Unspecified Rage

Jig saw or riddles?

There was a bright light being pointed in her eye and she couldn't blink. Julia could vaguely tell that someone was holding her eyelid open to check her pupil but it made no sense.

"She's waking up. Hurry." Julia heard her principal's voice. What in the name of god is going on? Why is Mrs. Baumberg here? Julia worried, still mentally dazed.

"Are we going to have to tell her or can you handle this?" Ju heard an unfamiliar man's voice ask, gruff with worry. Weakly turning her head, she spotted a fuzzy shape looming over her.

"Wha--?" she tried to ask, body too exhausted to jerk as the pain started to build again. She felt a tear escape and drag down her skin. Even the flesh of her face felt like it'd been flayed. She just wanted the pain to end, to go away and never come back. Nothing ever made it stop, and only love of and for her family kept her from trying suicide. She would never choose that way out, not when it would hurt people she loved so dearly, but that meant dealing with the burden of agony everyday.

"Shhhhhh." She heard the principal croon. It was weird but her voice was gravelly and worn, as if she'd suddenly developed a smokers voice. There was an underlying grumble to her voice that sounded so WRONG.

Julia instinctively tried to jerk her head away from the hand that comfortingly petted her hair out of her face. "Shhhh." the principal repeated. "I can hide this memory from her. But not much more than that. She's getting too beyond what I can handle. I'm too old, she's too close to the real change and there is just so much pain to work through. I wish I could tell her it would get better. But I try not to lie to them." Mrs. Baumberg sounded so old and tired, worn out and empty.

"Can you call on the power of the pack to help?" Megan asked, voice wretched from crying.

"No, we're too broken now. Too many of us have succumbed to the madness. We have so few whole packmembers left. Between our Alpha's illness and the rogues, there aren't enough of us to help her and keep the Pack together." the Old One said tiredly, her dual centuries weighing heavily in her voice.

"Then she'll just have to endure. Like we all do." the Alpha growled, angry at the judgement in the Old One's voice.

"And the one's that did this to her?" Graham asked, doing his best to keep his father's growing madness from affecting the others.

"Rehabilitate them or kill them. Banishment doesn't work." The Alpha admitted, much to the relief of the others. It was a hard task to assign, the killing of packmates who'd gone rogue, but necessary. Thus far not a single one of the Borealis Pack had been able to cure a wolf who'd gone rogue. The madness could be slowed, delayed even, but not cured. Once they went over the edge into madness, they started to loose their grip on their humanity. Eventually they'd go wolf and never return to human form. And after that, they'd go 'rabid' and have to be put down before the human population could figure thier secret out.

At 206 years old, Mrs. Baumberg looked less than a fraction of that but felt more than 10 times as old. The lupine theriomorph did not die of old age, accelerated cell regeneration saw to that. But a were wolf, as society called them, would rarely live so long due to pack fighting, hunters and the depression that dragged the older wolves to loose the will to live. But somehow she'd survived this long. Only to be confronted with something no pack had ever dealt with before.

A mental illness, a communicable madness that started in a wolf and would eventually drive them feral. No wolf seemed immune, although emotional extremes seemed to make one more vulnerable to a worsening of the affliction. There were wolves who'd had symptoms of the disease for years and had never gone over the edge, and yet the Alpha himself had only started showing signs two years ago and was already on his way to loosing control, and not just of his Pack, but of his own actions. Which would catapult the young Graham into an Alpha position he was sorely unprepared for.