Beast of Yore

There are legends that speak of monsters.

They speak of shadows walking in the night, only given form in the absence of light. They tell tales of flesh stripped from bone, of skeletons picked bare beneath the full moon, and of the ones who disappear on the fateful nights, never to return. They warn of the many coated beast: he who walks in the skin of man, creature, and animal, but who is never precisely one thing.

Kyra has heard all of these tales, and yet he’s sure they’re never quite right. There’s something about the way these beasts are viewed as other, like specimens or aliens or things, that doesn’t sit right with him. He sees the hunter with his pelts and he strokes the coarse fur with tactile fingertips, eyes closed and the scent of a damp forest fresh after rain filling his mind. He sees the fisherman with his fresh catch and trades him coppers for a salmon, scarcely waiting until he’s home before he rips into it with those same fingers that stroke and caress.

Sometimes, he doesn’t view them as hands so much as claws. He has to be careful with what he touches, but he never is, and that means he breaks things more than he should. The world doesn’t tell him things as straightforwardly as it does to others, so he keeps a journal — his own little world, filled with his thoughts and memories and dreams.

He wanders alone, but never lonely. His footsteps trace the prints of creatures of old. He feels the shadow of the forest in his blood when he moves, supple and lithe like a predator, and when he hums, the earth hums with him.

His teeth ache to bite, to rip and tear. His limbs ache for the stretch of a run through the trees. His ears, large and twitchy, are sensitive to the quietest sound rustling in the undergrowth. He could use all of these things to kill, he thinks. It makes sense.

And all at the same time, it doesn’t.

Those legends speak of monsters. He’s just Kyra.

Perhaps someday, someone will understand that.