Alpha Rogue Chapter 4

I stayed up for the rest of the night pondering on the strange dream. All in all, the dream made me want to know what or who I was. It was clear to me that I was not human and I really needed to find out what else existed out there. I needed to know if there were others out there of my kind and what kind exactly they were.

I woke up early the following morning and prepared breakfast. The day was a Saturday which meant that my foster parents were going to be home all day. After breakfast, I left them a note on the fridge and headed out to town on my motorbike. I had one mission that day, research. For this, I headed to the town library. The library was a large place. It had two sections, one for internet research and another one for book-related research.

I chose to start with the internet. I fired up the search engine and typed in my weird symptoms in their order of occurrence. The search produced two results; vampirism and lycanthropy. Vampirism was about vampires and since I was certain that I was no vampire, I chose to focus on lycanthropy.

Lycanthropy was about a supernatural species that existed in human form but could also transform into wolves.

Lycanthropes lived in a society called a pack. They were social beings. Their leader was called alpha. He was the strongest male in the pack. They also had warrior wolves who were mostly the youth of the pack before they got married. The third part of the pack was the members who were married and had families.

The lycanthropes stayed human until they turned sixteen. At this age, they shifted into wolves for the first time, which was usually very painful. The pain got less and less the more one shifted. After the first shift, Lycans could control their shift from human to wolf and vice versa.

The lycanthropes had a gift of telepathy which enabled them to communicate through their minds. This was especially useful when they were in their wolf form. In addition to that, the lycanthropes had super strength, speed, heightened senses of sight, smell, hearing, taste, and the ability to heal quickly from their wounds.

As in other communities, lycanthropes had a justice system. The alpha served as the judge. There existed in the pack, prisons where the guilty lycanthropes were put.

Runaway and lone lycanthropes were called rogues. They were detested by pack Lycans and killed on sight.

The lycanthrope command structure consisted of the alpha and his wife and the alpha's second in command. The second in command was called a beta. He acted as advisor to the alpha and stepped in to fill in the leadership role in absence of the alpha.

The lycanthropes were said to live in seclusion to avoid their supernatural secret from getting to the humans. Despite these efforts, some humans knew about them and hunted them. These people were called hunters. They exploited the only weakness the lycanthropes had, wolfsbane. This was a wild flowering plant that was toxic to lycanthropes. It was said that once ingested, wolfsbane caused severe pain and paralysis to the victim, leading eventually to a slow painful death. Legend stated that whereas the leaves and flowers of wolfsbane were toxic to lycanthropes, its roots proved to be an antidote.

At this point, I was fairly convinced that I was a lycanthrope. I had most of the stated traits but then I had no pack which I guess kinda made me a rogue. On top of all that, I had no memory of my first shift. I didn't even know how to shift in the first place.

I decided to take a break for a while and then come back for more.