Ascension - Book Eight - Man x Man

Chapter 17

In magic, there was a type of anesthesia that the body dosed the brain with, a way to pacify the body and prepare it for some sort of transformation. Often in my case, it was an escape from immeasurable trauma in my times of torture or serious wounds. 

 I often remembered the purgatory that my mind sent me to, speaking to my father while I was left agonized in the mortal world. In this new life, as a lycan, I often missed that realm for there was little offerings as far as my vacant imagination when I was in need of a distraction.

 Never one to shy away from pain, in fact, it was something that I'd written off as a necessity in life such as mine. At times, pain seemed like the fairest of payments for the things I sought. High cost for high reward, I worked in means that money couldn't fathom. Yet here I was, on the brink of oblivion and my mind continued to seek for that comfort zone of a numb purgatory. 

I found myself blinking rapidly, trying to will myself into that very realm, to whisk my consciousness away while my body was remade into something no man should ever endure. I found no such sanctuary, for lycan magic was not a matter of convenience but the act of turning a man into a weapon. I wait for the morphine effect, yet each snap of my bones is worse than the one before it. 

When a bone breaks, often times the limb goes numb, a temporary relief for the brain while it accesses the damage. My body compounds on itself, from the inside I'm shredded and mended to turn into something foreign. The wolf had been given permission, I needed no compulsion to let the beast out, I only needed an allowance that passage though my mortal form was a possibility and the wolf was more than happy to oblige. 

There is little as far as a distraction, I might have marveled in the contortion if I weren't reliving one hundred times over in slow motion. My limbs snapping, breaking, mending and then fracturing once more. 

Life almost seems to pause to marvel, while the change is soundless, I fear it is because my surroundings are so impossibly loud that it drowns out all else much like white noise. A blessing in disguise for I could not stomach what the shattering might sound like to my sensitive ears. What feels like an eternity could only have been moments, possibly a minute or more with the ferocity that this new form bursts from the trash heap. 

In these eyes, I'm no longer my own. I don't see three people here to seek my aid, I smell the heavy scent of musk and false claims, a lie almost wafting in the air before my nose. My wolf acts without my permission as I feel my body finding itself in this four-legged stance. For once, I don't feel abnormally hot, my body feels contained and yet I'm totally at the disposal of this consciousness that had done little to reveal itself to me up until this point. 

I'd been given a command, to kill the three of them, and every fiber in my being wanted to fulfill that command. Unwillingly, my teeth bare, ears instinctively flatten against my skull as I stand on wobbly legs. I was a king in a past life, I did not live to serve anyone, let alone three spoiled children. The vicious bark leaves my muzzle before I can reign it in. Before me, my companions shift. Their bodies contort so quickly to their various shapes of lycan lineage. 

Reluctantly, I take a step back. A green warrior might have thrown himself into the fray at that moment. I could kill them, I feel it to my core that at the very least one would perish under my fangs. But, I'd been compelled before and I was no novice at the acts of prevention.

Experience leant it's hand to me for the first time in a long while. I could not win between all of them and something in me was stronger than any desire to murder my captors. No mere mage could compel a creature that knew no master. My nose twitches, I did not want to be here. They could not force me to remain here, not in my current state.