“It’s been ten years, my love.” Eris said, moving about the kitchen with restless purpose that did not seem to have a destination. Nothing on the stove, nothing to cut or peel, or roll between her palms, nothing that required her hands at all, and still she moved, shifting dishes, smoothing the cloth on the table, turning a cup in her fingers as if the weight of it might settle something in her mind.
“Yes, ten years,” I said, quiet as the steam rising from my tea, watching the dust settle and lift in the autumn light. I stood, bracing my hands against the frame of the door, looking out over the land that once been a vision of the future and was now only a reminder of labor spent and muscle wasted. Hard work won it, but hard work was not keeping it.
Ten years since my last transformation. Ten years since the blood ran like fire and the old hunger had howled my bones. I had made myself small, domesticated, tied my hands in promise, and mostly, I had Eris to thank. She’d given me another name, another life. And yet, even with her there, the wanting never fully went quiet. There been moments—small, blissful things, like the glint ona knife’s edge in a room too dim to see clearly—when I been tempted. A merchant too arrogant in his price. A knight who looked down his nose and made insults under his breath, daring me to answer. My patience stretched thin, a tight drum-skin over something deeper, waiting.
But Eris grew round with child, and the temptation turned to fear. Not of what I might do, but of what I might become. No longer a thing to resist, but a thing to dread. If I lost myself, if I slipped, if I turned and my body followed, what would be left of what I hollowed?
Phoibe was three now, and she was the root that bound me to this world. I had thought I loved Eris in the fullest way a man could love, but then Phoibe had come into my hands, red and screaming, and my heart had left my chest and gone into her, where it would live and breathe and beat outside of me forever. If anything threatened her, I would burn the world to its bones. There would be no hesitation, no question, no second thought. And that knowledge—terrible, absolute—frightened me more than anything ever had.
Eris felt the same, about Phoibe, when I asked her. It steadied me to hear it. “Why now?” she asked. “Why would it come to you now, after all these years?”
“Because they are threatening our livelihood,” I said. The words tasted of iron in my mouth. “If they come after the harvest and demand what we have, then the only thing the Duke will have left to count is the stones of his city crumbling around him.”
She sighed, low and long. “I’m sure we can find another way, Damian,” she said. Her hands were never still, even as she spoke. Turning a glass vial between her fingers, the thick liquid inside moving sluggishly with each motion. “If the urge rises, I have a few extra potions prepared.”
Eris had always been gifted in her craft. A thing between magic and science, measured and precise, but with just enough wildness in it to make her truly dangerous. It was her potions that had held me back, had kept me from becoming what I once was, that had allowed me to stand beside her and call myself a man instead of a thing with teeth and fire in its blood. But we both knew—if I wanted to break free of her remedies, I could. And if I ever did, there would be no return.
One morning had come slow, heavy upon the earth, the way it does when the world is caught between breath and silence, when something unseen leans its weight against the doorframe but does not cross the threshold. Mist lay close, wrapped about low fields like a body drawn in sleep, turning in half-dream, the wheat standing pale and waiting, something near-golden but not yet sure of itself. I stood at the fence with my hands pressed against the wood, felt it rough and old beneath my palms, and beside me, Phoibe leaned in quietly against my side, her small fingers curled over the rail, the night’s warmth still clinging to her skin.
She was watching the fields the way I had learned to—slowly, as if watching for something hidden just beneath, the land itself might speak if youlistened hard enough.
“It looks like gold,” she murmured heavy with the last dregs of sleep on her tongue. I nodded. “It does.”
She was quiet then, watching the wind move softly over the tops of the crop, the hush of it threading through the quiet. Then, after a moment, “Will it stay gold forever?”
“No,” I said, after a breath. “It changes. It ripens, and then we take it. Then the fields go bare for a while.”
Her fingers traced the grain of the wood, small and slow. “So it dies.”
I let the air out of my lungs, slow enough to keep the weight from shaking loose. “Yes,” I said. “For a little while.”
She was quiet again, but this time, I could feel the thought turning in her, as sure as the fields would turn beneath the scythe. She looked up at me then, her brow drawn, the searching already set deep in her gaze. “Are people like that too?”
