a sturdy stick / with one end bloodied / a wolf with a punctured eye—

—what Seven left in the woods

some werewolves get all angsty about "harming the people they love" and "becoming someone they don't know". seven just smells people

-Leonard Oaksworth (ooc)

There was only ever the one rule, as unyielding as iron and stern as a clenched fist: do not go into the backyard woods on the night of a full moon. Seven’s parents were both werewolves, had been before they met—they’d met not knowing and then fell in love with each other’s shared strangeness. The rule was—self-explanatory. They had to tell young Seven, eventually. Of their lycanthropy. The lycanthropy they had that Seven did not. And the rule—self explanatory, and they explained it anyway, and they made sure Seven knew.

Seven didn’t know this, but his parents could smell fear: a sharp tang manufactured in the palms and behind the ears, the odd glimmer of a constricted pupil.

And when they were explaining the Rule, they made sure Seven feared.

Seven was—seven. Odd. Odd, odd. (Seven’s name does not remind him of the Night, no matter how much you might think otherwise—) Seven was seven, and he’d given himself a—complex. Complex. Is that the right word? He’d sat in his wide and comfortable bedroom on the second floor and looked out the window and he’d—he’d been slowly convincing himself, then quickly, a bit like falling into water, the way time slows down as you breach the surface and submerge—he’d been convincing himself that there was something special about seeing the full moon, at night, while stranded in the woods. That there was nothing that could quite replicate it. The taboo-ness—it glitters.

Seven thought he was missing out. He thought, I only have this one life. I love the woods. I love the woods at night, I love the moon as it crests over the trees, and it itched at him, and he’d felt a sudden panic, like—if not now, when?

It didn’t really occur to him that he’d grow up and he’d have other opportunities to gaze at the full moon, maybe even from the woods if he was an intrepid and prepared adult. All he knew that night by the window was that—he had to do this.

Just this once. Then never again.

So Seven snuck out the front door. Not the window, yet—that would come After, when he gained strength and a willingness to scale up and down the scaffolding of physical risk—he was seven, and he fumbled with the key and picked the lock, and he stepped outside with sock feet onto the back porch and peeled off his socks and breathed in the cool night air. Craned his head back to admire the dim white pinpricks in the jet-blue night. His breaths came loud. His heart, hammering against the back of his ribs.

The moon, suspended there. Wide and bright as an eye.

He went barefoot, into the wet and dewy grass, into the woods.

It manifests as this: a scratch. Seven went into the woods and he came out with a long red scratch starting at the base of his right rib and traveling across his stomach and down to his left hip. Shallow. Non-debilitating.

But it’s not the scratch itself that matters—it’s what comes with it.

His parents did not know who was in the woods that night—the woods are long and expansive, a smaller limb of a larger forest, a woodland, well, that’s the reason they bought the house, because they love the woods too—but no, they don’t know who did it. This was back in America, and they were close with some neighbors who were werewolves but not many—and if it ever came through the grapevine who had ran a claw across their boy, they never told Seven.

(Seven never thinks about what he left behind in the woods, no, not ever—about how he could set it to song, a song that would go like this: a sturdy stick / with one end bloodied / a wolf with a punctured eye—)

It was just a scratch.

Seven thinks of himself, in a way, lucky.

Mother, father, child. All three, now. Tight as ever. Seven: drifting from his friends. Seven: formation and reformation. His mother would say: identity-building. His father: lucky it wasn’t worse.

————— W E R E W O L F —————

STATS
STAMINA: 5 | EVASION: 4 | STRENGTH: 7 |
| WISDOM: 6 | ARCANE POWER: 4 | ACCURACY: 4 |

ABILITIES
Recognize familiar people by sense of smell, Wolf Form (Rend, Bite)

I T E M S

|None (yet)|

S P E L L S

Reducio

| O N E |

None (yet)

P O T I O N S

Reducio

| O N E |

None (yet)