He had gotten separated from the pack in his hunt for an elk, successfully taking it down and was currently bringing it back for his baby siblings. They had just opened their eyes and were beginning to eat whole food. He wasn’t the best hunter in the pack, but he wasn’t the worst either, an older sibling had been recently kicked out of the pack for not bringing in enough meat, and Tva was motivated to not experience the same. He was still young, just over two years old, and not quite ready to leave his natal pack and set off on his own.
It was late in the night, and he was eager to return to the pack and share his kill, his belly full of elk meat. The sky was bright above him, though the moons were dark. Brilliant lights danced, greens and reds, the occasional fainter streak of blue and purple among them. His parents used to tell them when they were pups that the lights were where old wolves went to hunt the star-beasts, running endlessly after the mystical creatures that populated the night sky with pinpoints of glittering light. They were slightly different tonight, more animated than usual, jumping wildly, a wider range of colors visible in their spectrum.
He threw back his head to give a call, intending to locate his pack when the sound was ripped out of him, captured, drawn out of him against his will, an eerie, unnatural cry that seemed to go on and on until there was nothing left inside him. The sound drew him up, up and off the face of the earth into the writhing lights of the sky above. His vision blurred, filled with light and shadow, strange otherworldly shapes, an insistent unfamiliar buzzing in the back of his head before he faded into the blackness behind his eyes.
When he came to his entire body was throbbing with an intense burning, piercing pain, he could feel the current bouncing around in his body, moving so fast it felt like his whole body was aflame, his every muscle spasming simultaneously. His brain felt ablaze, every neuron firing concurrently, his mind unable to focus on anything but the fierce agony. He could feel his heart beating uncontrollably, arrhythmically, missing beats wildly as it contracted. His chest wound tighter and tighter, a horrible building, suffocating pressure. And then. Nothing. Blissful nothingness.
His second awakening was just as upsetting, though for very different reasons. He wanted that bliss to never end. The comforting warmth of a long, deep, well needed nap. Colors he hadn’t known existed, all twisted up together, but in perfect harmony, hauntingly beautiful and in startling clarity. Becoming his highest, truest, most genuine self, a pure euphoric rapture. But instead he was yanked back, submerged abruptly in cold reality.
His awareness was transformed, he realized. He was somehow more than he had been before, his entire being changed, charged from his experience with the dancing lights. He took stock of himself, mentally cataloging the alterations. His mind was suddenly clear, as if the lights had suddenly been turned on where before there had just been darkness, shadowy vague thoughts suddenly with stark coherence. Colors seemed brighter, more defined from one another, and he could see up close and very far simultaneously, all in piercing detail. It was as if a whole new hemisphere had been unlocked in his mind, new thoughts, new insights accessible to him where they had before been sealed away under biological imperatives.
It was hard to tell without another being to compare against, but he felt larger too, as if he had hit a sudden growth spurt, his muscles and joints aching with rapid development like they had when he was a puppy. He felt…restructured, as if his entire being had been reorganized, reconstructed from its interaction with the electromagnetic radiation. He still felt a little charged, flushed with current, though the pain had dulled to a soft pulse of awareness that he could push to the back of his mind if he didn’t focus on it. He immediately did so, not ready to deal with the trauma of his first awakening.
But most shockingly of all, he was still in the thermosphere, high above where he rightfully should have been, seeing the land, clouds even, stretched out beneath him, so so far away. He whined, disconcerted. His vocal cords were different too, he realized, or rather their juxtaposition in his head had changed somewhat, opening up a range of vocalizations not previously available to him. He worked his jaw, testing, letting loose some outlandish sound that he had never heard before. He stopped, startled, unsure what to do with the new noise.
He tried to reach out to the ground, so far below, paws stretching out for it before him, but his body seemed resistant, propelled away from it like a magnet. His paws, he saw, had changed color, his coat a striking blue, and somewhat translucent, the dancing lights somehow trapped within their blurry outlines. He was the light, he thought with sudden clarity.
He was being drawn somewhere, he realized. Some sort of strange pull on something deep inside him, some force that he couldn’t see, only feel. It felt as if something beneath his skin was reaching, yanking him along with it. He moved with it, raced towards that place over the horizon, unwilling to remain stuck, anywhere was better than being stuck. Stuck like the bison they had driven into the muddy banks of the riverbed before playing the cruel long game of attrition. Being stuck was death, only motion was life.
The attraction built the closer he got, accelerating faster and faster, towards the ground, he realized with gratification and some trepidation. He could almost feel the wetness of it, the humidity radiating off the surface of the ground beneath, just out of reach as he sped north. And finally it was under his feet, soft powdery snow, untouched and cool on the pads of his paws. His tail wagged and his tongue lolled out, happy to finally be on land again, eyes squinting with contentment. He bounded and leaped, romping in the snowdrifts, happy to be free from the otherworldly powers that had captured him, celebrating his survival from the whole strange ordeal.