Something in me moved, something long still and settled. The question was old, though her voice was young, old in the way of things turned over in the dark when no one else is awake, old in the way of things that have no clean answer.
“Some are,” I said, and my voice did not feel like my own. “Some grow back, even after they’ve been cut down. Some are planted again, somewhere else. And some…” I exhaled. “Some just stop.”
She pressed her lips together, thinking, thinking in that way she had that made me ache, as if she had been given too many things to wonder about too soon. “How do you know which one you are?”
I looked at her, really looked, at the way the first light of the morning caught in her hair, at the depth in her eyes, already reaching for things too far to see. I bent my head, pressed my lips to the crown of her, felt the warmth of her beneath me, so free, so real.
“I don’t think we get to know,” I said, quiet as the morning itself. “Not until it happens.”
She held still, slow as the light moving over the fields. Then, softer than before, “Then I want to be the kind that grows back.”
Something ached in me then, heavy and full and without a name.
I wrapped an arm around her, drew her in close, the two of us watching as the wind pressed its long, slow hands over the fields, the wheat shifting, turning, breathing beneath the first long touch of the sun.
“Me too,” I whispered. “Me too.”
The harvest came, and the harvest went. The fields bent gold beneath the sickle, and the hired hands moved among the rows with keen ease, taking what was needed, leaving what was not. Wheat, mostly, but I kept a smaller garden beyond the trees, hidden behind the fields where the Duke’s men wouldn’t think to look. Hardy things, thick-skinned and stubborn enough to make it through the winter. It had been a good season, as good as it could be after a drought like the one we had suffered.
We took what we needed, and nothing more. Which meant there was nothing left for the Duke. If he had any sense, he would dig into his own reserves, the great vaults of grain and barley and rye he had hoarded through the years, instead of turning to us for what was never his to begin with. But sense was a thin thing in men like him. And I knew well enough—if it came down to it, if he took from us what we could not afford to lose, if he reached his hand too far—then my restraint would be as dry and brittle as the fields had been before the rains.
And it was only a matter of days before they came. Three of them on horseback, their figures dark against the bright edge of morning, the sun catching off their polished armor.
Phoibe was with the neighbors for lessons; Eris was in town, shopping at the market. The house was empty but for me and the silence, which had been comfortable, until now.
“As long as they don’t force the issue, nothing is going to happen,” I told myself, tasting the words, testing them, making sure they were true. Then I stepped outside.
They reined in before me, the horses shifting beneath them, their nostrils flaring, uneasy. The knights sat tall in their saddles, their shoulders squared with arrogance that can only be bred, not earned. Their armor was untarnished, without so much as a scratch or a dent, proof that they had taken more than they ever given. Not real knights, I concluded; tourney knights they must be. They looked well fed. Their horses looked fed as well. They looked at me like a man might look at something beneath his boot.
Contempt, I could handle.
“Sirs,” I said, standing easy, my hands loose at my sides.
“Farmer,” one of them said, without preamble, without courtesy. “Your crop yield is past due.”
I did not shift, did not blink. “No crop yield means no tribute,” I said. “Not even sure my family will last the winter.”
“That isn’t how this works.” The knight’s lip curled. “Blame your poor farming skills. We estimate, based on the size of your fields, that the Duke is due thirty bags of grain.”
Thirty. Even in a good year, it would have been too much.
I let the quiet settle between us before I spoke. “Can’t bleed a stone, sirs. Good day.” I turned as though I had already put them behind me.
“We can bleed you, peasant,” one of them said, his voice light, almost thoughtful. “And your wife. And your daughter.”
It happened then—quick, involuntary, like a breath taken too deep, like a fire catching dry tinder. Every tendon in my body drew tight and wound itself into something inevitable. Muscle coiled, bracing. Beneath my skin, the bones shifted, stretched, too fast, too sudden, an ache I had almost forgotten. My teeth felt too large in my mouth. The scent, the horses’ sweat, the cold edge of metal, the iron tang of my own blood, just beneath the surface, just waiting.
I hadn’t been this close in a long time.
“Is that…” I breathed, my chest rising with something deeper than breath, “a threat?”
