13

“Aleksandr Ulric was our ancestor,” Xiumin explained. He was the oldest and had much more knowledge about the origins than any of the others. “He was born of a Russian Mother and German father. But that’s irrelevant. When he was still a toddler, he got lost in the woods.”

“Having come from a wealthy family, a search party was sent for him,” Baekhyun picked up the story. “After two weeks with no results, they gave up, presuming him to be dead. After all, the 16th century German wilderness wasn’t too friendly, especially for a helpless little child…”

FLASHBACK

He was lost in the woods. Cold, hungry and alone, he wandered about until he simply collapsed from exhaustion and hunger. As he curled up in a ball, resigned to dying from exhaustion and hunger, he found himself no longer alone. A wolf mother, limping towards from a broken forepaw, tossed two dead rabbits in front of him. For some reason, he wasn’t frightened. The wolf mother stared at him until he hesitantly reached out a hand to touch her fur. To him, she was just a scruffy looking dog with a broken paw. The wolf mother lay on her side, bearing her teats to him. When he had consumed all he could handle, he curled back into a ball and slept. That night, he dreamt he was a wolf like the one lying next to him. He dreamt he was by her side hunting prey and making tracks across the vast landscape. The next night was the same. The wolf mother returned with a slaughtered animal and he ate. He splinted her paw at the end of the first week, and in turn the following week, she took him with her to hunt.

Slowly, Aleksandr began to lose bits of his humanity. He became stealthier, more savage, quick thinking. The wolf mother eventually brought him to the rest of the pack, and he was taken in as her pup. He didn’t bother trying to find his way home, he had become attached to the wolves who had so mercifully taken him in that he was only grateful that he was alive. By the time a month had past, he was already starting to show signs of complete animalistic reversion.

He was as strong as the pack beta by the time he was five and had been with the pack for just under a year. And one day when he woke up, he was a wolf.

Just like that, he had turned into the very thing that he had been living with for the past months. And the funny thing was that he somehow knew that this is the way things were supposed to be. He found himself shifting from human to wolf at will, and he used it to his advantage during hunts. Even the other wolves knew that something about him had changed. They could sense the magic that had happened. It was unclear as to why it happened, but that was irrelevant for the time being. He was one of them, and really, that is what mattered.

He spent the next two years with the pack, hunting and fighting for dominance against other wolf clans. By this time his wolf mother had grown old and weary – she was close to death. The day of her death was a very sad day for Aleksandr. She wasn’t the only mother he had known, but she was the one who raised him. The one who could have killed him but didn’t. The one who had awakened the wolf in him and the one who had taught him to not only survive, but to live.

For days after her death, Aleksandr struggled to stay connected to the rest of the pack. In his human form, he was but seven years old. But in his wolf world, he was already an adult, and he was being looked to more and more as the next alpha. Whether or not he wanted that was a different story.

A year after the death of his wolf mother, he left the pack. He just wandered away and never went back, similar to how he came upon them in the first place. It was a strange experience. Here he had been, mere miles from his human home, yet he had never been there once in the three and a half years he had spent with the wolf pack. He wasn’t even sure how he didn’t manage to find it before.

He emerged from the woods, his fur matted with dirt and sweat. He wasn’t sure, but for some reason he knew that he wouldn't be able to leave the forest and approach the giant estate in the beast form, which he was currently in. Looking up to the furthest window on the manor, he spotted a couple. They looked very unhappy.

“He’s my son, Aldric! I can’t just give up the search for my son!” The woman screamed at her husband.

“Think clearly for once Petra! It’s been years. He’s gone. Do you think I am happy about this? He’s my son, too!” Aldric shouted back, pain clearly evident in his eyes.

“But the winter is upon us, and we can’t afford to use any more resources on trying to find him,” he added, and the sigh that followed could have moved mountains. “We have to think about things practically now. We have to-”

“Sir! Madam! Look!” A servant came rushing, breathless into the room, waving his hands frantically at the large bay window. Both Aldric and Petra turned to the window, and what they saw shocked them.

Standing just outside of the manor gates was a little boy. Could it be their missing son? Had he returned?

Without hesitation, Petra swept out of the room, her feet moving faster than she ever could have imagined. She was down in the foyer in a matter of a minute, and out the door a few moments later.

“Aleksandr!” She called, and the boy looked up at her with the sweetest brown eyes she could only remember as being the ones of her beloved son. “Aleksandr, my son! My dearest baby boy!” She reached him and gathered him in her arms, pulling him tightly to her.

“Mama,” he whispered, his voice soft and puzzled. It was the only human word he knew. “Mama, mama, mama.” She picked him up and carried him back towards the manor, holding him as if he would disappear again if she let go.

“Yes, my sweet darling, Mama is here,” she cooed softly. “Mama will always be here.”

Over the coming months, Petra never left her son alone. Even though many thought it was odd that the lady of the house, who had her own duties to attend to, took her son with her everywhere, they said nothing. They knew of the unfortunate incident that was his disappearance, and he was a sweet boy after all, no one could argue with that.

It was only within the Ulric household that some of the truth was known. At first, things were hard. Aleksandr had no human mannerisms whatsoever. He had to be taught to dress himself, feed himself properly, speak, read, write, and interact with other humans properly. He was banned from going outside of the estate gates and was only permitted to do so in the cases that Petra was unable to stay on the grounds herself. She trusted not even Aldric to watch him alone.

But it was through staying with him at every moment that Petra began to notice the changes in her son. His appetite had increased significantly; yet no matter how much he ate, he didn’t seem to become unhealthy. He seemed to have bounds more energy, and