The sun was a blood lurid red slipping below the jagged peaks of the Redmount Mountains. For Shannon, its fading light was not a promise of rest, but a countdown to her dark side.
She pressed her spine against the damp, crumbling limestone of a marketplace stall, the stench of cured hides and raw sewage thick in the air of the human settlement known as Rodehalt. Her heart hammered against her ribs, a wild drum against the silence she desperately needed to maintain. Her hand instinctively sought the knife tucked into the small of her back—a souvenir from a previous, fatal encounter.
In her human form, Shannon was a striking contradiction to the brutality of this world: a beautiful white woman with very fine features and long dark hair and emerald eyes. But it was her human body's physical capabilities that were truly alien here. Even untransformed, she possessed a preternatural strength and speed that allowed her to outrun and outfight most of the predators on the planet.
Seven minutes. That was all the time she estimated she had before the light truly failed. And when the light failed, the shift would come. It wasn't a curse; it was a mechanism of survival, a biological clock wired to the dark matter symbiont residing inside her flesh, bones, blood and very soul.
A shout, coarse and guttural, sliced through the evening air, and Shannon tensed.
“She was seen near Tanner's quarter! The emerald-eyed witch! Ten silver for the one who brings her back to the law, whole or in pieces!”
The posse. She had hoped to slip out through the eastern gate while the city guards changed their watch, but the primitive inhabitants were proving more organized than she'd given them credit for. These humans, thick-skulled and violent, were armed with iron edged weapons and their prized, uniquely designed flintlock firearms—weapons that were clumsy but brutally effective at close range.
A group of four men rounded the corner, their faces shadowed with avarice and anger. They wore dirty leather tunics and carried the scent of stale ale and fear. The leader, a man with a scarred cheek named Dargen, leveled a flintlock rifle at her chest.
“Hold there, star-woman,” Dargen snarled, his finger tight on the trigger. “That’s far enough. “You owe the Elder three days of labor and a new ox. We’ll take the bounty, and you’ll take the cane.”
Shannon let out a slow, steady breath. No time for talking. No time for escape.
She launched herself forward before Dargen could adjust his aim, moving with a blur of speed no human on Earth—or this planet—should possess. Her momentum carried her straight into the four men before they could react.
The flintlock roared and released smoke and a ragged iron ball, but Shannon was already past the point of aim. The ball walloped the wall where she had been standing an instant before.
She grabbed the barrel of the second man's gun and ripped it from his grip. The metal was thick and heavy, but her slender hands closed around it like hydraulic vices. She brought the butt of the weapon whipping in a sharp arc that jackhammered the jaw of another jingoist. The butt punch made a crunch that echoed in the alley. The man dropped and flopped with his face a red ruin.
Dargen recovered first, drawing a short sword. He lunged and swung in a smooth stab intended to jab her shoulder. Shannon ducked and plucked the hilt from his hand and clubbed the thug’s mug with an arc of her elbow that sent him flying and falling.
The third man fired at Shannon’s body and his barrel boomed and blossomed fire and fog. The ball chiseled a channel brushing her breast as she sidestepped slightly. She moved phenomenally fast with a slash that hacked the man’s hand off. Her backstroke smote his throat and clove his carotid artery open in a geyser of gore.
A fourth foe appeared and fired at her figure. His flintlock vomited a volley of grapeshot in a clamor and conflagration. The spread of pellet lead went too wide for Shannon to fully evade in the alley. Several pellets peppered her posterior as she dived and climbed up in a blur too fast for human eyes to fully follow. Her stolen sword swooped in a loop that hewed the head off the gunman. Then Shannon was in full flight as more guns gushed out gouts of smoke, fire and flying lead that sped behind her fast moving figure.
She had neutralized the threat, but the noise—the gunfire, the shouts, the bone-cracking impacts—would draw more attention than she could handle. She vaulted over a low wall, her superior leg muscles making the six foot obstacle feel like a slight step, and began to run toward the city's crumbling western wall.
The last sliver of the sun vanished, plunging the world into the darkness that she excelled in. She was running flat out across a muddy field used for livestock, the stone walls of town shrinking behind her. Ahead lay the untamed jungle, thick with the scent of damp earth and something far worse: raw, predatory menace. The first signs were subtle. A tingling beneath her skin, a sensation like cold oil replacing her blood. Then, a sharp, profound ache in her chest.
Focus, Shannon. Keep moving.
She felt the temperature of her skin plummet. The clothes she wore—simple, sturdy linen—began to strain. Her shoes suddenly felt too small. She stumbled, falling to a knee in the mud, clutching her head as a wave of alien energy—the dark matter symbiont activating—flooded her nerves.
Her teeth elongated, pushing painfully against her gums. Her vision blurred, then sharpened, the darkness of the evening suddenly resolving into perfect, infrared-tinged clarity. The roar that tore itself from her throat was not a woman’s scream, but a bass note of thunder, shaking the swampy ground.
