Notes: Our Werewolves Are Different, but only some of them.

Wax and Wane

Chapter 1

.1.

On the far edge of Nibelheim, unsheltered by the mountain's cold stone, and perpetually smothered in ice and snow, stands a quiet, solitary house. It is a queer thing, a lonely thing, that scarcely ever breathes smoke from its chimneys or bears light in its windows, and it is one of the oldest houses in the village, built to stand the test of time. No one goes near it, except children on dares to knock on the door or peer through the frosted glass, usually on eerie full-moon nights accompanied by much drama and the occasional horror story. It is the subject of many folk tales, rumours, and village legends, and it is wholly and thoroughly abandoned. Except for a day each season.

Skulda Strife comes down from the mountain as a herald of the changing seasons. She clears the ice and snow from her roof and walls, she sweeps out the dust and lights a fire in the hearth, and then she comes to make her rounds of the town. She speaks with the Mayor, sells fur and meat and tooth and scale at the markets, and buys all the little things that can't be built from what the wilds provide. Invariably she is pointed at, whispered and stared at, and keeps gossip lively for weeks after she leaves. Invariably, in the weeks after she leaves, a new season ushers in. The town lives and works by her comings and goings, for it is known that when one of her kind comes, it is to herald a new season.

When the pattern breaks, it is never good news.

When the dragons over-breed and a bold fledgling comes to harangue the livestock, Strife comes to Nibelheim. When wolves not her own intrude on the town, snapping and snarling, Strife comes to Nibelheim. When a new season draws near, Strife comes to Nibelheim. So it has been, and so it shall always be.

Until, one day, Strife comes to Nibelheim to herald Winter, and doesn't leave.

Whispers wax and wane like the moon above as smoke trickles from the two chimneys, candles dance in the windows, and Skulda Strife does not return to the mountain.

Then, wolves come to Nibelheim. Not the strays, the desperate ones apart from kin and territory, which are a danger to all in the village. But Skulda's wolves, her ravening horde. First one, then two, then three until finally a massive pack of over forty individuals are yapping and snarling and wrestling on the edge of the pine forest, wandering between the trees and the lonely house.

Three individuals among them are larger than the rest, command more presence, and most visibly of all, are adorned. Wood-bead necklaces, metal arm-bands, even earrings decorate their frames, weaving into the fur. In some, fangs and claws flash as ornaments, and even the tell-tale shine of materia weaves into the twine. It speaks very clearly of what they are. And then, of course, there is Skulda herself – and never were there wolves as large as Strifes. She towers over the rest, more thoroughly adorned than all of the other three put together, and positively laden with Materia – most noticeably, a single red, glimmering like blood from her chest – and she slips between skin and fur with impudence. Human, she looks tiny, puny, much shorter than the average woman; it's almost a mockery.

On the fourth day, they finally come with Skulda to the village. The exiles stand beside her just as wild and dishevelled, as if they belong. They visit their families one by one, and then leave again, melting slowly into fur and fangs at the edge of the forest.

On the fifth day, the first person dares to ask Missus Strife why, exactly, she and the wolves are there. And she declares, wearing a sunny smile, that she is expecting.

The gossip which is a small town's lifeblood positively explodes.

.2.

Skulda Strife's pregnancy is in the same shameful, unspeakable manner as it always is for her family. She lives all year with the wolves, all her life with the wolves, and with neither partner nor husband comes to the ancestral cottage with a quickening in her womb. She remains active through all of the autumn and all of the winter, disappearing each evening with the wolves yipping hunt-calls at her heels, and the nights are full of howling.

It's a frightful time for everyone, needless to say. No one likes having savages around, or wolves, or exiles, and most of all, no one wants a Strife staying so long in the area. Which, as memory tells, she will certainly be doing. For years, even!

.3.

She is a sentinel, a guard, a protector of the village, even if the village has forgotten. She knows her duty. She passes the months as she always does, leading her wolves against the many monsters of the mountain, glutting them on flesh and blood, but returns each day to the little stone cottage that she was born in. Crooning softly to the smooth curve of her belly, she weaves teeth and claws into leather cord and twine, shaping strong lengths. She weaves materia into little wire cages and then they into the leather and twine, and from the smith in town she commissions the supplies she will need to properly provide for her child.

Over five gradual months, her child grows, and her belly grows heavy, and she can't run quite as far as she is used to. But they know what to do; they won't suffer her absence, so long as it is short.

It is late Spring when she senses her time approaching. She descends to the cottage basement and scrapes for hours at the cold earth at the centre where there is no floor, digging herself a small, dark alcove which feels safe. Then she stuffs herself full of meat, retreats to the den, and waits.

.4.

