<span style="font-family: 'Book Antiqua'"><span class="fixed-color" style="color:#336600">She was called Mother once, revered as something akin to a Goddess to a tribe who both feared and speculated her existence. They sacrificed to her, they gave her bounty, they worshipped an alter that only grew her power. They wished for things in return as well; a return to good health from sickness, fertility, a good harvest, the demise of their enemies. The more they gave, the more they wanted. From Mother, she became Goddess; she became Giver, Guardian, and other things. Her name bloomed across cultures, changing, but her origin always remained the same. And so, finally, she gave them a gift. But also -- she gave them a curse for their greedy ways.<br/>
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By the light of the fullest moon, and especially on nights where the harvest moon was high and bright in the sky, they changed, became more potent, stronger, faster, keener. They came able to survive when the winter was too harsh by banning together as beasts. The strongest even learned to control the turn, defying the tie to the moon, and became alphas in their own right, to lead all her Children. But they were also forced to embrace the animal as well, losing their cognizant abilities during the change, and truly embracing the thing that they became.<br/>
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It had been years since she had returned to what had once been her village, once a plot of land with hovels and a handful of families watching as the sun rose and fell day in and day out. Since then, it had grown, but not by so much as she might have thought. Now there were cobbled roads that led to bigger and better things, their homes were made of stone and brick, strong mortar to protect the insides from the elements. They had learned to craft things, weapons, tools, things to make their lives easier. And many of them had traveled here to settle while what had once been her kindred had scattered, blending their blood, so that the beast became ever dormant in their descendants. Until what she had created had become nothing more than a mere myth that came to life, occasionally, throughout nations, on a full moon.<br/>
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One of her Children still remained in the village and soon after she had made her call, she was pleased to sense his arrival. A small smile crept over her delicate features, looking almost demonic with the flickering light of the flames. It only grew larger when she heard his voice, crackling with uncertainty like the fire. For the time being, she did not move, except that her amber-lit stare traversed to the mouth of the cave where his silhouette loitered, then finally came to sit, in the darkness, where she was but a mere mirage to his perception. <br/>
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“Come in,” the wind shrilled, blowing the words into his ears, perhaps having served as encouragement for him to walk into his fate. And as incense and magic filled his lungs until he passed out in a heap just inside the shelter, the Mother was already rising to her meet, the ancient mantra chant humming from parched, cracked lips as the battered balls of her feet tread a circle around the inside of the cave, drawing out the dormant wolf that lived inside the man’s soft flesh, coaxing it out of its long slumber so that it stirred, heckles rising, impatient for a hunt.<br/>
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Hours passed. The light of drawn crept up through the branches of the forest, awoken by the song of the birds. The girl sobbed in a corner of the cave, curled in on herself, her fire long since burnt out so that the ashes sat cold in the pit. Her dress was splattered in blood and so was her skin. Her luminous eyes, bloodshot with lack of sleep, stared horrified as the unconscious man that shared her space with her, only he was more covered in blood than she. From his mouth to his hands, to his bare chest where it could be seen from the tatters of his shirt. A dead deer had been dragged to the mouth of the cave, disemboweled, with chunks missing from its flanks, its glassy dead eyes already buzzing with a fly attracted to its death.</span></span>