Werewolves

Derek has some comments here about werewolves and the experience of being one. Some of this has been mentioned already, but other parts are new information, and it seems like a good time to talk more about it metatextually as well. A lot of information about them isn’t widely known, and some of those details may be revisited later, but for now I’m going to be focusing more on basic information that’s easily learned in-setting.

Let’s start with maybe the most basic question: What are werewolves? This might seem obvious, but the answer actually isn’t. All of them used to be human; there are no known natural-born werewolves, for reasons that I’ll get into in a bit. But it’s not something you study and practice, and most werewolves have much less understanding of magic than, say, mages. It is in principle possible for a werewolf to develop abilities other than their natural set by studying how to apply their power outside of its normal definitions (something I’ve touched on before as a possibility), but few of them do so and it’s really only especially powerful ones who could do anything exotic with it anyway.

So, they’re former humans. They were all converted by an existing werewolf, which is part of why the question is complicated. There must have been a first werewolf, the logic goes, a sort of patient zero for what can be modeled similarly to an infectious disease. But no one knows who that was, where the power first came from, or why it developed at the start. No one who talks about it, anyway, and so any answer to the question of what werewolves are runs into this ontological first-cause issue.

In the present, they don’t resemble humans more than very superficially. Their body is human-shaped a lot of the time, but they don’t actually have much in common. Their biology is different in ways that have been examined in-setting and might be discussed more on that basis later. It’s not just that they’re strong, fast, and durable beyond human limits, either. They are markedly inhuman on a much more detailed scale than that, and even a normal medical lab could easily find a great deal of strangeness in samples from a werewolf. They don’t age, and generally revert to a healthy, young adult body if they’re changed later in life, but the age in question is variable. Some werewolves look like teenagers as young as Kyoko; Cassie comes to mind for this. Others look like they’re in their thirties. The closest thing to an explanation is that people stabilize at the general age of their own self-image, but this doesn’t seem to be a strict or predictable rule.

Their signatures are also completely inhuman. To Kyoko, this is so obvious that she’d never mistake one for the other. They have very little in common on this level, which is largely why there’s no possibility of breaking some curse. In order to turn a werewolf back, you would essentially need to be able to perform the same operation in reverse, and that’s not possible.

Because, as Kyoko mentions in the narration here, changing a signature like that is extremely hard. You have to be able to change the fundamental nature of who and what someone is. Humans are, barely, weak enough for this to be done by an infectious agent, which I’ll discuss more shortly. But werewolves are much stronger in a supernatural sense than humans are. You would need orders of magnitude more power to go in the other direction, and you would need to have a total understanding of the human you’re trying to produce, which is virtually impossible to find. Werewolves cannot return to being humans. Some want to, others find the idea abhorrent, but none can.

How does the infection happen? Well, it’s actually easier to model this from the perspective of a pathologist or epidemiologist than by thinking of it as a spell. Imagine the signature of a human as something like a metaphysical genetic code, the equivalent of DNA. Curses would be something akin to giving them a disease, with the details varying widely. If you apply a curse to a human, though, you still have a human. If you break the curse, or if they shake it off on their own, you’ve cured this metaphorical disease.

But all pathogens are not created equal, and this is a place where that metaphor applies in force. Some curses are transient workings, things decided to incapacitate someone briefly and then fade. These don’t require nearly as much work and power to produce as more intense things, and are more useful in a fight than as a lasting punishment. Lycanthropy is closer to a retrovirus. It self-replicates by breaking into that genetic code and inserting its own. This is where the analogy breaks down, because lycanthropy can then spread through the entirety of their identity rather than just occupying a small part of it.

However, there’s another important parallel this suggests and which Kyoko mentions: You have to be vulnerable for that to happen. People have the equivalent of an immune system, which is part of why it’s so hard to change these things. They will resist instinctively and involuntarily. The process is already hard enough that even the mild resistance which an untrained human puts up can easily keep it from happening under most conditions. Healthy people don’t become werewolves. You need them to be in a weakened, susceptible state. Currently the main approach for this is to use mild to moderate poisons for several days or weeks to steadily, gradually put someone in poor health. Then you give them a more severe poison that will take them close to death, you maul them, and hopefully the act of injuring them will transfer enough of the werewolf’s signature into them that it will start this process. Once it does, they’ll be hardy enough to survive what happened. If it doesn’t, less so.

