Broken Lines |✔|

1.

There is a barrier in the land that holds creatures of nightmares in place.

Stories of how this barrier came to be, twisted throughout the years. Some have stated that it took over 100 witches who surrounded the whole of the forest to cast their spells and trap us here.

Others concluded there was nothing holding us back. That it was all in the mind.

There were others that stated it came with choices. You could choose what prevented you from stepping over and what didn't.

I was never close enough to the edge of the woods to know. I never had a reason to venture there.

My life was a happy one. Something I was content with and to me, there was no edge of the forest or end of our world. There was no barrier because that was a legend. No one could prove it because there were no firsthand accounts of it actually stopping them.

The forest was wide. It was vast. Who had time to find the end? There was nothing more useless than seeking an out when all you wanted to do was stay.

My father was strangely curious about this legend. There were witches he consulted with, who all told him the same thing - it's not real.

He never could let it go though. My mother was exasperated. My father's pack was amused. Life moved on.

He was a leader. He had no time to waste in sitting around thinking of myths and tracing their origins. Running monsters such as us- that the legends had portrayed as creatures who needed to be contained- was time consuming enough.

And in my foolish youth, my mind was filled with other thoughts.

There is a creature inside us. Something that everyone has. The wolf. The animal that transcends our soul and becomes another part of our body. We mold our mind to fit the shape of a different form. It was a hard process. A difficult one.

You could have the soul given to you, but that did not mean you could always be successful in accepting it.

Only warriors who underwent the hardest of training could shift into such a form of the animal. Many people found the process to be too much. But I could still see it in them. The way of the wolf. How they tilted their heads, or the sight of their eyes when it gleamed in the light of the moon.

I had always thought in passing that it would be nice to be able to go to that form. It would be nice to feel the process and see what such a transformation would be like. But the training made me wince, and the fear of the pain made me hesitate.

After all, I was still only a child. Still only 12 at the time. I did not know better. I did not know that it would soon be the only thought in my head.

My mother was a hard woman. I always had the idea that maybe I was not enough, no matter how many times she assured me and said that she loved me. She would tell me that the transformation and training was all optional. That our people would understand if I did not want to go through with that.

One day, she would say to me, you will meet your Alam, your world, my Vera...and he will take away the burdens from you...he will make sure you are safe and will provide for your father's pack when he is gone.

But not until I was seventeen. Not until I became of age and the soul of the wolf came to me would I be able to see with new eyes and take in the world for what it should be.

I would trace the line that was on my wrist whenever I heard her words. Break any barrier. Let nothing hold you back.

But my father would only laugh. Laugh and shake his head and say to mother that there was time and no need to rush. My world would be waiting, and I still had mother and father to provide for me.