To awaken a Furyan whose very nature has been suppressed for years… that will require life-threatening danger and anger enough to ignite that legendary Furyan temper. Sorry Taniar, but it's time to wake up.

Awakening:

Prologue: A Merc and His Mark

The man watching with cold calculation as the beast know widely as a Hellhound tore through the slum of some small town on some backwater planet was an ex-mercenary. To the Guild council he was known as Phirdu Haddok, to everyone else he gave the name De Winter.

He was like his false name, cold.

There are men who are born to be mercenaries: calculating, cruel, greedy, and amoral. De Winter was one of those men, he didn't care if the person he hauled in to whichever slam was willing to pay the most was the worst scum to ever roam the galaxy or an innocent soul who was in the wrong place at the wrong time, just so long as he got his payday.

He didn't care if the men he set out with came back with him from a job, in fact, he had knocked off a few himself. That's how he was promoted to captain of his first Starjumper.

He enjoyed violence and the company of an expensive working woman on occasion. He hated little backwater hick towns on no-name planets like this one more fiercely than anything. It reminded him too much of the place he was born, not that he recognized that as the reason for his intense dislike.

And right now he was angry, so very fucking angry, because the one thing he was good at, the one thing he liked, and the doctor just told him that he couldn't do it anymore. Not if he wanted to keep breathing.

This last mark had as good as killed him, this freak with the glowing eyes. De Winter- no, he was just Haddok now, was a merc no longer, and that infuriated him. So he released the Hellhound.

The beast belonged to his mark, it had nearly ripped out his spleen on more than one occasion, so as an act of defiance, Phirdu had captured it and kept it on his ship. He'd expected to use it to lure the man he's been hunting to him, and he'd succeeded, sort of. Things had not gone his way, his plans were rendered completely useless.

His mark was gone now, left the planet, went back to his homeworld. Haddok knew, because that's what his mark had told him he was going to do, as he stood over the bleeding De Winter. He'd left everything behind, including the beast.

So Phirdu, in his rage, released the creature to destroy everything in its path. Maybe someone would kill it, maybe not, but his bloodlust would be sated either way. He watched as it caught another man by the throat and ripped the flesh, flinging blood in every direction and roaring with a bestial fury. That was the third human it had killed in less than a minute and he couldn't have been more satisfied.

He followed the Hellhound for an hour, allowing the creature to satisfy his lust for carnage as it killed whatever it could catch. He was going to kill it once he was satisfied of course, he was not so stupid as to think he would be able to control the beast, only his mark had been able to do that.

He was beginning to wind down when he lost sight of the Hellhound, though it was hardly the first time. When he finally caught up with the beast he was, unbelievably, shocked. There was a little girl, she was no more than four years old, but that was pushing it. It was not the sight of the Hellhound ripping into the girl's young flesh that astounded him, more than one of the creature's victims had been children and that hadn't gotten even a grimace out of him.

What shocked him was the sight of the Hellhound with its bloodied muzzle resting in the little girl's lap, eyes closed and armor plates rattling in a grumbling purr as the little girl scratched the beast behind the ears. The sight of the fearsome creature acting like a house pet sent another bolt of rage through him, seeing for a moment his mark instead. That tall, imposing man that could turn a wild killer into the most loveable of creatures.

And then he realized how right he was, the girl had the same coloration as the man he'd been hunting, and he could see the resemblance, to what he realized must have been her father, in the shape of her lips and the set of her jaw. It was her eyes though, her eyes that gave it away.

They glowed.

Not like her father's eyes had glowed, her eyes were weak, a child's underdeveloped eyes. For the first time Haddok realized that the man he'd been hunting had naturally glowing eyes, no matter how impossible that seemed, not the slam-eyeshine he'd taken it for.

He wanted to kill her of course, daughter of the man who'd as good as killed him, how could he not want her dead?

But watching her pet the monster gave him a sudden idea, one he liked even better than killing her. Because as much as Haddok like carnage and vengeance… he liked turning a profit just that much more.

The mark is not Riddick, fyi, he is, kind of obviously, a Furyan though.