The Lycan Who Shouldn't Exist

CHAPTER 5

The day finally came.

The ground gate opened, and the arena gate was shut, which signified the arrival of the three powerhouses.

The crowd began to move. She stood among the crowd. One person, in one body, carrying everything in her with no particular place to set it down. Shame is supposed to be familiar by now; she has worn it so much that it shaped itself around her, but what surprises her the most is she feels it more. Although she expected to have developed some resistance to it by sixteen or distance from it.

She walked to the gate and stood as others were waiting for the gate to fully open when Mira came to her and stood beside her.

The gate was older than anyone present. That was the first thing she noticed, it stood for generations before her and long after her.

That was what struck Nyra first as she stood in front of the iron and timber structure as it dinged on her that this had been done many times before she was born or even existed, and it would be done many times after. The wood was dark of age with carving that the meaning had passed common knowledge into categories of things people respect from generation to generation.

Then the crowd started moving, and the gate was fully opened, and she moved together with them.

Inside, the valley seems larger than it looks on the ridge; only the untested and the recently shifted youngsters are allowed inside; parents, family and spectators stay on the ridge.

The valley had its own landscaping. The treeline has space between them like a field, uneven ground, clusters of rocks and natural depression that could serve as shelter.

The light was already dropping to the western ridge and the sun was making its slow decision towards the dark.

She could smell something in the air. She has no name for it. It is not the crowd nor the trees but something older. Something that made the faint warmth behind her sternum react and go still like an animal that found something it wanted and was waiting to understand it.

Mira came up beside her, and they started walking towards the eastern section of the valley, away from the densest group finding position against a rock formation that put stone at their back and open ground.

“Good instinct.” Mira said quietly.

“Survival instinct, you mean, not courage,” Nyra replied.

“Those are the same thing, dressed differently.”

Around them, the valley was filling with energy already changing, not dramatically, not yet, but the way the air changed before the storm. Some layering of pressure and anticipation. The untested youngsters were spreading around the valley in groups or pairs.

She could see the ones near her who had visible signs or ready shimmering, a sense of something in them which had been building towards tonight for a long time and knew it.

Nyra noted their positions and deliberately noted other things.

She felt it before she understood.

Pressure—low and total, like the atmosphere itself had added weight. It came from the center and spread through the rings. She couldn't see it, but she could feel it. It passed through her the way deep sound passed through the water. This brought her to her knees, so with everyone, all fell to their knees by a very suppressive force.

The warmth behind her sternum flared immediately, sharper than it has ever been. She pressed her hand against her chest before she could stop herself. She felt something in her for the first time before it went back.

Around her, things started happening.

Not immediately, but the energy builds in layers—the three Elders are not rushing this, she realized. She turned to look at Mira, who was in so much pain that her wolf was already tearing to the surface. Nyra reached out to her, but there was nothing to hold and she shifted a bit. The Elders were applying the pressure the way you want to open something cleanly —not shatter it. Steady. Increasingly. Giving the bodies in the valley time to respond to it. The pressure getting intense forces Nyra to get support with the rock.

The first shift happened. The first scream cut through the valley, and it was Selene, her sister. The sound was that of tearing and reconstructing that the human ear finds uncomfortable. A wolf stood where she had been. Her wolf was dark almost at the gate, ash or grey with shiny brown eyes. Next, a boy from Ashwool, and then more people shifted, then Mira started shifting.

The valley energy shifted from anticipation to something more volatile: multiple first-stage wolves. None of them was rational. All was lost in the world that had just begun, which was entirely different from the one they knew about twenty minutes ago. The air thickened with it. She could feel the instability of the weather, like standing at the edge of something uncontrollable.

The warmth behind her sternum was not faint anymore, it was insistent. Almost urgent. Like something pressing at the door but not breaking through, just _ present. More present than before, she didn't know what it meant, because she didn't have time to think as the surrounding energy was becoming more difficult to stay inside and dangerous.

First_ time, wolves move towards nothing in no specific direction, just an animal testing its body getting violent and attacking others that bump into it.

Nyra moved

Not away—but sideways toward the rock formation she saw before the ritual started: a cluster of large stones near the eastern wall that created alcoves. She moved towards it with controlled speed like someone who had already decided and was executing.

She sited Mira's wolf, which is grey with hazel eyes engaged in a fight with another wolf. More wolf shifted and very irrational.

Some beasts that were hiding in the valley came out newly shifted wolves were excited to attack, blood thrust she knew she needed to stay safe and was struggling to move to the alcoves she found.