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───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────13 January, 2025
Durmstrang Institute, Werewolf Cavern
Full Moon
Durmstrang Institute, Werewolf Cavern
Full Moon
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I had heard about this place through notification at the start of this school year; though I hadn't thought that I would, in the same year, be one of the first to christen it for its intended use. Over the course of Christmas break, there had been many conversations, several letter volleys, paperwork and testing... All over a stupid mistake. All over an accident that I had brought down on my own damn head. I should have known better, perhaps I did know better, but I had for some reason thought that in this one instance I knew better than my own sense of rationality. I had "pulled a Piérre", and of course I had gotten burned for it.
Wolfsbane potion did not taste good. I learned this quickly from my first dose a week ago. This was also not a surprise: I knew what was in it and how those ingredients worked to lay the counter-enchantment to the disease's effects. Did not mean that I was any more pleased about having to consume it every day for seven days, it just meant that I was willing to make sacrifices so that... bad things wouldn't happen if I decided to try to have a mind for defying the rules again.
I had been stubbornly quiet the entire trek to the cavern, which was set vastly apart from the rest of the school in the middle of nowhere in the mountains: arms crossed, brows furrowed, scarlet cloak flapping in the wind as the black wolf fur trim tickled my cheeks. My hands were clenched into fists to conceal the jittering in my hands indicative of a worsening palsy-like effect that had mounted at the same time as my increasing moderate sickness up to tonight, psychosomatic or truly physical I couldn't quite guess at, and also to conceal from even myself just how frightened I was of the fact that tonight was the first time I would... transform. Becoming something that was a not-me.
The smell of the cave was... similar enough to other caves I had been in. Though, admittedly, it lacked the particular musk that those experienced in being escorted through living caves would easily recognize. No ancient incense of guano and mud, no petrichoric tang of rainwater having seeped through stone for millennia, and no particular humidity. The last of these made a bit more sense as I glanced upwards to behold an indigo sky sprinkled with meek stars that were too shy to peek through cotton-candy vespers of cloud colored dark mauve and pink lemonade. Still... it was strange. To my senses, it seemed... unnatural. It looked real enough, seemed structured enough like a natural cave... but felt, and smelled... wrong.
The final dose of Wolfsbane for the month waited for me, labeled with my name. On reflection... I realized that I didn't have to take it, really. I was being contained like the animal I was going to become. I could become fully wild, feral, dangerous. Lose my mind, just for the night. Rage and rave in this little place, romp and drive myself mad on the walls while a voice raw from crying out and threatening yet remained mute to anyone outside of my own ears. But to remember everything afterwards... what horrors would those revelations bring? No... I was, even if clad with something other than human skin, still capable of humanity. Surely that was something worth clinging to.
So the foul concoction was consumed with a gag. The last six ones had not tasted any better. Insanity to think that it would start tasting 'better' anytime soon. I only regarded farewells, Good Nights, and Good Lucks, with a slight nod and a half-hearted and disregarding wave of my hand. I wasn't feeling very verbal. I had my own thoughts to commune with already, and that was too much to deal with already.
Shed the cloak, the shirt. It would be easier that way. Cloak wrapped around me, I took a place near the water, leaned against the wall with my legs crisscrossed. Patient. Sweating with anticipation, with fear. The remnants of aconite in my mouth. Sour. Bitter.
So much fear. More bitter than anything else I could taste.
Pale light mixed with the smaller and lighter motes of stars began to trickle down from the open skylight over the crystal cave lake, reflecting off of the mirror surface and casting flecks of refracted white light on the artificial walls and across my face. There was a moment of simple admiration of the way that the lake seemed to glow, the way that it held the image of the full-bodied moon in its stomach as if the skies were to be found in the waters and that the heavens were merely the mirror used to behold it, before a sudden burning began to race across my skin in tandem with a pitch of nausea that keeled me to a side with the suddenness of the onset.
Swift and decisive, and similar to an attack, I hissed through my teeth and tried to brace as my fingers curled into the ground only for my nails to scrape and file themselves on the stone. Everything itched, everything burned, like a thousand hot needles poking at sunburned skin at the same time in wave after wave. My sight began to waver as sweat beaded my brow, watching my hands deform as black fur foliated like wildfire from burning pores. Fingernails discolored to black, hardening into long, supple keratin claws.
This was normal, I tried to remind myself from what I had been taught and what I had looked into over the course of the month to prepare for the first time. All of this was perfectly normal: the pain, the discomfort. It was a blood curse, after all, not a walk in the park. "Ffff..." My expletive withered away in my own throat as the heat seeped into the bone, distending them and in preparation to be altered into quadruped structure. Everything started to peter out of immediate awareness, I was done trying to understand what was going on as I squeezed my eyes shut and simply laid myself out on my stomach with my hands over my head, willing the cold cavern floor to cool the immolation of transformation. Valentin's gift, the Hunter, was under one of my arms, the single button eye dark and black as it watched the rest of the curse that its fabric structure alluded to work its magic on flesh and blood.
Lungs and heart worked in a panic as organs reorganized, a low and growling sound left me as my face felt as if I had been punched there. Everything hurt. I didn't want to move.
Eventually the pain began to recede into a dull and fiery throb, and then into a numb and almost bruise-like sensation. The worst passed away, and then there was simply ache. Exhaustion, as if lethargy had laid a weighted blanket all over me and instructed me to simply stop.
