"Ethan opened his eyes to nothingness.
The first thing he felt was the cold—a damp, heavy cold that rose from the ground and clung to his entire body. The second was the silence. There was no wind, no leaves, no distant stream he had heard minutes before with his enhanced hearing. There was no sound at all except for his own heart, beating slowly and heavily, like a drum inside a cave.
The third thing was the darkness. It was so dense that he blinked several times, just to be sure his eyes were actually open.
Where... where am I?
He was lying on his side, his face pressed against cold, damp earth that smelled of mud, rotting matter, and something older that he couldn't name. He tried to remember. There was the forest, the circle, the twins' voices reciting the spell, the blue sphere crashing against his chest, and a pain so great that...
The memory cut off in the middle, like a movie ending abruptly.
I must be dreaming, he thought, and almost believed it. It has to be a dream. Or I passed out. Or...
He didn't finish the thought. He propped his hand on the ground and tried to get up.
The movement felt strange from the very beginning. His arms were too long, his legs too heavy, and when he finally stood up, the sensation that the ground was way down below, much farther than it should have been, made him dizzy for a second. He stretched his body, and the air passed through him differently, as if he had grown in a way that fit no measurement he knew.
Ethan's eyes widened.
I'm... huge.
He brought his hands up in front of his face. Even in the gloom, he could see with absurd clarity, and what he saw made him hold his breath: long, thick fingers covered in dark fur and ending in curved, sharp claws the size of knives.
With a racing heart, he ran a hand over his face. Instead of the skin he knew, he found fur. Further down, where his nose and mouth should have been, there was a long, warm, damp snout, and beneath it, a row of fangs he felt with the tip of his finger.
Ethan stood motionless.
A wolf. I'm a wolf. He took a deep breath, and the air entered in volumes that had never fit in his lungs. I turned into a werewolf. For real.
The ritual had worked. The transformation had come—the one he had feared so much and that Klaus had said would be different. But if it had worked, where was everyone? Where were Klaus and Elijah, the twins, Alaric? Where was the clearing, the trees, the moon?
And Hope?
Her name pierced his chest like a knife.
— Hope? — he called out.
The voice that came from his throat wasn't his. It was a deep, raspy sound, almost a growl, that reverberated in the darkness and bounced back to him, unanswered, coming from all directions. Ethan waited. Nothing. Just the echo, slowly fading away, swallowed by the void.
He wasn't going to just stand there. If this was a dream, he needed to wake up. If it wasn't, he needed to find out where he was, and there was only one way to do that.
He took the first step.
The ground shook.
It wasn't a slight tremor. The earth sank beneath his weight with a dull thud that spread through the darkness like ripples from a stone thrown into a lake. Ethan looked down and saw the mark his own paw had left in the soil, deep, with the claws tearing into the mud. It was the weight of something much heavier than a man, much heavier than any wolf. He calculated, unwillingly, that it was over a ton.
He took another step, and once again the ground shuddered. And another. And another. Each stride made the darkness tremble around him, and the sound echoed like that of a gigantic creature walking through the bowels of the world.
Ethan didn't know where he was going. There was no sky, no horizon, no path—just the pitch black and the cold, and that damp earth that seemed to breathe beneath his paws. But he kept walking, slowly, his senses on high alert, with a single idea hammering in his mind, stronger than fear, stronger than confusion:
I need to go back. I promised her everything would be fine.
After a time he couldn't measure, Ethan stopped.
The darkness was the same as before, and would continue to be the same if he walked for hours or days. Tired of groping at nothingness, he looked at his own hand, enormous, covered in fur and claws, and thought of an idea that, until that night, would have sounded absurd.
If I managed to move a leaf once... maybe I can manage this.
He raised his palm, concentrated on the warmth he felt inside his chest, and pronounced with the deep, raspy voice of the beast:
— Lummus.
For a second, nothing happened. Then, a small sphere of golden light sprouted from his palm, hovered before his face, and illuminated the surrounding space with a soft, warm glow.
Ethan stared, jaw dropped, at that little orb hovering in the air.
