as the evil guys...but straightened back out.

And even though it took werewolves to do it...I think I finally got head out of my butt.

Sure, I was struggling with temptation...strong temptations. And it was one heckuva fight. Fighting against the lust for XWF gold...it felt like cutting off a limb. But now I realized...I wasn't alone in my battle. I was never alone. It was just like Roland had said...we all have our demons...whether it was alcoholism, laziness, a lust for gold...or lycanthropy.

We might not always beat our demons...but the one thing we could never do, was stop trying.

Alone again, beneath the night sky, I closed my eyes beneath my visor. I could feel one half of the tag-titles slung over my shoulder, while the US title was wrapped snugly about my waist. If you really want me, some thing crawled up from my id asked me, set yourself free...and come for me.

Never stop trying.

I opened my eyes...and there in front of me, was, well, it was me. Adorned with the title belts...Natalia looking on in approval and adoration. At my feet were the dead, broken bodies of Mister Mystery, Peter Gilmour and Sebastian Duke.

I blinked, shook my head and finally, the image or whatever it was went away.

Never stop trying.

Off in the distance, I heard a trio of wolf howls.

Sometimes...you gotta push.

Roland, Chaney...Leon...good luck guys. And....thanks.