There was something inside of him, eating him away and clawing with razors to escape from his torso. Curled up in a small ball, the skinny, undernourished Nathaniel Walker, with his jet black hair falling into his eyes, clawed at his forehead with his fingernails, embedding them into his skull and dragging them down to his sunken cheeks to leave a trail of white pressure points. He was whimpering with every breath, whining out words with only the odd one here and there audible and clear.

"Not to me," he cried out, staring at his palms, which were white and chapped. "Never to me…"

They had all promised him, every one of them, that he would be different, that he wouldn't be touched, that when the time came, the moon would pass overhead and nothing would be able to crawl out of him in a bestial rage that could tear his life apart. Psychosis nipped at the edges of his mind, talking to him that he was wrong, they were all wrong!

"Not to me!" he shouted, tilting his head back against the cold stone wall; four of those confined him to the cell, with a door of solid wood and only a barred window to look out of at night.

But it was happening to him, the same that had happened to his father, but not his mother. His siblings had been drowned at birth for fear but his mother had finally let him live, finally let him see the light of day that his brothers had never known, and now it was all going to be shattered.

Trembling, Nathaniel ground his teeth together and shook his head as if to clear it, shouting as he did so, the sound more like a howl that stretched out the window into the night. The night where, suspended above, a silver disc emanated white light down to the earth below; the moon was full and bright in a cloudless sky.

The thing inside of his stomach and chest grew, ripping outwards with every beat of his heart. Night had only just fallen, but even during the day he had felt uneasy, pacing his room and snapping at anyone that came near him. That was when his father had dragged him here, to the cellar, the empty cellar with nothing but stone and dirt and nothing. Nothing to shout at, nothing to rage towards, and nothing he could talk to. Only himself, and to himself the only thing he could repeat was, "Not to me, they promised, never to me…" over and over again, his lips barely moving as they shook.

His white shirt was ragged and dirty, his pants too large for his thin frame; hand-me-downs from his father.

With a heaving chest Nathaniel looked up to the light of the moon; it smiled mockingly down at him.

Half wolf, it said to him in a sing-song voice, I control you now.

Another howl broke his mouth as something tore inside of him, and this time it did not cease nor pause like the others had.

I control you, not you nor your mother, just your long dead father, and now you'll come to join your two brothers' fate.

"No," he whimpered, and he stood up now to grab at the bars on the window and try to pull them free. "No!"

He had to fight it. He had to, or he would die, like his father, either burned by the villagers in the nearest town or slaughtered in fear by his own mother. The bars rattled in his hands, creaked but would not budge. Tears now rolled down his face as that, too, started to burn with the fire that was consuming his entire body. He felt hungry but nauseous; weak but powerful with anger.

Eventually, he could not stop it any longer. Like a river that was too powerful for its dam, his self restraint vanished and was washed away with a roar that scratched his throat and was aimed for the moon high above. His teeth elongated, his eyes narrowed and the green colour they were slowly turned into amber flecked with viridian.

This was only the first night in a following lifetime of such transformations.