Winter Wolf

It's All My Fault

There are things in life that are beyond our control. You call it fate, or destiny, or gods plan that’s up to you. I just know that I never could have imagined how completely insane my life would have turned out. My name is Elaina Mitchel; but everyone calls me Ellie, I’m a 21-year-old werewolf of the Crescent Blood pack. On my 16th birthday my mother and father were killed in front of me in a rouge attack that claimed the lives of many beloved pack members.

From that day on I was the target of everyone’s hatred, many people thought that it was my fault that so many had died because I was always wondering around the boarders of the pack land. On that particular day I was out for a run in the woods, I knew that I wasn’t supposed to be that deep in the woods without adult supervision, but everyone knew that I never followed that rule, the woods were my safe haven where I felt most comfortable and in control. I’ve always went into the woods when I was stressed or scared and it had never been a real big issue…not until the rogues attacked on my Birthday. For humans your 16th birthday is a huge deal because you are able to get a car and become more independent, that’s different for werewolves. For a werewolf your 16th birthday is when you go through your first and most painful change. As time goes on the change becomes less painful and faster, but the first change is slow and torturous. It happens the exact moment that you came into the world- your exact birth time.

When a werewolf child turns fourteen, they start taking a class on the change that you will experience on your 16th birthday, to help you navigate your way through the change. Every fourteen-year-old goes to the pack house on Tuesday nights to listen to the pack doctor tell us how magical and amazing it is going to be and how you will finally be accepted into the pack once you go through your first change. As the years go by the stories about the amazing experience get more complex. Around your 15th birthday they bring in newly changed Werewolves to tell the stories of their change. That’s when you learn that the change isn’t all candy, rainbows, and unicorns. That’s when you hear about the excruciating pain that you are going to go through. How you feel every single one of your bones breaking and healing repeatedly until you are finally in wolf form. That’s when you hear the horror stories of kids getting stuck in between their human and wolf forms or in extreme cases that’s when you hear of them going insane with the pain and having to be killed or just dying from the exhaustion and pain that is rippling through their bodies.

That’s why at 11:45pm on January 23rd I was out on a run in the woods around our pack lands. In our family the first change is something that we do as a family everyone aunts, uncles, and cousins they all gather around the house of the child who is about to change it is an all-day affair. Exactly twenty-four hours before your birth a party starts and continues up until the moment you change. At 11:59pm my change would start, and I was so freaked out by that thought that I ran into the woods away from everyone. I didn’t want to be surrounded by people when the most horrible thing I would ever experience was going to happen, so I ran. No one had ever run from a Change Party before and everyone was so confused, so they all went looking for me, and that’s when it happened. That’s when my whole life was flipped on its head and spun, because at 11:53pm on January 23rd the largest rouge attack our pack had ever seen happened and my whole family was in the woods completely unprotected looking for a scared little girl who just wanted to be alone.