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I, Lycanthrope The Transformation

I hope, dear reader, that I have not lulled you into a sense of complacency – or perhaps, for some of you, boredom – with the academic beginning to this text. Rest assured, the stark reality of life as a werewolf, even the banalest elements of such a life, are rarely if ever so dispassionate.

It is easy in researching a phenomenon and examining it with extreme granularity, to lose sight of its true nature. In understanding the microscopic minutia of a subject, it is commonplace to develop a certain blindness to the subject’s day to day reality – to lose sight of the forest for the trees.

To avoid just such an error of perspective, especially in my old age, I must frequently remind myself – and I feel compelled to remind the reader – that the beating heart and fiery soul of the werewolf is spawned from violence.

The tearing of skin off flesh with razor-edged talons; the goring of fat and muscles with salivating incisors; the feverish lapping of monstrous tongues at hot pools of human blood; the matted, wet fur of frothing muzzles nestled into the still living intestines of a screaming victim.1

These are the scenes of lycanthropic “birth”, and from these terrible moments is spawned a life suffused with violence at its very core.

To understand how inextricably Lycanthropic existence is interwoven with brutality, one need look no further than that most fundamental part of the Werewolf mythos – the physical Transformation2 itself.

In the next chapter, we will discuss the physiology of the transformed Werewolf and, as we will discover in more detail than the average reader may currently possess, the Werewolf’s monstrous body could not be more different from a human being’s.

In order to turn a man into such a monster, the Lycanthrope must undergo a Transformation befor which the extraordinary mutation of the lowly caterpillar into the astounding butterfly appears utterly quaint.

The monstrous Transformation regulated by the Lupus Modum is ruthless in its efficacy. Each Transformation is devastatingly painful, and yet ultimately rejuvenative , often dramatically so. Each Transformation destroys the Lycanthrope’s human form, utterly and completely. Yet, should the Werewolf survive until the transformation reverses itself, he will return, hale and heartier than before the Transformation took place.

In that sense, the Transformation is both destructive and creative – death and rebirth combined into one catastrophic and miraculous, terrible and awesome ordeal.

Over the last two decades, I have been observed closely by my staff at the Institute during each and every one of my monthly Transformations. I can attest that after five centuries the process does not get any less painful, while the reversal to human form affords me less and less biological returns as the years pass.

By watching dozens of my transformations – in conjunction with hundreds of experiments carried out on cell cultures derived from biopsies taken from both my human and Lycanthropic forms3 – the devoted scientists of the Institute have been able to meticulously map the Transformation from start to finish.

Suffice it to say, as with every other element of the Lycanthropic condition, the Transformation is couched firmly in biology rather than curses or magic. However, the biological processes involved are seen no where else on Earth.

Contrary to public conception, the Transformation is not instantaneous. On average, it currently takes me up to an hour and a half to fully complete my Transformation, although this time has increased markedly in my old age. In the past, as a young Werewolf, I would Transform, from start to finish, in under thirty minutes. 4

On the macroscopic level, the changes are horrendous to observe. I have watched the video footage of my own Transformation many times.

The first thing to change is the complexion of my skin, which moves from the pale translucence of old age to a dark, opaque and mottled coloration, beginning in the center of my abdomen and spreading out evenly across my entire body. From there the swelling of my musculature begins – the tearing and stretching of the ligaments of the arms and legs, elbows and knees. For nearly half an hour my flesh seems to inflate and distend around a skeleton far too small to support its mass.

With these initial changes come my now patchy and graying fur, as well as the destruction and reforming of the cartilaginous portions of my face and ears. My nose crumples and flatten , the nostrils extending into slits. My ears are pulled like taffy by invisible hands until, long and suffused with thin blue vascularity, they flop down on either side of my malformed face.

Although this initial portion of the process is visually distressing to watch, and in large part eliminates the outward signs of my humanity, from a subjective standpoint, this first period – which spans 30 to 40 minutes – is a cake walk. The pain is relatively minimal and mostly I am bothered by the discomfort of inconsolable itching, similar, based on accounts I have read, to the onset of anaphylaxis.

It is the second phase of the Transformation when the torture really begins. The dis and reintegration of bone structures is a pain more complete than words can describe. If you have ever broken a single bone, you have experienced not even a fraction of the suffering of which I speak. Those of you unlucky enough to have survived a terrific impact with the front end of a truck might have some idea.

If you take the many months it took to heal the pulverized remnants of your skeleton, and compress those months of suffering into the space of forty minutes, you might come close to imagining what all Lycanthropes have experienced twice a month since time immemorial.