It worked.
More than that: it had been easy. No effort, no pain, no explosion in his own hand like had happened so many times practicing with Penelope. The magic flowed through him as if it had always been part of his body and he had never known it. And apparently, the wolf form wasn't an impediment. It was an advantage.
The sphere followed him as he started walking again, hovering beside his shoulder. For the first time, Ethan could see what was around him: a floor of black, damp earth covered in broken bones, and, far away, irregular rock walls that lost themselves in the darkness like those of an endless cave.
That was when he heard it.
First, a low, raspy sound from the left. Then another from the right. And another, and another, until the entire darkness seemed to breathe, growl, and scuttle toward him. They were guttural, wet, hungry sounds that belonged to no animal Ethan knew.
The light illuminated, in the distance, the first eyes.
— Shit — Ethan muttered.
The monsters burst from the shadows all at once. There were dozens of them, with shapes he couldn't name: misshapen bodies, full of too many arms, mouths open in the wrong places, bone claws, and skin that looked melted. They came running, crawling, leaping, all in the same direction.
Ethan looked around. There was no escape, nowhere to run, nowhere to hide.
So he did the only thing he had left.
He fought.
The first monster leaped at him, and Ethan grabbed it out of the air and tore it in half with his hands. The second was crushed against the ground. The third had its throat ripped out by his fangs, and the bitter, rotten taste of its blood invaded Ethan's mouth. He roared, and he fought them all.
When the last one fell, the ground was covered in bodies, and Ethan panted, bloodied, surrounded by silence. No relief, no victory. Just exhaustion and a terrible hunger that he only noticed at that moment.
He looked at the flesh before him.
No...
But the hunger gave him no choice. He knelt beside one of the bodies and tore off a piece with his teeth. It was rotten, bitter, fibrous, and the taste made him gag. Even so, he swallowed. Because it was that or die.
The monsters didn't stop coming.
Ethan fought the first night, then the second. He fought until he lost count, until "night" and "day" stopped meaning anything. He fought for weeks. Then for months, and kept fighting. The sphere of light accompanied him wherever he went, the only thing keeping him from going mad in the pitch black. He killed dozens, then hundreds of creatures, and ate the flesh of every single one of them, because meat was all he had.
He tried, a few times, to return to human form. He concentrated, took a deep breath, searched deep inside himself for the boy he used to be. But the wolf wouldn't yield, and as time passed, Ethan discovered an uncomfortable truth: he didn't even want it to. In that place, body wouldn't last an hour. Weakness was death. The wolf was the only reason he was still alive.
Sometimes, between one fight and the next, he wondered if he had died. If that was hell, and if with every monster he killed he was paying for some sin he didn't even know he'd committed. He couldn't think of any other explanation.
Over time, he stopped being afraid.
He stopped being afraid even of the dragons.
The first time he encountered one, he thought he was going to die. The creature was enormous, bigger than anything he had faced before, with black scales that reflected the light of the sphere and a fire that lit up the entire cave. The fight lasted what felt like days. When it ended, Ethan's body was completely burned and torn, but the dragon was dead at his feet. He could barely believe it. Dragons were storybook things, things impossible to even think of facing, and yet, he had killed one.
And there was the meat. For the first time since arriving in that place, Ethan ate something that didn't taste like rot. Dragon meat was dense, warm, strong—the best of everything that hell offered—and after eating it, he felt a new energy course through his entire body.
He killed others after that one.
Time passed. Months turned into what might have been years, and Ethan had no way of knowing. He was stronger, faster, wilder, and, inside, more tired than he had ever been. Tired of the fighting, of eating rotten meat, of sleeping with one eye open, of talking to no one and waking up in the same pitch black. Tired of a place that had no end and no exit. He wanted out of there. He wanted out once and for all, more than he had ever wanted anything in his life, and the helplessness of being unable to do anything about it was a slow fire consuming him from the inside.
Ethan stood up. His gigantic body rose before the light, and the ground shook beneath him.
And then he did something he had never done in that place.
He screamed.