Skulda heaves for hours in agony, keening and growling all through the night. She hears her wolves pacing around the cottage, on guard, on alert during the alpha female's most vulnerable time.

Then, finally, with the half-moon high above, Skulda gives birth to a healthy son.

She names him Cloud.

.5.

She bites away the birthing film from his mouth, then licks the whole of it away. She feeds him and ties his first pendant around his neck, and then she puts Materia in his hands as they ripple into being from paws. His tiny fingers close tightly on the little green orb, his wide, dark eyes too young yet to see anything other than how it glows. But he is a Strife to his bones; he stares at it, fascinated, and does not let go.

.6.

She stays with him, underground, for five days, murmuring and growling and nuzzling at him. She is half out of her human mind, wolf is strong in her for this, instinct knows what to do with a wolf cub, but still she pushes through to teach him the ways of Strife as well as Wolf.

At the end of those five days, she leaves him in the den and wanders out in wolf-form to the cool air of a Nibelheim night. She goes to the forest's edge and waits, patiently, while all the pack yip and murmur with delight, clamouring around her like excited puppies, all competing to catch the scent of the new little one. Finally she grows tired and shoves past them, stuffing herself on the fresh-killed carcass nearby. She gathers the scents of the more important individuals and then withdraws back to the den, taking some choice items with her.

Little Cloud, in the absence of her warmth, has shifted seamlessly into his own beautiful downy fur, whining with a cub's voice for her return. She presses him back into the loose earth and feeds him. Then she introduces the pack members' scents to him as they hang on her fur, one by one, and with growls and tackles and little nips at his scruff teaches him how he should behave in their presence. Days pass, and Skulda flits in and out of the den, bearing each time new scents and new things for her child. His eyes pale to the same clear, beautiful blue as hers, and begin to flash in the meagre light from the cottage above.

.7.

She puts a dagger in his fingers when he is two weeks old. He grasps happily at it, as does he anything she gives him, and she waits patiently as he does what he usually does with his gifts – waves it around and bites it with toothless gums.

She takes it back from him as he yelps at the pain of blood blooming from his mouth and a thin line along his face. She watches his form ripple between skin and fur in distress, setting in a little wolf shape that curls up and whimpers. A few minutes in she pushes him over and licks the blood away, watching the blood slow steadily beneath his fur, and the beginnings of healing. She waits for him to become a furless newborn again, and then puts the knife back in his hand. He first tries to push it away, frightened, but after much urging reluctantly accepts it, holding it far more warily with his stubby little fingers.

He has learned.

.8.

A Strife infant does not grow as quickly as wolves do. A wolf mother would have been out of the den, with the cub, in the space of three weeks. Skulda, urged by her atavistic wolf-mind, recognises that he is yet far too small, and stays in the den with him day after day, the weeks passing like water through her fingers.

He is too young for human words, but the language of wolves is simple, and comes easily when he has the right shape. He is young, but Strife enough to be taught things.

One by one she presses Materia into his fingers, sniffing at him, encouraging him. She takes them, periodically, and sets little embers into the soil, little static jolts, little stabs of cold. Skulda gives them back and croons at him until, finally, he makes his first sparks at three weeks of age. She bowls him over and smothers him in wolf-praise, happy and proud.

.9.

Magic and Materia are the toys of a Strife child; they need no other. Skulda watches, brimming with pride, as week by week he sits in the dark and learns the way of Materia and its power. He tires quickly at first, but his progress is quick, and day by day he plays longer. The channels that connect magic to the soul imprint themselves in an almost discernible process – five days after the first sparks come the first fire, a little yellow thing that bites at his fingers like the knife had bitten his flesh, and he drops the orb and whimpers, cradling his hand until it heals, and then fire too is something he has learned.

Cloud learns the danger of electricity just as quickly, but ice takes him longer. He is six weeks old when, fascinated, he realises that ice is physical in a way that lightning and fire simply aren't, and spins bizarre, elaborate shapes of frost into the den. He has created an alarmingly large block of ice when he begins to realise that it's cold, and he doesn't like it so much after all, but Skulda won't let him out of the den or snuggle next to her for warmth. Instead, she hands him the Fire Materia over and over until he realises the ways of ice and fire, and how they can ail each other.

Soon, though, Skulda begins to grow bored. She has a firm, instinctive block against the idea of taking her offspring out of the den early, and of course leaves periodically to feed herself, but a mother can only watch a child play with fire for so long. After a while she brings her crafts down to the den, and some days weaves leather and twine and tooth and claw together with glimmering shards of Materia that catch Cloud's eye. He reaches for them, only to be disappointed in how they refuse to answer his call like the spheres do. Other days, she carves at stray branches with her knives, making beads, pendants, and little figures – which Cloud promptly appropriates, in most cases.