Her body swelled. Bones cracked and reformed, thickening with the density of neutron star material. Her skeleton expanded outwards, her flesh following, rippling and blackening. The linen of her tunic ripped into tatters, unable to contain the mass.
Within seconds, where the petite brunette woman had been, stood a creature of nightmare.
The black wolf was an impossibly massive silhouette against the deepening dark—larger than any grizzly bear. Even on all fours her back reached over five feet high. Her head was huger than a hippo with a massive maw full of titanic teeth. Her claws were all easily over eight inches extended. The very texture of its fur was alien, absorbing the light, making it seem like a moving patch of pure shadow. This was not magic or mere lycanthropy; this was the alien symbiont of the Void, granting her impenetrable alien flesh and instantaneous, near-infinite healing. And yet, behind the feral emerald glow of its eyes, the mind of Shannon remained rational.
Run. Now. The primal instinct was overwhelming, but the human intellect directed it.
She heard the shouts again, closer now. The posse, alerted by the noise of her transformation, were pursuing. But they weren't the only ones.
A crashing sound erupted from the jungle line—a sound far heavier than a human footfall. A scent, hot and musky, filled the air. She lifted her massive head with huge jaws parting to test the wind.
It was a Ceratosaur, a mid-sized but vicious bipedal hunter, drawn by the sound of the fight and the unique energy signature of her transformation. In her human form, the dinosaur would have been a near-impossible challenge. In this form, it was merely an obstacle.
She had to escape both the primitive, violent men seeking their bounty and the myriad of roaring, stomping monsters that ruled the night. The black wolf dug its immense claws—each one a curved spike—into the soft earth and vanished into the jungle gloom, a blur of pure dark matter speed, leaving the sounds of confused human shouting and a rapidly approaching Ceratosaur behind her.
The transition from the soft mud of the livestock field to the tangled gloom of the jungle was instantaneous. Shannon’s mind, housed inside the skull of the symbiont, processed the environment with brutal efficiency. Every root, every low-hanging vine, every broken branch was an obstacle, yet her speed was such that they blurred into a single, rushing tunnel.
The Ceratosaur’s scent, a sharp, metallic musk mixed with decay, grew stronger. The creature was heavy—a little over twenty feet long and weighing nearly a ton—but surprisingly swift. It greatly resembled a Tyrannosaurus from Earth, but it had much longer upper arms ending in huge hands and long claws. It also had horns hooking from its head and down its spine and long tail. Shannon registered its position not just by sound, but by the displacement of heat and air around it, a sixth sense granted by the symbiont. It was paralleling her path, intending to cut her off. The raw fear of being cornered while her form was still settling into its full power was paramount. She veered sharply right, smashing through a thicket of razor-leafed ferns as if they were cobwebs. The foliage barely snagged her dark, light-absorbing fur.
The Ceratosaur, a blur of scaled muscle and yellow-grey hide, burst into the clearing ahead of her. Its massive jaw, lined with serrated teeth, snapped the air in a challenge. Unlike the men, this beast recognized the dark wolf as prey, not an artifact to be recovered. Its guttural roar, deep enough to vibrate Shannon's internal organs, was the last sound of warning.
The wolf didn't dodge. Dodging was for fragile things. Shannon, channeling the dark matter's kinetic energy, met the charge head-on.
The Ceratosaur's massive body slammed into the wolf's shoulder with the force of a battering ram. The impact would have flattened a mastodon, but the wolf barely yielded a foot. The symbiont’s alien flesh and bones, dense and non-baryonic, were an almost perfect shock absorber. A tiny, internal whine of displaced energy was the only indication of the hit.
The dinosaur, stunned that its attack hadn't even registered, recoiled instinctively. It was a mistake.
Shannon’s jaws snapped like a clamp on the Ceratosaur’s neck, just above the clavicle. Her teeth, thicker than hippo tusks, sank effortlessly through the reptilian hide and the tough muscle beneath. There was no resistance, only the sensation of warm, spurting blood flooding her muzzle and mouth.
The Ceratosaur shrieked, a high-pitched cry of pure agony, and thrashed violently, its powerful hind leg whipping up and catching Shannon’s flank. She felt the impact, a dull, heavy thud, but no pain. The kick, designed to shatter the spine of large herbivores, barely disturbed the symbiont’s mass.
She tightened her nip grip and ripped while wildly waving her head.
The dinosaur's tracheal and major arteries were opened instantly. Her teeth knifed through its neck nearly beheading the beast. Its thrashing subsided into a weak quiver, its legs drumming the earth in a final, frantic dance while dying.
Shannon released the carcass. It slumped heavily to the jungle floor. It was a kill made with surgical, overwhelming force, lacking any sense of sport. The mind inside the wolf felt a wave of cold nausea at the efficiency of the kill, but the symbiont demanded she take two, deep, restorative gulps of the hot, metallic blood.
