16/31

today nothing happened, or at least not enough happened that would be interesting to read about.p

Some of the easiest things to write about are our dreams.

I ran. In a blur of hooves and sweat and terror, totally not innocent and alone, and hunted. I rode on my stolen horse in my stolen clothes, and my hate for men and my stolen life. Then a crash, a terrified neigh, and a flash of gray fur. A searing pain on my neck. Blackness.

I wake up. The constant drip of a stalactite on the roof. Stalactite. Stag, tight, lagging behind the other girls on a trip to the well. Drip, drip. It smells like Wolf. Kin, Fur, hunted by the people who captured me. Drip, Drip.  Hunt. Hunt. Hunt. I open my eyes, wild scrambling, listening for outside, and I hear it. Run, Free, Hunt. Pack. Hunger claws at my stomach, the wolf inside me crying out for food. But I cannot hunt without pack. And now I know. I am wolf.

Pack. Hunt. Meat. Deer. My mind says to the others, the glowing pairs of yellow and green eyes that watch me. I cannot see, but I feel, the sense of pack, of home.

Yes, wolf, we will run. Pack, Together, Bond. That is alpha. He is in charge of us. There are four of us. The one that smells like milk. Her pups. Alpha, he is strong and brave and always knows what to do. Those are his pups, small and they know nothing. Pack Bond will teach them. We all rise and run out of the den, a long cave dug into a hill. We run for the kill, the deer that we feel. And we all run so fast, all we hear is the panting of our breath and our thought of food. White wolf howls and we join in. We are human too, and the thought of eating raw deer is both disturbing and truly thrilling. Alpha tells us to stop so we do. We halt, and the world is no longer a blur around us. We will hunt the stag.

We are silent. Brown wolf says that I should not help because I am new. Alpha says no, we are only as good as our weakest link. I will catch the stag. The stag is a hundred feet away. The area around us is covered in trees, with low branches. I leap, balancing as I silently leap from branch to branch, until I am above the deer. I drop, my long claws sinking into its flesh. I crush its legs, biting into its neck, snapping its spine. It falls, dead to the ground. Alpha shifts. One moment he is pack, and the next he is a man, grey haired. 

“Go ahead, eat.” Says Alpha. I thrust my muzzle, red like my hair in human form into the carcass, eating as if I have never eaten before.