The first time Cloud sets her on fire and giggles as she jumps up and snarls, she growls deeply and threateningly at him, and then sets him on fire with the mastered Materia she has around her neck. He shrieks and then howls, going wolf-shape, for the five seconds she sustains it and whimpers for a further three, whereupon she casts a very slight Restore at him. Then she hands him the Materia. No fool child, he quickly makes the connection, and is soon literally glowing with health. He isn't very happy with her for the next few hours, and Skulda knows that human mothers would be horrified. But neither she nor Cloud are human, and pain is the best teacher in the world.

.10.

Cloud is too young to learn words. Too young for human concepts, or knife-work, or wood-carving, or weaving. But Materia is natural. It is a part of the world, as much as water and stone are, and using the magic you are born with is as natural as moving. As natural as how the wolf runs, the fish swims, and predator strikes prey; but as in so many other ways, humans have grown apart from nature. By the time youths first hold a glowing sphere in their hands, their body has forgotten the instinct to call at it, and they will forever be crippled in its ways.

But Skulda held Materia in her hand mere minutes after she first breathed. She knows magic like she knows her own scent, and her son will be no different.

.11.

After four months underground, Skulda casts an eye over her son and admits to herself, warily, that it's about time he emerge.

So, finally, she sighs and ties Cloud's Materia – his, that she spawned by mastering her own – into elaborate wire nets, wire that she weaves into and around the same leather cord and twine she uses for almost all jewellery she makes. Fire, Ice, and Lightning she fastens around his little furry neck, which he noses at, puzzled. Restore she fixes into a sturdy arm-band that fixes onto his stubby little leg, front right. She nips at his ear when he messes with them, then ripples into fur and pushes him out of the den.

He is alarmed at first, squirming around her nose, but then realises where he is being led, and stumbles excitedly alongside her. She has to carry him up the stairs by his scruff, and he hangs bonelessly until put down, whereupon he comes to life and skitters clumsily around the little cottage in delight, sniffing and squeaking at everything. She lets him investigate for ten minutes, then rolls her eyes and pushes him out of the door.

Little Cloud freezes for a moment, inhaling the hundreds of new scents and peering at the bright, bewildering world around him. Then, the escalating excitement of the pack, waiting at the tree-line, catches his attention. The massive crowd of individuals, ears erect, shove and pace around in a frenzy, all fixated on the pup whose scent Skulda has been acquainting them with for the past four months. Their scents, in turn, are something Cloud is familiar with; she leads him to the pack and watches as they all nose at him, all crowd around in the same delirious excitement as they'd shown when they first scented his birth on her.

She is relieved to see that she taught him correctly – he knows to roll over and show his belly to the older, bigger wolves. He also, to her surprise, begins nipping at their faces in a way she hadn't taught him. She would need to start feeding him meat soon.

After the pack are mostly done, Skulda shrugs out of her fur and picks up her pup, coaxing him into his ungainly, chubby little human form, and swaddles him in the furs she'd brought out with her. She brings him to Grend, Kjora, and Futhar, the exiles in her pack who still keep names. They ripple into humanity and carefully, one by one, hold him in their arms, smiling as he squirms like the puppy he is in their grasp. She tells them his name, then takes him into town and shows him about before the staring eyes, presenting him and naming him to them all.

"Are those Materia, around his neck?" Mayor Lockhart asks uneasily, to break the awkward silence he'd spent staring at her baby bemusedly.

"Yes." She answers, calmly, and taps at the middle on his pendant, the Ice. Perfectly happy to follow her direction, frost begins to curl in the air, then falls. Unused to being off the ground, Cloud watches it descend to the ground, startled, as the Mayor flinches. "The first thing a Strife child learns is how to use Materia."

Watching the ice form and shatter like grass as it tumbles, he haltingly questions "is that safe?" and then jolts visibly when Cloud, wanting to get to the ground, ripples into fluffy pup-form and tries to wriggle out of her hands.

He stares at her child in horror. Like he's something wrong.

Skulda hides her own ice behind a razor-smile, showing teeth, and replies "perfectly." Then she bites admonishingly at her son's ear, and walks away without so much as a goodbye.

.12.

With Cloud old enough to be left without her for fair periods of time, Skulda assigns Kjora to his care and for the first time in too long takes to wolf form and rallies the pack with a high hunt-howl – they take it up and the edge of the forest comes alive with wolfsong, thin and loud and chilling as she runs into the trees, the others at her heels. Her pack has hunted in her absence, and her alpha male defended the territory, but they've had to remain close to town, to her and her cub, and the borders have gone unpatrolled for too long.

