The Story We Were Born Into.

Before there were werewolves, there were guardians.

They were human once, wholly and grievously so, living in an age when the world pressed close and left no room to breathe. The land was sentient then, not only beneath their feet but surrounding them, observant and attentive. Some understood early that survival did not come from dominion over nature, but from alignment with it. These ancestors were not predators of the Wild. They were its witnesses, its stewards, its quiet arbiters.

When danger arose, presences that did not belong, forces that thrived on fracture and imbalance, the ancestors did not turn to steel alone. They turned inward. Through rite and discipline, through inherited remembrance carried deeper than thought, they learned to step beyond their bodies without severing themselves from them. Their spirits learned how to roam, how to pursue, how to return. The wolf was not summoned at random. It had always lingered at the threshold.

The wolf was fidelity and endurance, restraint sharpened into fangs when necessity demanded. It understood dominion of territory and the sanctity of kin. When the ancestors crossed beyond themselves, it was the wolf that answered, not as possession, but as covenant. Flesh began to recall the routes of the spirit, and in time, those routes etched themselves into blood.

At first, the change did not manifest in flesh, but in essence. The ancestors moved as wolves through unseen corridors of the world, guarding boundaries no ordinary eye could perceive. Yet spirit leaves residue. What walks a path often enough begins to linger. Generation after generation, the veil thinned, until spirit and body learned how to converge.

That was when the first true shapeshifter emerged.

The transformation was not born of fury, nor shackled to the moon, though moonlight softened the passage. It was bound to blood memory, to the instinct that awakened when protection was required, when balance tipped toward ruin. The wolf did not consume the human. It steadied them.

As the bond passed through lineages, it deepened and diversified. The wolf learned the cadence of each bloodline, and each bloodline learned to bear the wolf in its own manner. Abilities surfaced not as boons, but as adaptations, manifestations of spirit translating itself through flesh. Some distorted the flow of time, others brushed against memory, shadow, flame, root, or wind. No expression was ever identical, even among those who shared blood.

Clans arose not through conquest, but through inheritance. Each bound to a common progenitor, a shared terrain, a distinct philosophy of carrying the wolf. Some expanded and became known. Others remained sparse and vigilant. Many withered as the world accelerated beyond their capacity to endure. Those who persisted learned restraint. They learned that the wolf must be relinquished as often as it is worn. That shifting was not liberation, but obligation. That power endured only when it was shared, questioned, and safeguarded within family.

Thus they gathered beneath full moons, not in reverence, but in remembrance. To reaffirm their origins. To ensure the wolf remained a guardian, never a sovereign.

The world may have lost all recollection of them, but the blood did not.

And somewhere still, a clan preserves the story in its oldest form, not as legend, but as lineage.