“Call it whatever you want.” His voice was easy, practiced, like a man stating the price of bread. “Before this, we stopped at your neighbor’s farm. Missus Drusilda—fine, noble woman—was hosting lessons for the village children. A most generous offering, wouldn’t you say? And an excellent opportunity for us to ensure compliance from thick-headed bastard peasants like yourself. Which one of the children was yours?”
Something in my jaw gave way. I felt it before I understood it—a wet pop that sent a crack of pain rolling through my skull. I staggered, a breath stolen from my lungs, my tongue thick and useless in my mouth.
“What,” I said, the word strangled, half-formed, “did you say?”
“We have the entire village’s children under guard,” he continued, and his voice was still easy, still casual, like a man discussing the weather. “If I remember right, your child was named Grey, wasn’t he?”
“No,” said the second knight, as if correcting a minor detail in a story. “Grey belongs to those Shepherds. Phoibe is the one we encountered earlier. She’s been disobedient, so we have her in the dungeo—”
He never finished.
My fingers had grown—twice their usual length, tipped in nails thick as iron. More than enough. More than enough to cut through the thin flesh of his throat. A wet, sucking sound, and then the body fell, slumping to the earth, gurgling in the dirt. The scent of blood was heavy, copper-bright and hot.
The other knight had time—barely—to draw steel.
“M—monster!” he gasped, eyes wide, blade trembling.
I bared my teeth. “A man defending his child…” I inhaled, feeling the weight of my limbs shift, the stretch of my skin pulling apart and reforming. “No,” I said with something deeper than language. “There are no monsters here.”
Eris potion fought me. She had given it to me earlier; as a precaution, she called. It dragged at my muscles, clung to my bones, tried to keep me still, keep me bound—but the thing inside me had rested too long, too well, and now, unchained, it did not rise hesitantly. It roared.
I felt it—felt the fur needling my skin, the pull and grind of my bones lengthening, twisting, the rippling pop of sinew and muscle snapping apart and reattaching, thicker, stronger. Pain, yes. Blinding, unbearable—but sweet, like the first breath of air after drowning. Like something long caged, finally free.
A growl rolled from deep in my chest, shaking in my ribs, shaking loose in my throat as I rose, taller, heavier, bending the earth beneath my feet. I stood nearly eight feet now, hunched against the raw, electric sensation of my own body remaking itself.
“Gods above,” I rumbled, flexing my hands and my claws, “and Gods below, I missed this.”
“The Werewolf of Jouska,” the knight said, voice a thread stretched thin, caught between the weight duty and the cold press of fear. “I thought the Inquisition put you down years ago.”
To his credit, he did not run.
I felt it settle over me—the transformation, like a long, slow breath drawn through bone. Final. Absolute. The body always went first. The mind—always the last to go.
What followed was no duel. No clash of wills between men measured in steel and fire. There was no honor in it, no order, no weight of history behind the stroke of a blade. There was only the sound of breaking—bone unseamed from flesh, a thin gasp cut short beneath the weight of teeth. The stench was thick and hot, rising in a red mist. And the heart, the trembling, pulsing thing of it, was weak against the shape of my hand.
He struck first—a blade through the chest, a gesture, an offering. The steel was nothing. It did not burn, did not halt, and did not matter. The wound would heal before I swallowed my first bite.
His shield shattered beneath my hand. His armor gave way like wet paper beneath the press of claws.
And then—his heart.
Still warm. Still twitching, the last fading echoes of a life I had already unmade. The taste of it, I knew, was as I had remembered. But this one—yes, this one had lived soft. This one had known comfort. I could taste it in the fat, the marrow, and the thickness of it against my tongue.
When it was done, I took what was left of him and carried it from my door away, into the hush of the dark, where the earth would drink what I left behind. But it would not be enough. Eris would see. Eris would know. Hopefully stop me.
I turned, breath heavy, steaming into the dusk, the sun drowning itself in the far-off hills, bleeding out against the sky.
I walked toward the city.
And as I went, I let my voice uncoil, low, thick, stretched through hunger and promise, the old warning that came before the feast. “Remember now, bastard Duke. When our mouths are empty, we will find a way to eat.”
Follow TyJheir Shipman on Social Media
X: @tyjheirs
Instagram: @tjxtron
Leave a comment