He couldn’t.
His claws dug into the forest floor, kicking up roots and leaves with every desperate stride. The trees blurred into streaks of shadow and moonlight, branches slicing across his cheeks like whips. Mud splattered up his legs. Blood — not his — still clung to his fur. But none of it mattered.
He could still hear them.
Granny’s voice, raw and unbreaking.
The screams of the children — his pack, his only family — shattered like glass inside his skull.
He ran as if the world itself were ending.
Because it had.
The forest, once a place of safety, now felt alive and hungry. The canopy groaned in the wind. Owls fled from his path. The usual rustle of nighttime creatures had fallen silent, replaced only by his breath, harsh and ragged, and the pounding of his heart like war drums in his ears.
Why didn’t you save them?
The voice wasn’t real. Just guilt with a tongue.
*You could’ve fought. Could’ve done something.
But he was six.
And he was alone.
And the world didn’t care.
He pushed forward, eyes stinging from tears and wind, until the forest turned against him.
CRACK—
A hidden root caught his foot mid-stride. His body pitched forward, arms flailing, and gravity pulled him toward the cold, unyielding earth.
But just before the impact — the world broke.
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A deafening crack like splitting stone echoed through the air, and suddenly the dirt in front of his face bent. Like water folding under invisible weight. A jagged seam split reality itself, glowing with brilliant, flickering light — violet and white and blue — colors that didn’t belong to this world.
Time paused.
Then—
FWIP.
He vanished.
He reappeared in silence.
Not the silence of the woods or the awkward quiet before tragedy — but a pure, transcendent stillness. His body landed in soft grass, cool and damp beneath his fur. No pain. No wounds reopened. Just... peace.
Ryo blinked, stunned. The panic hadn’t caught up yet.
He pushed himself upright, paws trembling.
The world around him had changed completely.
He was on a cliffside, high and lonely, with the edge just a few paces from where he sat. A single, twisted tree arched toward the stars beside him, its bark the color of ash and its leaves shimmering faintly with a glow that pulsed like breath.
Below, endless grasslands rolled like green ocean waves under a silver sky. The moon above — no, moons, two of them — hovered quietly, their surfaces scarred with craters and strange patterns like runes written in ancient hands.
The air felt wrong. Or maybe it felt right for the first time.
Light, warm, thin like mountain air. But electric. As if every breath was charged with invisible threads of possibility.
He looked down at his paws. They were shaking.
And glowing.
Soft cracks of light laced through the fur along his arms , not wounds, but fractures, like glass under stress. Pale energy pulsed within them, casting shadows across his chest and the ground beneath him.
“...What am I?” he whispered.
The wind didn’t answer.
But something inside did.
A strange click in his bones. A hum behind his heart. He could feel it now, a presence coiled within him, ancient and patient. Like a storm waiting to be named.
This wasn’t magic. Not entirely.
It was him.
He cracked reality because he cracked.
The pressure of the prophecy, the curse, the rejection, the burning screams of the only home he ever knew — it shattered something deep inside. And whatever was born from that break had opened the world.
Tears slipped down his cheeks again, but he didn’t sob this time. He simply stared at his hands — paws? claws? tools of a monster or survivor? — and wondered if they had ever belonged to him at all.
You’re not broken, Granny’s voice echoed in the back of his memory, soft as starlight. You’re just different.
He took a breath.
He was still alive.
Somehow, someway, he’d crossed into a new part of the world, or maybe a new world altogether. But this place didn’t look like it hated him.
Not yet.
And for the first time, he didn’t feel powerless.
Alone, yes. Scared, definitely. But there was something else now — a tremor of strength beneath the fear.
A seed.
He didn’t know what came next.
But he was no longer running from the world.
Now... he was running toward it.
To be continued...