Visually, I can attest to the fact that this part of the process is also quite terrible to behold. It begins on the bones of the face and jaw, which briefly turn to a soft jelly before twisting and extending into a snout. The roundness of the skull flattens somewhat, even as the volume of the entire structure embiggens notably. The teeth come next, my former, dull human set falling loosely to the ground and new, stabbing incisors slowly descending from bleeding gums.

Finally, the rest of the skeleton follows suit – the framework underlying the new weight of muscle exploding to an appropriate size. Shins and thighs widen further and the new muscle there takes hold of the new bone. The knees and elbows expand thrice fold in size, as do the knuckles of each hand. The fingernails on the ends of each wide finger, fingers now twice as long as any human’s and supported by monstrous tendons, all fall out – and from the raw gore of the nail beds are expelled five bone claws on each hand, each with an edge as sharp as a steel razor.

Watching this final portion of Transformation is horrendous, but even worse is listening to it: forty minutes of unbroken crackling, the sound of bones breaking and setting, again and again. I have likened the noise to the sound of a dozen soldiers marching on a bed of broken glass.

Microscopically, my cells reveal a series of phenomenal changes. Each cell first expands to two or three times its normal size, before exploding into an orgy of growth. Rates of cell mitosis increase one hundredfold in a matter of moments and the sheer numbers of the cell masses quickly increases exponentially.

Analysis under the lens of an electron microscope reveals cryptic but possibly telling observations, the nature of which strongly implicates the mitochondria as the central actor in the Lycanthropic infection. Mitochondric activity during the Transformation – that is energy production within my cells – increases logarithmically, ultimately leveling out fully two orders of magnitude higher than the average human being’s.5

Given the cataclysmic nature of the Transformation, is it any surprise that the werewolf should awaken in a state of abject hostility? In my old age, I fall into unconsciousness for the majority of my time in wolfen form, so complete is my exhaustion. But as a younger man, for centuries before I achieved a modicum of control, even I was left hungry for blood in the aftermath. of the Transformation.

As we continue to discuss the Lycanthrope, no matter how clinical my language, do not be lulled into complacency. There is an ancient saying which, although it does not hold water empirically is nonetheless helpful in considering our subject matter:

“The more violent a creature’s birth, the more violent the creature.”

By this dubious rubric, the Werewolf earns its reputation as the most violent creature of them all.

This final example may seem hyperbolic, however, I can personally attest to several attacks and subsequent lycanthropic transformations over the centuries resulting from such grotesque and seemingly deadly assaults on the digestive tract – several of which occurred long before the advent of modern medicine. By way of explanation, I can only say that the modern, “Hollywood” depiction of the frailty of human beings is, in many ways, wildly inaccurate. To be sure, human’s are frail, especially in comparison with the Lycanthrope – however, the hardiness of homo sapiens should not be underestimated. It may be impossible to fully appreciate this fact until you’ve spent over a month caring for a man with a hole in his abdomen so large that the warped tangle of his bloodied intestines is freely visible for any passerby to see. Over the millennia, the Lycanthropic transformation has taken on hundreds of names – from the deeply personal to the regionally unique. I will herein refer to the process simply as the “Transformation”. Our research on this topic was greatly enhanced by the discovery that cultured collections of my body’s cells appeared to remain in biological harmony with the rest of my body, despite being separated, even by great distance. The cause of this phenomena is not at all understood, despite our best efforts, but the effect is well documented, consistent, and quite dramatic. Indeed, there are several refrigerators full of cell colonies on Petri dishes which, once a month, temporarily expand to many times their normal size and number before reverting back to their original state. Thanks go to my assistant Leonard who accidentally discovered this phenomenon while testing a since failed vaccine derived from my own T-cells. In the spirit of transparency, and counter to my urge to gloat, I must admit that even at my peak, my transformation time was merely average. I have personally witnessed Werewolves safely transform in under twenty minutes and, in one desperate case, under ten – although, as I will expound upon in a story later in this text, the results, in that case, were less than ideal. There are anecdotes, of course, of Lycanthropes whose transformations occur in five minutes, or three, or even one. These are all apocryphal and ought to be disregarded out of hand as physiological impossibilities. It’s worth clarifying here the insanity of the numbers we’ve measured at the institute. The average human body creates approximately 92 watts of energy in a given day – that is the equivalent of an incandescent lightbulb. According to our estimations, during the transformation, my body creates nearly 10,000 times that much energy – nearly a full megawatt in electrical terms. How the cells of the Lycanthrope sustain these changes – let alone how they reverse them safely – and where the energy is coming from, is still a mystery. However, Leonard has often joked that if the mechanism of action in my cells could be fully understood and artificially recreated we might not only solve the riddle of Lycanthropy, but also the world’s energy crisis.

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