The spirits weave a tale that has been sung by no man. Their voices have come to me before in my dreams, telling the truth of a world which I was not ready to see. And still their faces haunted me, their voices calling to me always. Their words made no sense to me and yet they spoke volumes, consoled my grief and aroused my heart until it would nearly burst with the need of it. I wandered so unerringly into their path in these nights, that some years later I would see that it would be more than simplicity and fate at work. It was the way of things.

The last summer night before my birthday.

I awoke.

Sweating.

Seated upright in the cotton shirt that I wore nearly every night to bed. The window was open, breeze blowing swiftly through it, carrying a currant of warm air to my face. I knew that there was more to it than this, a familiarity upon the wind - like footsteps in the sand. To follow it meant movement and before my brain even began to send the needed impulses I was already out of my bed and out the front door. My steps were guided down the moonlit path. It was wet with mid-morning dew, the sun had not risen just yet. I could still feel the cooling sweat on my body as the night air touched my skin. Bare foot, I plotted onwards over smoothed oval stones spaced maybe three inches apart at best. My Grandmother had laid them out when she was a child, this was her cottage.

In a few short moments I had made it all the way to the lake behind her cottage without even noticing. So thick was this scent in my nose that I feel, to this day, that smell remains. The roughness of sand mixed with small worn pebbles denoted that I had passed the grass line. Continuing toward the shore, my eyes adjusted finally to the growing shadows and I halted once the lapping waters caressed bare toes.

Here I am. I thought.

There was a growing concern in the logical side of my brain that became all the more menacing until it seemingly vanished. Like an over extended relay, it snapped and the piece that had held me together in this skin for seventeen years finally released. I heard their howls as claws ripped into meat, their teeth gnawed and bit at the unearthed potential. They called to my beast with each mark upon my skin, with each rip of my flesh she clawed closer to the top until..

A heat washed over me.

A warmth I would soon come to love called me forward.

The crack of bone and tearing ligaments sounded and somewhere distantly a scream in the night called out, echoing across the still water of the lake until it disappeared into the trees. It was a hungry sound, one that I would come to know as the voice of change. The signal to the slip stream of my body, where the beast inside of me became real and over powered such a tender and innocuous body. My knees buckled and my fingers dug into the earth with the pain of it, I screamed and the world went black.

I came to visit her every summer and nothing like this had ever happened to me before.  I awoke the next day with bandages about both my legs and arms. There were a multitude of busy scrapes and cuts over once perfect skin. I hear the rustle of footsteps and the creak of a door as it opened..

“Illy?” It was my Grandmother’s voice. Calm, placid, just like the lake.

The lake?

I couldn’t speak yet, my tongue too thick and cottony from a night without water. Why did I taste blood? My brows furrowed and I gasped because even that hurt. She came to sit by me and all I recall from those brief moments of lucidity was how incredibly patient her eyes were. The deepest brown, wide set and almond shaped. Her mouth pursed and before I knew it a white cloth covered my eyes and I was asleep once again. Voyaging the myriad of voices in my head.

Life, from then on, was different for me.

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