Another low groan, a deep growl. It wasn't my voice, I realized. Not at the moment, anymore. As I raised my head, thick and black fur and great black paws complete with claws introduced themselves to my sights. So used to a human nose in my own sights, there was instead a long muzzle that my brain now had to learn to 'edit out' of my perceptions. Hunter Paul was laying on his side against my lupine barrel chest.
Pressing against the wall, legs wobbled as I willed myself to my feet, trying to understand and grow accustomed to the strange quadruped form. Claws clicked on the ground, skittered once as I lost my balance and fumbled to one side and into the lake with a spray of moon-silvered water and a high-pitched yelp at the sudden cold that I scrambled out of as quickly as possible and then stood dripping off to the side in. New legs, drugged up Woflsbane potion-induced exhaustion. Did not mix well. A brisk shake freed the outer fur from the lingering water before it could get to the insulating stuff beneath, and I sulkily slunk back to Paul with tail held slightly between my legs and ears unconsciously flattened.
After a half turn, I laid down again with a heavy whining sigh, my chin on the doll as I glanced around the cave idly again. There were sounds and scents, all of them from the outside that was masked with the smell of barrier magics intended to contain and sequester. The sound of the wind howled against the entrance, and my ears piqued to listen to the undertones of the baritone voice sighing. Water dripped. Far away echoes of creatures chattered in the night. Scent of water. Smell of green lichen.
Another silent whistle of a whine echoed with them, and then I got to my feet again. It felt strange to do so, but Paul came with me--held gently in my mouth along with the crimson Durmstrang cloak trimmed with black fur in the same shade as my own--closer to the entrance where the scents of pine and the outdoors were stronger and where I could get a better view of the outdoors. Eventually I bumped against the abjuring barrier, and then dropped my things before turning twice and then laying on the cloak with Paul between my forelegs. From here, I could look down the mountain--pines and spruce, fir and rowan plucking up and through the wind-sorted snow. A glow of golden light indicated that the cabin in which the Headmaster guarded me illuminated the snow nearby, glistening.
Look what I had done to myself. Good job to me. Made it all so much more difficult for those that loved me, and had done the stupid thing of permanently ostracizing myself from society over a stupid, stupid whim. But it was probably safest this way. Imagine I hadn't been good about taking the Wolfsbane. Would I have done the same thing to someone else that had been done to me? I didn't like that idea... but...
And then there was the matter of being able to obtain Wolfsbane after I was no longer under the school's watchful and magnanimous eye.
God... Valentin... I sighed into the doll again, blinking slowly. A low sound a little beyond a groan left me. A small, keening sound that didn't dare rise above a quiet mezzo piano. Ears strained to hear the sound return to me, but it failed to do so, and instead they folded back again as I kicked my rear foot out to get more comfortable on my own cloak.
I was tired.
I felt... alone.
Not in the lonely kind of way I liked to be.
So to evade the loneliness, of the strange and uncomfortable way that I felt for the first time in a new, eternal other skin, I tried to sleep. Tried to sleep until the cursed moon left the skies and dawn would eventually bring me back. Pained from the strain of transformation, perhaps, heavy-hearted: but at least it was going to be me again, eventually.
Eventually...
And eventually... dawn did come. With it came the reversion that seemed to happen with more of a whisper than a roar. Shivering in the cold wearing my cloak and with Paul hidden in it as I reclad and made arrangements for return, I could only imagine what those younger than I had to go through their first times. I was more than aware of the fact that there had been cases of children inflicted with lycanthropy... what in the world could their times have been like? Had they had potions? Had they been handled by folk who cared for the human they were as opposed to the danger they had the ability to become?
The cloak was tight about me, my nose buried in the scent of the black wolf's fur that could have been my own. Disturbingly enough, I could smell the scent of the animal in it mingled with my own wolf shape's. The wolf that had been slain for the cloak when I had been eleven and new to the school... that I had chosen myself by hand and for its size... It smelled of the large animal I had remembered seeing with my own eyes and that had left a scar that had eventually healed. That wolf I had helped to kill in reactionary fear with the help of the instructors teaching the way of the northern wilds. The wolf that had transformed me into what I had become last night I had not.
Had gentleness, mercy, made me weak?
Had I survived less now than I had then?
The black Wolf I squeezed tighter, pressing it to my chest. The scent of the great animal, of the great hunter it had once been ensorcelled me. Was I one of them, now? Or was I less, since I could no longer control the bloodlust that came with such power unless by the hand of external intervention only barely able to tame it by pharmacology and drugging?
When I saw Valentin, I knew he could see it in my eyes as well. I wasn't sure if he was able to see the split-second and impulsive urge to throw my arms around him and simply melt there for the need for touch. Something I crushed down quickly: something I crushed down so that I wouldn't melt, so that I wouldn't crumble and break then and there. Like that. Because I couldn't let myself do that after all of this.
Valentin would let me.
I just couldn't bring myself to let myself do it.
I just had to carry on. To carry it with silent dignity and acceptance.
I was a shapechanger now. I had a second face.
But for how much longer could I carry on like this, with everything eternally weighing on my head and heart like this?
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───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────𓃦 |Stam10| Eva8| Str20| Wis10| Acc17| Arc0
Heightened Senses | Tracking | Wolf's Grace | ⚪Obnoxiously Strong | Martial Artist | Muggle ConditionNone