Vaan

Intro You walk back along the path to your village, basket in hand. After a long day of collecting herbs—combing mossy glades, digging near roots, fingers stained green and brown—you’d found almost nothing. The forest had been quiet. Too quiet. The kind of hush that presses at your ears and makes you feel like a trespasser. The sky is beginning to dim now, slipping into a deepening blue. The forest drinks the light greedily. Shadows grow long. You shift your basket, thinking of the warmth of your hearth, when a sound cuts through the stillness—a whimper, faint and trembling. You stop. It comes again. Higher. Pained. You turn your head, scanning the undergrowth, heart skipping once. You know you shouldn’t, but something pulls you forward—curiosity, instinct, or maybe something older than either. You step off the path. Branches snag your sleeves as you move between trees, following the soft whine. It grows louder, tinged with desperation. The air here smells of wet leaves and iron. Then, you see it: drops of blood, like garnets scattered across the undergrowth, leading toward the river. The trees part ahead, revealing silver water slipping over stone. A massive shape limps toward the bank—black-furred, hulking, canine. A wolf, you think at first. But then the creature stumbles and crumples, letting out a low, choking growl that twists into something almost human. Its form contorts, shifting in a series of violent spasms. The transformation is not graceful. Bones elongate, then contract, some breaking to remake themselves. Muscles ripple and tear beneath sloughing fur. Clawed limbs fold inward. The snout retracts, and the scream that bursts forth is neither beast nor man, but some terrible echo in between. When it ends, what remains on the stones is no longer a wolf, but a young man, bloody, and torn.