SECOND PLACE
WEREWOLF MAGNET
ABSOLUTELY FERAL

A beast makes its way through the woods. It sniffs at the wind. Whenever it notices something interesting, that is the whole world condensed to a single point. Russet ears twitch, the whole unseen world unfolded before them. The Forest is alive, alive, alive! When it comes upon the bones of a stag, it realizes at once that they are not stagnant, cast-off shells, but that they are being consumed and broken down to be remade in the nuclear furnace of a wolf’s womb or the incandescent workshops of a tree’s leaves spread to tear open rays of sunlight and pour them greedily down its branches, and that all life is a circle, life to death to life, and how selfish, how provincial of the underworlds to think that the careless cast-offs, the invisible soul, is anything more than a bit of dream and fluff that gets lost as the mushrooms turn meat to pulp and then are ground between the lips of those who graze upon them?

The beast throws back its head and screeches in delight. It flings itself headlong into jumping, scampering, cartwheeling, all its senses alive, lit from within by the fire of divine providence and inevitability. When it arrives at a stream it lowers itself to drink, and the cold sharp water is the best thing it has ever had. When a thing with a head like a snake and a belly full of baying hounds lurches beside her to drink, it offers the new guest scritchies and raspberries on its noisy tumtum. Then it wades into the water and lets the current wash its scent away, wash tomb-dust away, it scrubs at itself with its nails until it is fresh and clean and new.

It eats a really weird bug and doesn’t even care.

***

LATER

Time is nothing to a tree. This means that in sufficient quantities of trees, time goes quite queer. This is why people who live out in the woods are Like That.

An arm comes through the window. It is black with matted hair and mud, and its nails are long enough to scratch the wallpaper. The arm is connected to some sort of Woods Creature or Sasquatch with bright green eyes, which bounds in as if it owns the place, the ears on top of its head twitching. It sniffs the air.

It grins.

And it lunges at Sam like a wild beast, things like “this is a terrible idea” and “don’t I still have to get him to sign off on detention” completely forgotten. You’re stuck, vampire! Time to spin the wheel a little!!

Timmy, Annalee— do you recognize this wild, feral, Wood-mantled thing as Elodie? Don’t worry, either way, she’ll mostly be back to normal tomorrow. Probably. So feel free to just freak out and run for it.

[[b]7[/b] on Lashing Out; Thanqol gets to decide how bad the harm turns out.]