Prologue - Blow, blow, thy winter wind!
On any other night, it would not look like this. It would not leer, peering down evilly with its sickly, pale yellow light. But that night, when Remus crouched uncomfortably in an unnamed forest at the outskirts of the werewolf pack, the moon glared at him through hooded eyes, watching the shudders of him and 40-odd others as they went through their change.
For him, the change was torture. Torture, pure and simple, because it depraved him of what he fought so hard to keep at all other times – his mild-mannered ways, his polite demeanor and gentlemanly countenance. Perhaps it was because of the change that he had those little things, the ones which endeared him to those who loved him more than he knew.
For them, the change was release. Release from human bounds, for this was the night in which they could excuse their inhuman ways because that was what they were – inhuman. It was their only chance to bite back – literally – at the blow fate had dealt them. Unable to cast off the curse and too vain to hate themselves, they embraced it.
He hung on to his humanity as deeply as he could. They pushed it away as far as they could. He used all his strength to retain a humane soul; they used theirs to be animals, even when they were not. Sometimes, he would feel the feral urges pressing onto his mind; sometimes, they would feel the slightest twinges of a long-fled conscience.
A wild howl ripped the silence of the forest apart. It was not the eerie, melancholy call of the brown-grey wolf that was Remus. It was the bloodthirsty one, shared by Fenrir with many others, signaling the beginning of the night's hunt. At the exact same moment, many hundreds of miles away, a small and fine-boned witch dropped her mug of tea.
For a moment, Tonks stared at the broken shards of brown porcelain. It was spread across the floor in a hundred different pieces, and each one of the brittle, splintered pieces stared back at her accusingly. "Reparo." The mug reformed itself at her feet, but bleeding red welts from where pieces had pierced her skin still remained. Bending slowly and stiffly, she picked up Remus' favourite mug and placed it carefully on the countertop. Shuffling out of the basement kitchen and up two flights of stairs, she slipped between the sheets of Remus' bed.
The village came into view quickly, Fenrir's pack trotting faithfully behind him in a swarm of brown and grey, muscly shadows moving on crisp snow. The bitter, winter wind carried a soft scent, easily detected by their twitching noses. Breaking ranks, they bounded towards the drifting smell's source, silent except for the crunching of snow underneath their padded feet.
At the edge of a graveyard, under a large beech tree, a Muggle girl-woman waited for her lover, wringing her hands anxiously. She was more than a girl, yet not quite a full woman. That, Fenrir reflected, was the perfect stage of life to feast upon. It was the human side of his split mind which thought this thought, for that was the only side capable of doing so. His wolf, though intelligent, would never think, only feel. And that the human side of his mind thought this did not bode well for anybody.
Beneath the beech tree, the Muggle girl-woman knew only that she heard softly crunching snow and was waiting for her lover to appear. She did not know that the young man pictured in her mind was far, far away in the arms of another girl, and she did not know that the soft crunching noises came from many pairs of feet, not one. But even if she did, it would not have done any good.
For, as the wolves bounded onto the girl-woman from the darkness, she had enough presence of mind for the moment it took to note that they moved with terrifying swiftness. Her last thought was of her family, her last image of the moon, shining serenely and wallowing amongst the stars, as her body was ripped apart by glistening teeth.
So many miles away, Tonks finally drifted off to sleep, dreaming of Remus amongst the ones who were the same as yet so different from him. The red welts on her legs were still there, staining the bed sheets a rusty red. Outside, bitter winds ripped into the bricks of No. 12, Grimmauld Place and a brown-grey wolf's fur, as he howled his sorrow up to the heavens.