Pack, Pack

Run with us, brothers.

The Pack rules all.

Imagine, if you can, the safety, the elemental comfort- lying amidst a sea of striated pelts that undulate in rhythm with their wearers’ breathing, the soft scratch-scratching tempo set by drowsy paws churning in the throes of one man chasing something in his dreams, desperate for satisfaction. Warm breaths redolent of wild mint and rotting meat misting in the chill autumn air, rasping in so many throats. To drift into oblivion, warm between the heaving flanks of your brothers, adding your drowsy growls to their twilight symphony.

The Pack itself is amorphous, a carnal collection of ragged-furred stragglers that eat and f**k and fight as one, a many-faced machine of flesh bred to scourge, to swallow the world one slow, bloody bite at a time.

There is Siyan, the grizzled gray, the rubbery flesh of his exposed eye-socket faded a thousand shades of bruising violet, who followed the tail end of a revolution that scored his ribs and muzzle with iron claws. He limped into the Pack’s embrace before the winter snows, steeled for execution, but instead found soothing tongues and stinging poultices to smear across the raw pink scars the guns and blades of man had left him.

He shed the stumble-tongued skin of man to become a wolf with a breadth of chest to match the stoutest barrel, bearlike in his shaggy pelt and hunched, humped shoulders, his muzzle packed with yellowed teeth as long and jagged as hunting knives. Paws made for the man-tall snowdrifts of Siberia.

Kurz, the rangy rot-mouthed cur, whose bites fester and bubble and dribble pus until the vessels beneath blacken and burst apart, organs collapsing into themselves like so many dying stars. Beasthood suits him as the mold of man never has; to use his teeth instead of those soft, easily broken tools called words.

Surry, wild to her bones, born in the skin of the form that she rarely leaves, fleet of foot and sharp of tooth. She’s all messy waves of rippling fur the color of the flatlands’ moist and fertile earth and jagged, pearl-white fangs, a wolfskin tented over sharp stilts of bone.

The Pack seeks the downtrodden, the slack-mouthed and dim-eyed, all whose blood sings with the wild roaming hills, and the Pack devours them. Head, first; to fill their ears with whispered promises of breathless nights galloping through the lowland forests, free of restraint, restriction, to feel the velvet trickle of blood on their tongues and to bathe their muzzles up to the eyes in the slime of fresh entrails.

Then, of body- to force the Change upon them, to call them back to what they are.

(“Chimera,” Siyan had growled to a newcomer, lips curled back to reveal dripping carnassials. “It means?”

“Two things, formed into one.”

“And aren’t you? You are man today, but there is wolf in you. It is becoming what you are, and have been all this time. Nothing more.”)

There is pain, of course. (“It only hurts the first time,” claims the obsequious bone-chewer, “And after that, it’s like putting on an old leather boot, molded to you. You’ll slide into your second skin with not a whisper of the pain you felt before.”) The changing fuses fingers together into blunt paws, lengthens the spine until a section of jointed pink bone splits the skin of one’s lower back, stretches chin and nose together to form muzzles packed with needlepoint teeth. Flesh and fur form row by row, blood sizzling upon the soil. Belly skirting backbone. Convulsions will rack a newly-changed; they will compact and lengthen, burst apart at the seams as their molecules spin and scatter in a frenzy of reconstruction, of new growth.

And afterwards a new creature is cradled in the soft summer grass’s entwining limbs, something birthed of desperation, an amalgamation of nicotine and nightmares that is neither wolf or man but fragments of both. Pale pink tongues will loll free of blood-spotted muzzles. They will breathe in new life.

A chimera cannot live fully as wolf or fully as man; to be a wolf too long risks forgetting the man, and remaining a man too long carries the risk of regretting the wolf. The Pack lives in turmoil, always in contrast with themselves.

Forbidden is to mate with wolf as wolf, or to eat of the flesh of men; forbidden is to abandon the pack that blessed one with their second skin, and forbidden is to kill the prey that they depend upon while on two legs.

Fourteen nights of every twenty eight, the wind will carry the songs of wolves. They will mate and roam and romp as one, pull together into tight spearheads to run down the scarce piebald bucks that populate their forest (to feel the earth thrum beneath one’s paws, to close eager jaws upon a thrashing foreleg and feel the bone crunch between one’s teeth, bloody slaver running in thick rivulets from their lips).

The inhumanity of chimera-kind is never disputed; to express the ears and tails and jagged teeth of animals marks them other, but it is a populated exile in which they wander. To change skins is to cross the border of humanoid inhumanity into the desert their creators intended. To abandon the Pack once initiated is to resign oneself to a lifetime of loneliness, to die kicking and screaming beneath the hands of man (the gun, the rock, the scalpel).

The Pack knows this, as it knows all nuances of man and beast, the interactions between. Some have called this insidious, abominable- (and disappeared into the oblivion of the rivers and forests of the flatlands for their bold tongues, never staining the grass they laid upon).

There is a truth in this, of course; but the Pack knows, the Pack judges, the Pack hunts, and, as ever,

the Pack owns. 

Author's Note

Just a rather long, rambling character development piece. Leave any crits or comments you see fit.