The Destined She-Wolf

The Four Phases

Kyra: human form

I looked up to the sky, and almost as naturally as breathing, let the shadows dance across my face. The mossy freshness of night air was sharp on my tongue; and the moon, directly above, shone radiantly in her fullest form. It was the first phase of the full moon. The night, in which I'd grown to accept with caution, would alter my life indefinitely. 

It was the night that I became a werewolf.

Kallum had informed me that it was nothing. That a fighter such as me would certainly pull through. Much to our own displeasure, I had, until quite recently, strongly disagreed. Of course I had. It wasn't every day one transformed into a four-legged beast and I had little idea of what to expect. 

A rustling noise in the surrounding bushes dragged me from my stupor. Alarmed and completely immobile, I checked first my left and then my right side. It was nothing, I told myself, just a rat scuttling through the trees. But in the middle of the city's biggest Forest Park, my eyes convinced me of otherwise, and I felt my shoulders slink into defense mode as they played tricks on me; my nostrils flared, head tilted for my ears to grasp a better angle. I started to panic.

I had picked up the heartbeat of another. 

I began to walk faster through the wood; my bare feet crunching and scraping over itchy moss and forest debris as I went. With a skittish glance around myself, I saw that I'd stumbled into a meadow. But still the second heart beat echoed through my head,  no matter how hard I tried to evade it. Frantic, I gazed up at the moon and witnessed her final shift; like a ripple on water, she moved just slightly, barely noticeably by all accounts, and I knew what was about to happen. 

"Please no, please no, please no," I had begged, unprepared for what was happening. I wasn't ready to shift just yet. I didn't know how to. Yet, even with my apprehensions, a deafening scream soon elicited from my lips: so loud was it that leaves fell with abandon around me from the proprietors above. 

It sounded never-ending, my lips unwilling to silence the deafening wail. I panted and shuddered and choked when it eventually trailed into shortness of breath, and before I could even tell myself that the first phase was over, my body seemed to have a mind of its own: it crouched deeper into the earth, and my skin bathed in soil and grit and my own shaking hands around thrust into my shoulders. Even although I had closed my eyes, I felt as if they were seeping - weeping blood, dripping, and then they morphed into the back of my eyelids. 

"Please just stop!" I cried, but it fell to death ears. Nobody could stop it. Nobody would stop it. For shifting came as naturally to wolves as the sun radiated heat: it was ungovernable. 

My hands were in front of me: they were shaking, digging into the soil; the veins on them pumped and protruded as if they were going to burst. When I tried to breathe in, I couldn't. I could hear, what felt like; the snapping of my jaw, breaking of my spine, throbbing of my heart. My nails and toe nails spurted out before my very eyes, leaving pointy claws which slowly and gradually sprouted their way afterward and sliced into the soil.  

I pushed my claws further into the earth as if to brace myself, shield myself -- stop the transformation from occurring! But I knew it was impossible. I knew I had to endure it. Withstand my teeth bursting out from my gums, bloody and spitting around me; the blood spraying over my face, affecting my ability to see clearly or even to breathe my air sacs filled with it.

And then a deep, granite voice penetrated through my mind, stilling me for only a brief moment in time. 

"Free it," it said: "You must first free the wolf within you. Don't stop it. Embrace it."