#we're getting better folks this was only 917 words

[lapinlunaire-games]

Halloweek Day 3: Fog | Halloweek Prompts

He crouches and springs forward, limbs moving with devastating ease. There is a shiver in his pulse that thrums with power, something larger and more ancient than anything he has or ever will be.

tw: body horror

He can feel it already—a heady, insistent tugging at his veins as he moves through the woods, shedding his shoes and overcoat as he goes. Smarter to do as his father does, and leave them in a neatly folded pile at the base of some tree, but the silvery thing setting his blood aflame is howling too loud and haunting now for any thought of that.

The moon breaks through the trees in a burst of cold silver; Sam’s heart quickens and he halts in place, just shy of the moonlight pooling on the ground.

Slowly, he extends a trembling hand—the moon tingles where its light slips over his skin, itching as it calls to itself—and lets his fingers unfurl. Silver gilds his skin, washing over each knuckle with a holiness so tender it burns. He flexes his fingers and releases a ragged breath at the pop of each knuckle, all preceded by a burst of ice beneath his skin. Same closes his eyes; sight is unnecessary for what follows next, an experience that he feels acutely, every cell of his being writhing in the knowledge of its transformation.

First is the familiar yawn that starts in his bones as they stretch, their new length and weight dragging pain down his spine for a long second before his muscles finish weaving new, stronger fibres along his skeleton. Melanin evaporates from his irises, yellow overtaking brown with a feeling like staring into the sun; Sam’s hiss of delighted, eager pain rolls into a snarl as his jaw elongates, bone groaning as the joint pops into its new place and thick fur sprouts from his skin.

The air is ripe with damp earth and the prickling scent of cold when he breathes it in next, his surroundings made impossibly sharp and clear around his trembling body. He crouches and springs forward, limbs moving with devastating ease. There is a shiver in his pulse that thrums with power, something larger and more ancient than anything he has or ever will be.

The world smears around him into a fresh-scented masterpiece of forest and sky, his pulse echoing the pound of his paws on earth, leaves crunching like great drums heralding his passage. On his tongue is the strong, tart vibrancy of the night slowly (inevitably) bleeding into day, leaching from the trees into his mouth and lungs like sap, the process of losing this ungoverned freedom kept at bay by the false, heady silver that seeps from the sky. Sam sheds the thought of this loss as easily as he shed his clothes hours earlier, lost in the unforgiving, imperative call of a finite ecstasy.

When the sun spills over the horizon—running faster only pricks the yolk more, each step tears it open along your spine—, Sam knows he cannot fight (and indeed, would not fight) the howl that lances from his chest into the last vestiges of the dying night. Something echoes back to him, singing silver in his blood as he bends his body to the ground and feels the wind rush through his fur the same way it does through the grass around him.

His mouth drops open, tongue lolling out as he rolls to one side and pants, his breath fogging into the grass. The power, this wild thing that screams like an angel beneath his skin, swells through his distended veins. It hones itself with every thump of his heart until the sun breaks full over the horizon and the cold silver choir in Sam’s blood tears him apart again. One final howl echoes through the trees, accompanied by the crack of bone and sinew shrinking back to fit around the shape of a man.

As the power of the full moon fades, so does its compulsion, leaving Sam sprawled out in the grass, bare skin steaming. He keeps his eyes closed, pressing his face to the ground as hot breath fans out from his parted lips. Wind rolls softly through the tangle of forest he’s found himself in, raising goosebumps where thick, dark fur has thinned and flutters in the wind like dandelion fluff.

In the still, sun-stained greyness between dawn and day, the symphony that had run softly alongside Sam in the night quiets and gives way to birdsong. The grass continues its rustle as dew forms on the blades, coating them in a softer silver than the one so recently disappeared. It beads on Sam’s body as well, only to steam off almost immediately.

His chest heaves—he can’t see it, nor truly feel it, but Sam imagines the Veil roiling around him, disguising him from woodland eyes—and he rolls onto his back and gasps softly at the new map of wet pinpricks along his body. Fog rises from his ragged breaths as he sinks into the soft earth and feels the dew set and steam off his skin, some silver part of him buried deep inside knowing that it’s a ritual, as simplistic as it is, that claims him as part of the earth too. Eyes still shut, Sam runs his tongue over the tapered points of his teeth—they’re always the last to come and go, these small things—and wonders, as he does every full moon, if the earth will still claim him when he can no longer run and howl, when he is a hollow memory preserved only by the way the world once yielded around his shape.

It is a small comfort to believe that he will still belong somewhere.