Shifting Sands

Things better left unsaid

It would be fair to say that I could get killed for telling you what I am about to. At least I am sure that this story will be filed away safely as fiction. Reader be warned not all fiction is untrue. But I digress. Let me start by telling you a bit about myself. If you saw me you would think I was a young woman in her twenties.Pretty as is all of my kind are. Even the ugliest of us are more attractive than a mere human. I am far older then my beauty or youthful face give me credit for. My looks are unimportant hair, eye and skin color does not matter just know even for my kind I am considered incomparable.I have many talents music a way with words, love. Yes, love is a talent some of us suffer for it and some us are enraptured by it. But either way it is a beautiful terrifying thing. A thing that has destroyed me many times. Yet I still breath with a broke heart. I would not say I was overly kind nor was I cruel. But my empathy was a tad stunted. You see we did not get sick and we did not die of merely old age even a violent death was hard to come by. We simply had little hardship at least at first.

What are we you may be asking or might have been smart enough to guess. We do not have any names for ourselves we do not need to define or categorize. That is a strictly human desire. We simply are, but you humans have called us many things Gods, Demons, Beasts, Shapeshifts, Lycanthropes and the newest incarnation Werewolf. We were many in ancient days mixing and mating freely with humans. There was no need to hide. It was an innocent time there was no us and no them. Some had wolves and some did not. It was no different then one person having brown eyes and another blue. We did not fear each other. It was peace I have not known sense.

My pack came from the northern island of what is now known as Britain . I was born in the time of when the Draoidh held power and nature ruled our cycle as father sun and the great mother moon.As a young pup I sat at the knee of some of the wisest priestess and priests. Julius Caesar brought with the Gallic Wars and with it the realization that human and Lycanthropes were in fact different. And I held the hands of my first love a gentle priestess as she gasped for breath. I stroked her hair ignoring the blood on our dresses. Her lavender sent fading into the coppery order of blood. The wet rattle of blood filling her lungs as she struggled to breath, her wounds deadly. For the first time in my young life I grasped that we where not equal. My Human lover was too weak to save herself or to heal her injuries. The light fading from her once green eyes and her hair sticky with soot and blood caked around her lifeless face. A pain I have never know tore through my chest. I clawed at my body my nails shifted leaving bloody rivers on my skin, before I felt my bones snap and elongate. My dress shredding,my teeth lengthening and sharpening. The Roman soldiers already deep in battler with others that had Morphed. The wild fear that rolled off of them, a sickening bitter stench perfumed the air with their defeat. Battle short and gory ended with Lycanthropes victorious. But there was no jubilant celebration. My yellow wolf eyes took in the sight of burnt huts and scattered bodies, The young, the old, nor the weak where spared. I raised my black muzzle and howled the pain that was echoing in each of our hearts.

With the loss of our humans the pack splintered our human selves forgotten. We roamed amongest the forests and grass lands. Many of us preferring our beasts. Those long years, lost in the memory of my Loves gentle hands in my black fur her laughter and sweet kisses. My human father deep comforting voice scolding me. Or the cry of my baby sister.Lost forever to me.

My second love was doomed as quickly as my first only I didn’t know it. Bryant he pulled the pack back from the brink of madness. He was strong and worthy of my love. The path to unite us was rocky and perilous. There where many that wished to take back their human forms and live as we once were. The angrier of us did not, we preferred the wild winds and no obligations. The freedom of our wolf selves offered an escape no bonds to lose. Me, I didn’t believe that we could go back, but we could not remain fractured as we were. Lycanthropes by nature are pack creatures and cannot survive alone. We will lose our human form completely and stay forever as our wolves at best, at worst we waste away. First the soul shrivels and we no longer care about anything. We in this state pry on man and beast alike, unable to tell the difference. Than our body become weak before we die. There is no glory in this wasting, mother moon weeps for her lost children for we cannot be reborn without a soul.

I blink sleepily on the sunny porch at my mother’s feet. The Lost years having taken a toll on my mother, she no longer youthful in appearance or body she yearned for human comforts.I still preferring my beast to my human as she knows too much pain. I wonder if mother will roast the rabbit for dinner. My beast shudders at the thought of ruining perfectly good meat. I yawn and lay my great head on my paws and drift contently to sleep.

The scent of another wolf mixed with my mother's sour odor of fear pull me from sleep. I raise to my feet. pulling back my lips I issue a warning growl. The man continues toward our dwelling. It was not his feet bare and dusty or his tattered clothing that I noticed first.It was red hair like a flaming halo.

And as easy as that the man that heralds the perilous future the pack strolls with no apprehension towards a very hungry she wolf.