The Awakening Prt 2

It tastes like thick gloopy honey, laced with all sorts of chemicals that burn my throat as I take it down and almost choke on its thicker consistency. I gag but manage to claw myself into staying still and swallowing hard with multiple gulps. Closing my eyes as the taste turns bitter, spreading down my throat and into my stomach and immediately warms them both. I can feel it disperse into my veins and limbs, knocking the cold of the rocks away from anywhere my skin touches and almost immediately I start to get a little woozy. The ground around me moving and swaying softly, like the sea coming in on the tide.

I shake my head but it’s completely pointless. Hunching forward so I don’t fall over, I now understand why every time I watched this, the newest to awaken would sit the whole ceremony slumped down and immobile until they turned. Seemingly oblivious to all of the ceremony and its stages as light faded to dark. They have drugged us for the pain, and I start to lose track of everything around me as a veil of surreal sweeps up like a warm fluffy warm fog and devours me whole.

I don’t know how long we are this way, what’s happening as all I can hear is the chant of the Shaman as he dances around, shaking things, singing, and clapping. Vision blurry and coming in waves, my body heavy yet detached and I no longer feel like I am really here or even conscious. Time passes but I have no clue how fast or slow, and all I know is it gets dark so quickly around me and I can’t seem to stop myself drifting into space or losing track and fading away. Cocooning me into the little bubble of black space around me where the smell of fire and incense makes me giddy and sleepy. It’s peaceful yet somehow, it’s not, and there’s a stirring of awareness and fear almost out of reach.

There’s warm hands on me, maybe, but I’m not sure, the sudden breeze although it does nothing to cool my eternal warmth. Lulling into a weird state of semi sleep and can no longer open my eyes or really understand what is going on around me. It’s almost pleasant.

Cold liquid and wrinkled hands, as something is smeared across my forehead, making me flinch with a second of reality and I grasp to focus on the dancing form in front of me. Rattling, blowing smoke, chanting a song as it runs down the bridge of my nose and I pull from memory that the new turns are marked with a fresh blood kill in preparation for our own turn. My face will bear the mark of wolf with an animal our Alpha will have slaughtered.

The roughness of something pulling across my skin startles me slightly, and then suddenly I’m levitating out flat or floating, or maybe just lying down. No clue anymore. I’m too wasted to have any sort of idea about what my body is doing, and the heavy, loud tones, of the wolf song echoes across the mountain as the packs sing to welcome our moon. I’ve never felt anything close to this, not even being drunk for the first time a few months ago, when we found some booze in the orphanage storage cupboard.

Memory of witnessing this many times reminds me that they take them and pull the blankets free for the turning; laying them down to be blessed by the full moon and logically a part of my brain is telling me this is what is happening. It’s almost like I’m no longer attached to my limbs and as a warm sensation trails firmly across my cheek, a raspy voice comes through the fog at me.

“It’s going to hurt… I can’t wait to watch it, reject. Or maybe I might take advantage of you like this. Finally get my way.” I barely recognise the voice, but gut instinct tells me it’s Damon, a boy from the Conran pack who tried to kiss me a year ago. He cornered me in the school corridor, pushed me against the wall and tried to force me to kiss him while shoving his hand up my dress. I fought him off, left him with a nice scratch down his smarmy face and he has been gunning for me ever since. Not that I marked him badly, we heal fast, but I obviously left a dent on his pride and his ego.

I can’t react and as a hot invasive sensation moves down my shoulder I can only squirm, wanting so badly to get his hands off me. He’s not that dumb though and with all eyes on us, he leaves me alone to my fate as I try to fight to come back to a sense of now. Suddenly afraid that after this is done, he will be the one to tend to me like this. Responsible for ushering me back to my clothes and the concealed shadow of the cliff edge. Who knows what he will do? I don’t recall if the turning takes you out of the drug induced stupor when it’s done, or not.

I can’t dwell on it any longer, as soon as I do, a burning light hits me hard over the entire surface of my body, almost like a blow torch was turned on and I spasm instinctively into an arched position on the floor. Every inch of my skin bubbling and blistering to searing levels of torture as though I have been set alight and I strain and claw the ground beneath me, gasping with effort. Breaking nails on rough terrain as I scramble for relief and yet can do nothing but scream.

Crying out in pain, writhing in agony, as an intense sensation rips my skin from my bones and engulfs me entirely. My voice deepens, scraping and running hoarse like I’m swallowing splinters and cries become growls, my throat almost bursting into flames with the effort. For a second, it’s like I’m being strangled. I’m under attack, my body is being ravaged, twisted, snapped and slain, but this isn’t another wolf… this is the turning. It’s so much worse than I ever imagined it could be.

Cracking, convulsing, and devastating agony, rip through me hellishly. Sending me rolling around in a bid to relive the pain as grime, rocks and dust scrape at my flesh and burn as I graze across them. I whimper and moan, but it alleviates nothing of the torture of my body crunching, shredding, itself apart. I cry out, beg for my mother to save me, wail for the fates to stop this, and claw at the rocks, breaking fingers with the sheer force of my fight and gouging what’s left of my skin on sharp edges underneath me.

No one could prepare me for what this feels like and I’m being turned inside out while slow roasted over an open bed of hot coals. I can’t breathe, I can’t scream anymore and silently I writhe and jerk and twist and turn as I am consumed by hell.

Our noises are drowned out by the stamping, chanting, and clapping of the packs, thundering through the ground and reverberating through my broken, smashed body… giving way to howls as the moon reaches its peak and they encourage us to make the final transition to become like them. Combining to howl, under strict orders that none other are to transform tonight and break the ceremony. Only the new shall change tonight, only our blood will spill as our human form is destroyed to build something better.

I want to die.

The pain is unbearable, driving me to the brink of insanity and it truly feels like my human self is being tortured to nonexistence. Every bone in my body snaps and reforms as though it’s being done manually, one at a time, my flesh tears free and pulls away from muscle. I’m wet, a hot pouring out as blood drains from the hellish self-inflicted wounds that seem to last forever, covering me in sticky warm heat, smothering me and leaving a vile metallic scent all around. I can’t tell what’s sweat, what is blood, what is maybe other kinds of fluid. Barely holding on, reaching a pinnacle where my mind is on the verge of collapse and the dregs of sanity teeter on a cliff edge. I howl and I strain with all my might, so I extend my face up into the air and gasp with relief as my lungs inhale and I finally take a breath.

And then … everything is still.

It all just stops. Like having a cold drink poured over scorched sunburn and instant soothing hits hard and intensely as my noise becomes silence, my burns become cool and my breaks become one.

I stop fighting my own body. Aware of the immediate cease of all of it and the creepy quiet that surrounds me so suddenly. The unnatural silence. Hazy and blurry as my head spins and I grasp for some sense of real. Catching my breath, gulping in cool air, and calming ambience, as the fog starts to clear, and my vision returns only a little.

I try to get up, to right myself, although it feels different and I stumble sideways with a disorientated sense of upright. I’m on my hands and knees, I think, even though I don’t know how I got this way. I can’t stand or push myself up as I would because it all feels strange and I blink and shake my head to clear my eyes enough to see which way up I’m facing. Confused, yet there is a calm taking over me, a sense of serene with heightened senses in every way. I blink, my eyes, watering as finally, dry is restored to moist and I see forms and shapes and shadows which then define to details and more.