Traditionally, situations were more often like Derek’s. People just got attacked, and most of them had no choice in the matter. This isn’t as common these days for a lot of reasons. It’s harder to find people alone in ways that leave them vulnerable to attack. Werewolves need to keep a low profile like everyone else. Separately, it has become much easier to anonymously hunt for recruits without being noticed. Larger population, the niche communities enabled by the internet, better communications systems, less likelihood that a refusal will become violent. The experience Derek had still works, but it’s rarer than it used to be.

The main reason, ultimately, is that lycanthropy is hard. This is critical to understanding werewolves. There are plenty of advantages to being one. The agelessness alone would draw a lot of people, even before you toss in shapeshifting and ludicrously intense improvements in physical function. But it’s hard, and it is dangerous, and it is often very unpleasant.

You see this in Seed and Trellis, in passing. If you look at the description of Cassie’s transformation, it’s gruesome. Every werewolf experiences that, and in fact Cassie is managing the process better than most werewolves could. Others take even longer and have more pain, and werewolves often have considerable anxiety or trauma about just how unpleasant their change is. They don’t get to opt out, either; this is not a situation where you could pick up lycanthropy for the perks and never use the core ability.

Because while lycanthropy is not a curse in the way the idea is traditionally understood, it’s not a blessing, either. The susceptibility to silver adds a lot of complications, and it creates a kind of suffering that humans do not have the capacity for. It’s not just that you suffer more or that it can be hard to avoid. Humans simply do not have the capacity for the same kind of experience, there’s nothing that will quite produce it. The moon also exerts a lot of power over werewolves, with new moons being a time of notable weakness and full moons bringing power but also compulsion and loss of self-control. Nearly every werewolf will be in fur on that night, and most on the nights directly around it. Restraining this change is very hard, and means that unless you spend your whole life in fur (which usually drives someone insane for reasons I’ll get to in a moment) you will be changing every month without fail, at least once. The suffering of the change is not avoidable for werewolves.

This is also why, as noted, there are no natural-born werewolves. They have to change at least once per month, and their change is damaging. Werewolves sustain significant physical injury during their change, very obviously so, with bones breaking, muscles tearing, and a gradual transition into a wildly different body plan. They can survive this, because they’re very durable and the damage inflicted by the change is particularly fast to heal. A fetus, though, has no such protection, and the process of shifting between skin and fur will usually be enough to prompt miscarriage. Female werewolves have basically no chance of first conceiving a child, then spending nine months either in fur full time (which will drive most wolves insane within a few months), in skin full time (almost impossible; few werewolves can remain in skin through the full moon, and it gets harder with each sequential month they try), or changing without causing miscarriage (which for nine months would require highly implausible luck). Male werewolves can father children, but they’re all with human women and they’re all born more or less human, with possibly some minor impact on their personality or abilities. The leading explanation is that if a fetus is trying to transform during the full moon, the chance of surviving that (especially given that human bodies are not really designed for carrying wolves to term) is effectively nil, and thus less human children are never born. So while it might, remotely, be possible for a person to be born as a werewolf, there are no verified cases of it happening. They were all human first. They all had the experience of that humanity being taken from them, whether they wanted it or not.

So that’s the physical cost. But all of that is just suffering, and while it sucks it wouldn’t really limit your pool of candidates for lycanthropy. That happens because of primarily mental factors. Instincts change drastically, and experience shifts. People universally exhibit some degree of change to who they are as a person; they’re still recognizably themselves, most of the time at least, but they aren’t the same. Prey drive can be as bad as Kyoko’s, and can go pretty poorly for the people around them. Impulsive behavior is common. Violent aggression is common, and empathy for humans tends to decline over time more than just alienation from the human experience would account for.

In extreme cases this becomes something Derek mentions here, when he calls the werewolf who turned him moon-crazed. This is a common term among werewolves and refers to a specific phenomenon, which is often (but not always) triggered by a full moon. People start to lose their sense of self in ways that won’t come back. They lose communication skills and the ability to understand others. They lose all control of their behavior. They become erratic in ways I model off of my experience of mania, with impulsivity and lability escalating quickly.

Werewolves who go moon-crazed die. There are few exceptions. Occasionally you get someone who can go far enough into it to clearly register as the term, but they get enough sense of self back afterwards to make it a sobering but nonfatal lesson. Most do not, and end up becoming little more than a rabid animal. Everyone, even other werewolves, firmly agrees that a werewolf who has gone moon-crazed like this and isn’t shaking it off needs to die.

