Lycan Coven
 By Alexia S. Luclwit

I was eleven years old when I received the bite. Now I am something of a leper to all but my own kind, but I didn't receive the short end of a straw. I have a talent, a talent for all things literary. It is there that one can write cloaked with a penname, and people can love you for who you are, not what. For I am sure, if they knew, that they may hold me in suspicion, and even more than that? Fear, fear of a kind of abnormal people who lose all control of sanity once a month.

I was a strange child; my mother would tell you that I never cried. In fact, for these reasons I was often given tests, thinking there must be something mentally wrong with me, but no. I didn't cry because I didn't have a reason to. I learned to read at age four, and by third grade found myself correcting the Professor's grammar more than she corrected my own. I was a strange child, still am, and loved to walk in the fields around my house after dark. The full moon was beautiful, but what was so beautiful would soon become my curse.

I never heard the werewolf's footsteps. I was sitting on the edge of a small bridge, dangling my feet over a stream deep enough to swim in. I never saw the wolf until I caught the shadow in the water below me, and then fangs clamps down on my shoulder. That was, I think, the first time I ever truly raised my voice, and it was a scream. I tore away from the beast, diving half conscious into the stream. The water was dark, and when I rose I could taste blood upon my lips. I floundered with one arm, finally grabbing a hold on a bar beneath the bridge. Over me the beast paced, growling and whining, snuffing between the boards. Numb from cold, shoulder afire I hung, most likely delirious with pain.

I awoke with the rise of the sun, no trace of my attacker. I managed to get home, falling into my parents arms. I was admitted to the hospital, bandaged, and branded as a lycanthrope. I lived in terror of my first transformation, and I think I know what it is that makes a person truly a werewolf. The pain, the pain of your bones relocating, the pain of things growing, shrinking, shifting, I was terrified. All through the night I howled and railed against the bars of my iron prison.

As soon as I was old enough I left my parents, I searched the werewolf annals for my own kind, hoping to find solace with those like me. I found them, scattered across all of England, and it was through me we began to amass. A solitary life is not healthy for a person with ties to a wolf, ties to pack-life. Now we live together in a mansion paid off through all of our own gatherings, a mansion a goodly distance from civilization. Upon each full moon we give in to the hunt, running all over the grounds.

We are the Lycan Coven. All of our blood is welcome to come and go at will, or stay if you have a mind to. We're a happy bunch, full-moon or no. I can be found in the den, so aptly named, writing my novels of fantasy and of a life I'll never live. You don't know what's your missing until it's gone, and I am lucky because I got to live eleven years of a normal life.

My name is Alexia S. Luclwit, a prowler of full-waxed moon. I am a lycanthrope, and I am not alone.