It is as she'd expected – further from town, further into the forest, monsters are abundant, having bred into a frenzy in the large pack's absence. Her wolves themselves are starving – they've hunted the acres near Nibelheim till nothing remains, and she knows some of them will grow weak soon if they don't eat. So, in a frenzy, she conducts the kind of slaughter that her father had warned her of, for the days she'd have her own child, and stay in one place for far longer than wolves are meant to.

Blood-drenched, exhausted, and very happy, she and her pack haul carcasses back to the edge of town and pile them together, and the massive pack falls on the meat hungrily as soon as she takes her fill of the best parts. Cloud greets her exuberantly, licking and nipping at her muzzle, and with consideration she regurgitates a little meat for him. He takes to it well, but she knows it will be a while yet before he is weaned.

It takes two weeks to properly secure the territory. She loses three wolves culling dragons, and the whole pack howls for their absence when night comes. The loners skittering on the edges of their range, hearing the vacancy, warily offer their voices, far away, and so in mere days she gets back the missing numbers. It is the way of wolves.

The chiefest blessing of having such a large pack, though, is that no other than the most desperate of packs dare encroach on the territory, so long as they continue to hear the numbers from the night howling. She marks the edges of the range to deter any of the bolder wolves, and returns to business, culling dragons. Before long she has tanned a number of new lovely dragonscale hides, and woven all the teeth and claws she doesn't sell onto jewellery.

Kjora remains the primary care-giver while she is away in daylight hours – Skulda trusts wolves to care properly for Cloud, but not to raise him. He is a child of both worlds, and she knows well the dangers of letting him become too wild. There is a reason a Strife always leads.

.13.

There is no escaping what they are.

Skulda is adult, and she is a Strife. When the Planet sings each month to the full moon, Lifestream rising and flaring beneath her feet, she can resist the way that delirium pulls at her mind, the way that base, wild instinct rears as a tide to wash all else away.

Humans call the beasts that roam the lands 'monsters', and Nibel wolves are in that category. In reality, most are only animals who bear magic, and attack and prey upon each other as their natures dictate – but what makes humanity deem them monstrous is that each and every one of those strong enough, magical enough, with enough lifestream running in their veins, will attack any human that draws near without remorse. It is not always prey drive, though many will certainly eat the corpse. It is not always their territorial nature, either. It is simply because they are humans, and humans feel wrong.

Kjora, Futhar, and Grend can't feel it. They were born human, and raised human. For all that they use Materia now, they feel distinctly unpleasant when in human skin. But she wasn't born among mankind. She can feel unease flare in her every time she draws near to a human, a species with such abundant magic inherent to them, who let it rot within. Unused, magic grows stagnant, insular, the channels grow thin and it feels disgusting to her sense, just as if their flesh were rotting and she could smell the stench of it, as if there is a sickness beneath the skin that needs to be bitten out like sour pus in a bad wound. After so many years, she is inured to it, but...

When the moon waxes, it pulls at the tides. It pulls at the Lifestream just the same, and it rises beneath the Planet's shell, quivering and bubbling, so close to the surface. Her magic rises with it, singing just the same, but humans' – theirs is still, stagnant, dead, and when everything is moving and the sense of life is deafening it feels so, so abhorrent, it's unendurable.

It is a well recorded phenomenon that monster attacks are far more common at the full moon.

Cloud reacts to the smell of wrong amplified a hundredfold by the moon just as she'd expect. But if she could learn to resist it, so could he.

.14.

There are a few other cubs in the pack who Cloud plays with, but they quickly outstrip him in growth and soon he is without peers. He thus amuses himself by harassing adults and playing with Materia – and Skulda is glad that her exiles supervise him, because otherwise many a house-fire would have begun. As he grows more proficient, she begins to travel regularly between the mountain's many mako springs and caves, searching shrewdly for natural Materia. But they are scarcer than they were once, and she gathers few that she didn't have already. In the end, most are of the sort that won't be suitable until Cloud is older – Mystify, Poison, Transform...they're invariably bad news for whatever he would practice them on, and he isn't old enough to know better.

After some consideration, though, she bullies her exiles for the unlevelled spawns of those she'd given them years ago, and gives Cloud one new orb: Earth.

Earth delights the little boy. He laughs with glee as the dirt reshapes around him, and he is shortly throwing it in people's faces.

.15.

At eight months, Cloud's milk teeth grow in, needle-sharp in wolf shape, but mostly flat as human. He begins to gnaw on everything, and Skulda's only defences against merciless assault of her tail are well-applied jolts of static, and some Barrier when he gets too annoying.

It means, for one thing, that she starts letting him chew his own meat, and for another stops letting him anywhere near her mammaries.

It also means that he is now at genuine risk of accidentally infecting someone.

end chapter