It’s difficult to fully predict who will go moon-crazed or why. There are factors, though, which make it more likely. One of the big ones is staying in fur too long, which is why I mentioned that people don’t. You can tolerate it for a month or two if you need, but if you don’t return to a human body occasionally you stop being human in a deeper way than just bodily form and magical identity. It is a very rare werewolf who can go more than two full months, experiencing multiple full moons, without ever changing back to skin without this happening. They avoid it strictly as a result.

The other most common factor, though, is that new werewolves go moon-crazed easily. This sometimes goes fully over the line, but they also have a higher rate of it being transient and recovering. The reason is more or less a lack of familiarity. It is generally agreed that you want as much time between the first change and the first full moon than possible, but a month is not long enough to learn how to manage a completely different nature and the instincts and emotions it brings.

New werewolves are the most susceptible to this, and there are some people in particular who have very little chance; most notably, if someone doesn’t have practice at managing their own impulses, they’re pretty much doomed. This is a significant part of what restricts how many people are viable as candidates to be a werewolf.

Meanwhile, a person who is fundamentally not in line with lycanthropy, whose personality and beliefs can’t be reconciled with it, is also generally doomed, whether they go moon-crazed or not. They can’t reconcile themselves, can’t accept what they’ve become. A devout pacifist and vegan will struggle with having become a carnivore with anger issues and a violent lifestyle. Someone who thinks what they’ve become is a spiritual corruption will not handle it well. People who can’t tolerate the idea of leaving humanity behind won’t.

Any of those people, and plenty of others, will rapidly become emotionally unstable and mentally dysfunctional. They tend to spiral out into guilt, self-loathing, and other destructive emotions. Even those who have enough willpower to keep from going moon-crazed will die in short order, often at their own hands.

With all of these things in play, you can see why Derek’s situation is unusual. The chance that some random passerby will be brought to the edge of death without going over, that they’ll be the right kind of weakened for lycanthropy to take hold of them, that they’ll have the personal strength of will and simple luck to not go insane, and that they’re a person who can tolerate it isn’t good at all. Most such victims just die, and since random death-by-mauling is a huge problem in terms of public attention, there aren’t many of them to start with in this era. Derek beat the odds by a lot.

Far better is to convert someone who knowingly agrees, is examined to guess at suitability (it’s never a perfect prediction, but with practice you can make a reasonably guess at whether someone will go moon-crazed right away), and is brought into poor condition in a controlled way. Since it’s so much easier to find people who actually would agree now, this is much more common.

So, that’s what werewolves are and how they get their start. Let’s consider the next question: What can they actually do, and how do they live? The narration has mentioned a few things here, like their rapid population turnover and personality traits, but not in a ton of detail.

At the most basic level they all have the same suite of abilities, i.e., they are fast, strong, durable, and ageless, heal rapidly, and can transform into a wolf. They have considerable sensory improvement, most notably a vast improvement in scent but with considerable gains in hearing and modest gains in vision. They can, with some work, learn to maintain a sort of empathic bond with other werewolves, something that was mentioned in Seed and Trellis. This is the set of features that everyone basically knows werewolves have.

However, they vary within that field. Which of them a given werewolf gets more of will vary based upon factors that are not clearly understood but are correlated with who a person was as a human. This isn’t so much to do with what they could do, either. Lycanthropy overwrites a lot of that. It’s more about who they are. Derek, as you might imagine from him having survived this transformation experience, was always a pretty tough guy, one who did not easily accept defeat and who had a sort of resolve most people don’t. Now, he’s got more in the way of endurance and healing than most werewolves of his age and power, but not as much sensory acuity. Cassie has a ton of sensory acuity and speed, but doesn’t have the raw strength Andrew did. Andrew was also a combat veteran before he was a werewolf, and that showed through.

Some werewolves will also have developed other tricks. This is more common with older ones; for reasons that will be elaborated upon much more later on, age is correlated with power throughout this setting, and werewolves are not an exception. Most of those who do know how to do more esoteric or unusual things keep this fact quiet, because it’s greatly to their advantage for people to think they only need to look out for the things they would with any werewolf. People who pick fights with the strongest werewolves in this setting expecting to just fight “a werewolf” do not fare well. A handful of wolves are powerful enough to be classed among the major players, a phrase that gets used a lot by characters in this setting and will be expanded upon later. For now, it suffices to say that they are very, very scary people. As the joke goes, if Conn Ó hAodha tells you to do something, and you ask him “you and what army?”, you must be fond of synonyms.