Lycanthrope

Ketu was in the fourth house on the astrology chart when Lycaon was born into this world. It normally signaled finality; endings, but this was different. This was an advent of change, a transformation, and a transcendence from evil sources and the beginnings towards a general expansion of evil. It was old evil returning from the ancients. It represented a renunciation, a rejection of the current ambivalent fragile balance, the status quo, and it brought about malefic, harmful and destructive forces. Neptune, the psychopomp cat, the guide for recently departed souls, was familiar with the nature of all creatures, especially in the change process, the afterlife. But he would be unfamiliar with this change, a change of death in reverse. Lycaon was born from the evil dead ancients through a living creature to bring death and spread evil on this plane, driven by ancient vengeance inside the mountain. The mountain had started its existence and formed, solidified, during earth’s earliest and great cataclysmic crust creation stages.

The Capricorn club was completely unaware and remained unaware of Lycaon’s existence. They would feel the tremors over time, spiritual winds touching their souls, as the Ba became corrupted and tainted with greed and yet more greed. Only Wicked and Neptune felt the stir in the spiritual air. The eyes in the mountain waited to meet the leader of evil and share Lycaon’s true birthright, his rightful place in the order of the world. In this realm.

Lycaon was the proud leader of all he surveyed. Together with his twin loyal followers Fenrir and Fenris, the trio would infect their evil onto the surrounding wildness and beyond.

He often struggled to remember the time he was different, or being someone else. Those faraway days, his beginning bygone days, those days of hiding his nature. Hiding his true nature. Those memories were fading, like the comfort of walls and a roof protecting him from the wet, the rain, and the first sprinkling of winter snow. He was now at one with the harsh elements. The tugging and tearing, and rasping of the wind, became his sword and shield. Nowadays he used all the elements as a hunter when hunting prey. That is what he had become, a hunter of prey. He now wore his walls and roof as protection in all seasons. The harsh seasons. He was reborn. He could no longer remember the precise moment, the moment of his rebirth, but it was the moment his life changed from an illusion to reality. He no longer needed to hide. The curtain of artificiality parted, and he stood proudly on the centre of his personal stage, the main character in his story, and true to his nature. He was no longer Ba, or part of the Ba world.

The only constant in his days on earth was a primitive obsessive feeling in his blood. He knew without asking anyone that the cocktail inside his veins would be the catalyst one day towards his transformation, transcendence to his true nature and purpose in the world.

Those early years before the transformation; his start in life wasn’t at all auspicious, in Ba terms Lycaon started his life under disadvantaged circumstances. He was at the most vulnerable. His mother was a street prostitute with no fixed abode, and his father could have been anyone of the many customers, impregnated and conceived in the back alleys of the town, his mother was eventually run out of town by the authorities. Those same authorities: set up in the first place, obliged to protect the vagrant mother and her baby – Lycaon himself. A decision was made that they did not want to spend the time and expense and give charity to a person such as Lycaon’s mother; although she was someone that charity was designed to support. At times, the Ba world can be crueler and more discriminating than the wilderness. At least in the wild creatures are free, the realities stark, with no false hopes. Lycaon’s mother was in dire need, but instead of getting the right support, she was ostracized, in order to protect the unnamed incestuous and guilty. Lycaon’s mother was a fifteen-year-old child with an unborn baby, thrown out of town because she was an embarrassment to the guilty.

In those formative years, Lycaon and his mother lived like stray animals, finding shelter in disused buildings, or animal winter shelters, barely protecting themselves from wind, rain and snow. They wandered from village to village begging for food, or the mother offered her body in exchange for food and a roof over their heads. His mother was no angel, even the word mother is a misrepresentation. If there was an opportunity to exchange Lycaon for a hot meal she would gladly accept. She was using the baby, the toddler, to gain more sympathy from those she sought charity. There was never any love or feeling between mother and child; it was a brutal upbringing.

Lycaon started fending for himself around the age of three or four and survived equally as well without his mother. From an early age the remote wilderness called his name, the mountains whispered in his ears, the ancients silent in the mountain, looking on with sightless eyes, knew his destiny was outside of the Ba world. To their understanding he was born a wild evil savage, it was in his blood. He was a hunter, a leader, destined to lead a savage wild existence.

The final transformation didn’t occur until he was nine years old, and the ancient world, the evil eyes of the mountain, waited for the final transcendence to his rightful primaeval life form. To eclipse and complete the final stage in his journey and to become a harbinger of evil.

Lycaon was already foraging on all fours like an able quadruped. More out of necessity than convenience. Climbing up and down the severe slopes of the mountain to gather or hunt for food, one requires more balance and agility than can be gained as a biped. The arms of a biped on the steep mountain inclines were needed for purchase, quickly becoming redundant as counterbalances in a typical fast walking or running posture. The clothes, now rags, barely covered his body, were the only recognizable evidence that at one-point Lycaon had originated from a human being. His body was already filthy, as it seldom came in contact with cleaning water. His skin had hardened, now calloused with continuously living in the wild, and curiously dark black hair grew and covered his entire body. He now resembled a monkey-like creature, as he adeptly traveled over the challenging terrain, in all weather conditions.

Lycaon had become a clever hunter, and in the mountain environment he was at the apex of the food chain, he had no other adversarial animals to fear. He didn’t need to fear any creature, except a random wolf or wild pig, conversely all creatures were his prey, and at his mercy.

The moon looked like a huge spotlight on the outdoor stage setting of the mountain. The sparse shrubs and miniature squat trees created texture and depth to the night vision, as the moon’s rays cascading against the contrasting textures. Sometimes reflecting and shining off the bald patches of rocky outcrops, weathered and smoothed by endless wind and rain. Sometimes glimmering on a leaf of a shrub, or a tree, or conversely absorbing and hiding the moonlight in the darkness of its foliage.

The huge mountain looked on in its grandeur, a compliment to the huge orb of the moon in the sky. The mountain whispered through the wind that night, an ancient evil whisper from the spirit Gods. The historical layers of our forebears, now dust within the sediments of rock hidden within the mountain, offered their homage to the act which was to be played out that night. Only one creature understood the whispered message, Lycaon was ready, and embraced the moment, the final moment, and his destiny. He outstretched his arms embracing the huge spotlight of the moon in the night’s sky, as his arms and legs reformed into that of the beast, simultaneously his human head reformed into a protruding muzzle, his nose and mouth expanding into a crazed smile, and his incisor teeth turned into fangs. The rags on his body, his remaining clothes fell away from his torso, and black hair increased in density, and grew longer covering his entire body. Lycaon stood on his bent hind legs and howled at the bright full moon. The howl was an acknowledgment to the world, Lycaon was announcing himself, acknowledging his calling since birth to the ancients, to every living inhabitant of the mountain, to the mountain itself, and to the spirit of the mountain behind those ever-present sightless eyes.

The Wolf Moon, and the Blood Moon that followed beamed down in homage, Fauces de la Muerte had arrived, every living creature was in jeopardy of his evil infection. Lycaon was more than a typical Lupus Vulpes, he was destined to be the leader of a deadly vicious pack, the messenger from the ancients - Les yeux de la montagne.

Finally, the full moon, the mountain stage, silently applauded the transformation that had changed Lycaon from Ba into a Lycanthrope (Werewolf).

*Ba is a word for humankind and their world.