One problem solved. The bigger problem remained.
Back on the edge of the muddy field, the surviving members of the posse had regrouped, joined now by a few more armed citizens—six men in total, clutching their flintlocks and iron swords. They had followed the sound of the thunderous transformation, expecting to find the emerald-eyed witch captured or dead, perhaps mauled by a local beast.
Instead, they found the ripped remains of Shannon’s linen clothes, scattered around the massive, clawed footprints that led into the jungle. And then, they heard the sounds of the clash: the guttural dinosaur roar, the sickening thud of the impact, and the final, wet snap.
Dargen, who was merely unconscious from Shannon’s elbow, groaned and stood, rubbing his throbbing temple.
"What in the hell was that noise?" he whispered, his bravado gone.
A young man named Kael, gripping a sharp saber, pointed with a pistol into the dark jungle. "The thing went in there. It sounded like... a stone giant fighting a thunder lizard."
Cautiously, they crept toward the treeline. The air here was different; heavier, charged with a strange, electrical coldness, and carrying the unmistakable scent of hot, fresh dinosaur blood.
Kael was the first to see it. He stumbled backward, his breath catching in a choked sob.
Lying in the churned earth of the clearing was the Ceratosaur. Its head was unnaturally twisted, its neck a pulped mess. Beside it, the wolf’s tracks—deep, perfect impressions—led away into the deeper, impenetrable dark.
“That’s… that’s a Ceratosaur,” Kael stammered, his eyes wide. “Nothing kills a Ceratosaur that clean. Not even the great rock-cats.”
Dargen stared at the creature. The dinosaur's body was immense, but the tracks beside it—tracks that dwarfed a human head—belonged to something exponentially larger. Something that had killed the apex predator with a single, crushing bite.
"It wasn't a monster fighting a lizard," Dargen whispered, finally understanding the true scale of what he had chased. "It was the witch. That was her." He looked down at the crushed jaw of his companion, remembering the speed and strength Shannon had shown in her human form. "She turns into a demon of the night."
A collective, cold terror settled over the men. The bounty was forgotten. The debts were meaningless. They were hunting something that could crush the largest monster they knew in seconds.
"Back," Dargen rasped, turning immediately toward the city. "Back to town. Tell the Elders to bar the gates. No torch, no weapon, nothing can stop a beast of that size."
The posse retreated in blind panic, their focus shifting instantly from greedy hunters to terrified prey. Their flintlock firearms and blades were utterly worthless now.
Shannon, already two miles away from the city wall, was running on all four limbs, bounding through the jungle canopy. The speed was exhilarating, a release of tension that human muscles could never achieve. She was a silent, black wind tearing through the prehistoric undergrowth.
Her internal compass—her human mind—focused on one objective: The Plateau. It was an arid, elevated region, miles away from the humid, dino-infested lowlands and, crucially, miles away from the human settlement. She needed space, silence, and, most importantly, time to let the symbiont’s transformation settle and to regain full rational control of her alien senses.
The sheer power of the wolf form was overwhelming. The world was a symphony of smells: the sharp, electric scent of giant ferns, the iron tang of ancient river water, and the heavy, sweet rot of fungal growths. Every movement of every small animal was a loud noise in her ears.
As she ran, she crossed a wide, shallow riverbed. A family of long-necked, stone-age cattle (something akin to primitive brontosaurus but smaller) were drinking from the slow-moving water. They caught her scent—the fear of the Ceratosaur, the blood, and the terrifying dark matter energy—and bolted, their heavy bodies thundering into the distance.
Shannon didn't look at them. Prey was not her concern. Her only concern was separating the human, rational mind from the alien, predatory symbiont. The shift was complete, but the struggle for dominance was ongoing, a silent, internal war waged over every stride, every breath.
She looked up. Through the breaks in the heavy foliage, she could see two massive moons of the planet beginning their slow ascent, bathing the jungle in a cold, blue-green light. It was going to be a long, dangerous night, filled with things far worse than the Ceratosaur she had just dispatched. She knew, with chilling certainty, that the city would not soon forget the night the beautiful brunette witch transformed into the massive, dark matter wolf. She had successfully escaped the men, but now she was trapped among the monsters.
She wondered if she would ever see home again.
Bio:
Tom Kropp’s work has appeared in The Horror Zine, Chiron Review, Churches, Children and Daddies, Down in the Dirt, Freedom Fiction Journal, Short-Story Me, Dark Harbor, Blood Moon Rising, Flash Phantoms, Phantomania Anthology, Lowlife Lit, The Listening Eye, J Journal, Evening Street Review, Conceit, Spotlight on Recovery, Muscle and Fitness, Outdoor Life and many other magazines. His play Jailhouse Confessions was performed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC in 2019. You can find more of his writings at tomkropp.wordpress.com. He has many audiobooks and eBooks available free through Google Play books.
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