The pack came out to meet him as he approached, legs stiff and tails upright in offensive positions, intending to defend their territory from a perceived threat. Tva did his best to display non-aggressive posture, kneeling close to the ground with a whine, showing as much of his underbelly as he dared, it was difficult with his new, massive size. The leading pair approached, the male sniffing him distrustfully. He…he knew that smell, though the male had just been a baby when he had left and was now a fully fledged adult, well into his teens. His baby brother was all grown up. With a deep guttural growl and fierce snap of his jaws his brother attacked, either not recognizing Tva or identifying him as a threat. The pack circled, getting into formation for a drawn out brawl, surrounding him like prey. Tva did his best to dodge rather than return the attack, still intent on communicating with his little brother, unwilling to relinquish his dream of getting his family back.

A pressure was building in the back of his mind, the soft pulse of electrical current making itself known from the recesses that he had pushed it to before. He could feel the tense charged feeling of current sparking through him, invigorating his muscles, rising to the surface of his flesh, flush with energized heat.

His brother ripped into his flank, teeth gritting down through the coarse fur, perforating his skin and tearing into the flesh beneath. Tva yipped, pained. Was this how it felt to be hunted? To know that you are surrounded by those waiting to tear your body apart and feed on you? He was overcome by a sudden empathy for his prey of the past, but he only had a moment for this startling realization before the heated current beneath his skin flicked out, tearing through his brother’s body with the same violence that it had him, all that time ago, back up in the sky. His brother’s body convulsed, and Tva with him, his brother’s teeth clenched and unable to release from Tva’s coat, wracked as they were with electric current.

Tva cried out, trying desperately to control the current from within, to wrestle it into submission, but the current wouldn’t be controlled, it lept about inside him like the live wire it was, bearing down on his brother with a vengeance that was not his own. And with a sudden ferocity the voltage increased, Tva’s entire body thrumming with it, his every cell alive with it. His body was a conduit, creating a magnetic force field increasing in size with each increment higher the voltage rose.

Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

Around them wolves roiled, disquieted by the phenomena. Another lunged at Tva, going for his throat. The current inside Tva reached a fever pitch, saturating him, and with the force of a bomb it exploded outward, ripping through the surrounding wolves’ bodies, the magnetic field tearing them apart with a wet wrenching squelch of blood and viscera, dousing the surrounding area and soaking Tva in the blood of his relatives.

Tva stood frozen, shocked, a heavy lump of his brother’s stomach falling from where it had been flung on his muzzle to the ground below, where it fizzled as it melted the surrounding snow, steam wafting up into the cool air.

All around him was carnage, brilliant shades of red flung around him in a perfect circle of butchery, indicating the boundary of the magnetic field. The heady metallic smell of blood permeated the crisp air, the heat of it warming the clearing, searing the white ground like a scar. The acidic sting of bile climbed up his throat. He had done this. He had ripped his family apart, had ripped them into shreds.

He lurched to the edge of the circle, limbs shaking, unwilling to sully them by vomiting on their corpses. He hacked until his throat was raw, but there was nothing in his stomach to come up, he hadn’t had to eat since before his transformation. He had only just found them again, distant relatives that they may be, they were the closest thing to a family he had, and he had just obliterated them, rend them apart until there wasn’t a whole body among them. A sob wrenched itself out of him, a sound foreign to him, a sound he had never made before, never been able to make before. Another result of this cursed transformation.

He loathed himself, hated what he had become. If he had waited to return, waited until he better understood his new body, this would never have happened. He had been so eager for nothing to have changed, for things to be somehow normal, as they used to be. For his family to be here, waiting for him. But they were gone, and what might have been his new family was a red smear across the clearing. His eyes prickled, another new sensation. He cataloged it with a distracted, dissociative attention, unable to tear his mind from the horror at hand. The horror he was the cause of.

He couldn’t be here anymore, he couldn’t stay, had to get away, far far away. Away from the site of his ineptitude and destruction.

He ran. And ran. For a long long time.