It wasn't a hunting roar, nor the growl he used to scare away the monsters. It was a real scream, coming from deep within his chest, so loud and so long that the rock walls vibrated. There was pain in that scream, and anguish, and a rage so old and heavy it felt like it had been bottled up over all those years. He screamed for his mother, his sister, for Hope, for the boy he used to be who maybe didn't exist anymore. He screamed until his throat burned, until the echo lost itself in the endless dark, and only then did he stop, panting, his shoulders rising and falling.
The silence that followed was unlike any other.
Ethan felt it before he saw it. The air above him began to vibrate, and a deep, low hum, like the sound of an overstretched string, rippled through the entire cave. The sphere of light trembled, and the floor, which normally responded to his weight, seemed to shudder on its own.
He raised his face.
High above, in the middle of the darkness, the air tore open. It was as if something had broken in reality itself: a thin, white crack ripped through the pitch black from top to bottom, widened little by little, and began to spin—slowly at first, then faster—forming a vortex of light that illuminated the walls, the scattered bones, and the dragon's carcass.
Ethan stood paralyzed, eyes wide. It had been years since he had seen any light other than his own sphere, and this one was white, warm, with a glow that hurt his eyes.
The vortex began to pull him.
First it was just a breeze, fluttering his fur. Then a current, dragging him a step forward. Then a force so great that his feet lifted off the ground, and the dragon bones and monster remains began to detach from the earth and spiral upward.
He didn't think about anything else.
He didn't think if it was a trap, or a trick of that cursed place, or what might be on the other side. Anything would be better. Any place different from that one would be infinitely better than everything he had been through in there.
Ethan bent his massive legs, braced himself on the ground for a second, and leaped.
The world turned into a glare.
The impact was brutal.
His gigantic body hit the earth with a crash that shook everything around it. Branches snapped, leaves flew, and the ground sank beneath his weight, opening a small crater. For a moment, Ethan lay there, fallen on his side, breathless, his ears ringing and his whole body throbbing.
Then he smelled it.
Damp earth. Leaves. Pine. A cold, clean air that slid down his throat like water after years of thirst.
He opened his eyes slowly.
It was night. But it wasn't the night from before: it wasn't absolute, formless black. It was a real night, with a huge sky full of stars, the high, silver moon between the tree tops, and the wind rustling the leaves with a whisper he had forgotten existed.
Ethan stared at the sky for a long time, unmoving, his chest rising and falling.
Then, slowly, he propped his hands on the ground and stood up.
His body responded with a familiar weight. His paws sank into the leaves, his muscles tensed, and his vision was higher, wider, as if he were looking at the world from above. He lowered his eyes to his own hands, and his heart, which had begun to beat more calmly, gave a jolt.
Claws. Dark fur. Huge, thick fingers.
I'm still a wolf.
He ran a hand over his face and found the snout, the fangs, the fur. He was out of that place, he was alive, and he was still the beast. Fear pierced him like a knife. What if he couldn't change back? What if this was all that was left of him?
He took a deep breath. Closed his eyes.
I need to go back. I need to be myself again.
This time, something inside him answered.
A heat rose from his chest to his shoulders, and a dry crack echoed through the forest. The bones began to shift. His broad shoulders narrowed, his ribs shrank, his monstrous muscles contracted layer by layer like a receding wave. The dark fur pulled back, strand by strand. The claws shrank and retracted into his fingertips until they became fingernails. His height plummeted, his deformed legs straightened, his snout shrank, his fangs vanished, and his face became a face again.
When the last crack died away, the colossal werewolf was gone.
In its place, kneeling on the leaves, was a boy.
Ethan stayed still, head down, breathing in gasps, the cold night air beating against his bare skin, which for so long had known only fur and and blood. He raised his hands before his eyes, slowly. They were human hands, with thin fingers, his nails dirty with dirt. He ran them over his face and found smooth skin, his chin, his nose, the mouth that was his again.
He had tried so many times, for so long, and never succeeded. And now, stepping back into the world, his body had simply remembered.
Ethan closed his eyes, and his shoulders trembled.
He was back."