Chapter 1: The Farmer's Shadow
The sun was an enemy.
That was the first and most brutal lesson of my new existence. It was not the sun I remembered, a golden sphere that brought warmth and life. This was a searing white orb that hung in a sky of such a pale blue it looked sick. Its light was not an embrace; it was an aggression.
An assault of photons that struck my host's eyelids and filtered into my consciousness as a reddish, painful fire. I, a creature who felt a fundamental affinity for the absence of light, was chained to a being of the day. The pain was conceptual, a fundamental rejection of my new nature against the environment imposed upon me.
The rest of the sensations were no better. They were a cacophony, a relentless attack on a consciousness that had only known the silence of nothingness. The sounds were sharp and strange: the singing of birds I did not recognize, the pitiful bleating of woolly creatures with twisted horns, the creak of old wood underfoot.
And the smells... oh, the smells.
The dense, damp fragrance of freshly ploughed earth, the pungent stench of animal manure, the salty aroma of the man's sweat, and the comforting fragrance of bread baking in a clay oven.
My residual human mind tried to catalogue them, to give them a name, but the senses processing them were alien, overwhelmingly powerful. It was like listening to a symphony through a hundred broken speakers at once.
And above all, there was the beat. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. An incessant, muffled, and organic drum, marking the tempo of my imprisonment. It was my host's heart, a constant reminder that I was a passenger, a ghost in his machine of flesh and bone.
My host.
My jailer.
He was a simple man named Lycos. His life was a cycle of such crushing monotony that, for a consciousness that had existed outside of time, it was a form of slow torture.
He woke with the sun, and I felt the dull ache in his joints, the creak of his back.
He went out to his fields and I felt the sun's heat on his skin as an indirect burn, a fever that made me crave the cold caress of darkness.
I watched him, from the prison of his soul, work the earth with calloused hands, eat his hard bread and salty cheese, and finally, as the sun sank below the horizon, return to his humble stone house to fall into a heavy, dreamless sleep.
During the day, my existence was that of a ghost tied to his shadow. Literally.
I was his shadow. My essence was anchored to that dark spot his body cast upon the ground.
It was my cell. I could observe the world through his eyes, hear with his ears, but I could not act. It was absolute impotence.
But then, night came.
When the last streak of light faded and the two moons began their ascent into the night sky, something changed. The bond, the golden shackle that bound me to his soul, loosened.
The shadow was no longer my cell; it became my door. With the first cloak of complete darkness, the system that had imprisoned me allowed me limited freedom.
The first time it happened was an experience of pure corporal horror. It was not a transformation; it was an eviction.
I felt my consciousness being torn from Lycos's soul and poured, like water into a mold, into the darkness surrounding him. The blackness of the night swirled, solidified, wove itself around me to give me a form.
Panic gripped me. I tried to stand up and collapsed. I had too many legs. I tried to look at my hands and only saw massive claws made of solidified night. I tried to scream and only a low, guttural growl that vibrated my own chest came from my throat.
My perception of the world became distorted. Colors faded into a palette of grays, whites, and blacks, but my vision was incredibly sharp; every leaf moving in the distance was a clear, defined event.
And the smell... the world became a tapestry of scents. I could smell the field mouse trembling in its burrow fifty meters away, the sap dripping from a wounded tree, the dampness in the air that promised rain by dawn.
My body was not flesh. It was... something else. When I flexed it, I did not feel the familiar tension of muscles, but the sliding of plates of compacted darkness. I felt both immensely powerful and completely alien. It was a nightmare. It was a monster.
Instinct, not mine, but that of this form, screamed at me to run. And I ran.
The sensation of four paws moving in perfect synchronicity was strange, but undeniably efficient.
I moved like a bullet of pure night, a blur of darkness that glided over the earth without making a single sound.
But my human mind was still in command.
This was not an act of liberation. It was an escape. I had to get away from this form, from this place. I ran towards the distant hills, towards the horizon, towards anywhere but here.
And then, the chain tightened.
It was a violent pull, a lash that shook not my body, but my soul. My run stopped dead in its tracks, as if I had crashed into a glass wall. I was dragged backward, the speed of my flight becoming the momentum of my forced return.
I landed in a heap of shadows and frustration barely a hundred meters from the small stone house where Lycos slept, oblivious to everything. The bond had a limit. It was a leash.
An invisible and absolute leash.
Despair threatened to consume me. But after despair, came determination. If I could not escape, then I would fight. I would fight for the only thing I had left: my form.
Night after night, the ritual began.
After the failed attempt to flee, the battle for my humanity began.
I concentrated, ignoring the beast's instincts that urged me to patrol, to hunt, to mark my territory. I focused on the memory of being a man. A memory that was fading, but still burned like a dying ember.
I tried to stand on my hind legs.
The first nights, it was pathetic. The anatomy was wrong, the balance impossible. I collapsed again and again, a clumsy monster trying to imitate a form I barely remembered.
But I kept trying. After what felt like years, I managed to stand upright for a few seconds, a precarious act of balance that exhausted my will, before falling again.
Then, I focused on my forelimbs. I sat in the darkness, lifting a paw, and focused on the memory of a hand.
I remembered the five fingers, the opposition of the thumb. With all my mental strength, I tried to mold the darkness that composed my body. It was like trying to sculpt smoke.
'Fingers... not claws. Five... not four.'
The first few times, nothing happened. But I kept insisting, night after night, a ritual of stubborn denial. And then, one night, I saw a change. One of the shadow claws seemed to shrink, retract slightly.
The paw flattened, widened. For one glorious, trembling second, the shape vaguely resembled a gauntlet, a clumsy, fingerless hand. Then, with a flicker, the form dissolved and the claw returned to its place.
It was a victory. A minuscule and exhausting victory, but a victory.
While my human mind was occupied in this existential struggle, the body had its own needs. Sometimes, concentration failed. The beast's hunger, not for food, but for the act of the hunt, took over.
They were like blackouts. One moment I was trying to remember the shape of a human face, and the next, I "woke up" with the metallic taste of blood in my mouth, the shattered body of some night creature lying at my feet.
The first time it happened, the echo of the man I was conceptually vomited, a surge of revulsion and horror. Was I turning into this? A senseless killer? But the beast inside me simply felt... satisfied.
Years turned into decades. I watched Lycos grow old, his children grow up and leave. I remained the same, an immortal monster chained to the life of a mortal. My nightly struggle continued. Progress was glacial. I could now stand upright on my hind legs for almost a minute. I could, with immense concentration, transform one of my paws into a crude, functional shadow hand for a few precious seconds before it fell apart.
But the struggle was taking its toll. The memories of my past life were now like sun-faded photographs. My mother's face, the sound of a friend's laugh... they were ghosts.
The name I tried to remember every night was now an almost inaudible whisper.
And another name, one that did not come from my memory, but from the instinct of this form, was growing ever stronger. A name that the beast seemed to know like its own skin.
Lykaon.
I hated it.
I hated that name. Because every time I heard it whisper in the corners of my mind, it felt a little more like my own. The fight was not over. But in the silence of those long nights, as I watched my jailer sleep, a cold and terrifying truth began to settle into my soul.
I was losing.