Between Two Skins

At the age of twelve, Ren fell ill.

It began as a cough. Then fever took him like fire through dry grass. His body burned, his thoughts melted, and the world spun into a blur of sweat and trembling limbs. Greta pressed cool cloths to his forehead while Markus muttered prayers under his breath. The village healer came with bitter herbs that tasted like soil, but nothing lowered the heat in his blood.

The fever dragged on for days. On the fourth night, the line between waking and dreams dissolved.

He found himself standing in a field of silver grass under a swollen moon. His body felt strange, lighter and stronger at once. A shiver ran through him, and suddenly the world tilted. His bones reshaped. His skin prickled with fur. His vision sharpened until he could see the breath of every blade of grass. The night exploded into scents and sounds he had never known.

He was a wolf.

Not in spirit. Not drifting into another creature’s mind. This time the paws that touched the ground were his. The teeth in his mouth were sharp and real. His heart raced with a primal rhythm, and his tail swished with restless energy.

The dream carried him through the forest. He ran until the wind tore through his fur, until the earth beneath his paws felt like a heartbeat. He chased phantom scents and heard voices that were not voices, the murmurs of the forest itself.

When he woke, the fever had broken. Sweat clung to his skin, but the heat was gone. His breaths came slow and steady. Morning light spilled into his room.

Then he saw it.

Wolf fur.

A small patch lay on his blanket, coarse and gray, tipped with silver. He touched it, heart pounding. It was not a dream.

For days afterward, the world felt different. His ears caught whispers at the far end of the pasture. His eyes could pick out the flight of a hawk from half a mile away. Scents bloomed in the air, rich and layered. The musk of goats, the sharp tang of fox in the hedgerow, the sweetness of hay drying in the sun.

Over the next year, Ren trained in secret. The fever dream had unlocked something new.

Shapeshifting.

He began small, choosing animals he had already skinchanged into. The cat was the easiest. His bones shifted, his frame shrank, fur slid over skin, and soon he prowled the barn on soft pads. The fox came next, its lean body perfect for slipping through hedges and chasing rabbits in the moonlight.

Partial transformations came with practice. Fox ears for sharper hearing when stalking birds. A dog’s nose for tracking scents across the field. Hawk eyes for picking out deer from the forest edge. Bird wings for gliding from the barn loft to the pasture. Wolf claws for tearing through brambles or defending himself from stray dogs.

But secrecy was his constant shield. Not even his childhood friend, Annalise, knew. She was a tall, spirited girl with hair the color of barley in summer and a laugh that carried across the meadow. She helped him herd goats and dared him to climb the tallest apple trees. But even with her, he spoke nothing of what he could do.

He had two powers now. Skinchanging, the ability to take over the bodies of animals while his own slept. And shapeshifting, the ability to transform his own body into animals he had skinchanged into before.

Life on the farm became his classroom. It was easy to slip into docile prey animals like cows or sheep, their thoughts slow and warm as sunlit grass. But predators were far more exhilarating. He learned to hunt mice as a cat, slipping through the barn shadows until the pounce came without thought. As a fox, he learned to stalk rabbits, freezing in place until the final dash. As a wolf, he ran deer to exhaustion, the thrill of the chase filling his blood like fire.

It was more vivid than any video game he had played in his old life.

With shapeshifting, he began to hunt in his own skin. A cat on the farm for mice. A fox in the forest for rabbits. A wolf in the high meadows for deer, running with the pack.

His senses sharpened during hunts. The air spoke in scent trails, the ground whispered with vibrations of movement, the night unfolded in layers of sound. Other animals spoke too, in simple tongues of growls, yips, and calls. Ren began to understand. Food. Help. Danger. Short words in an ancient language without grammar but full of meaning.

The wolves were the most complex. The pack in the forest was large, led by the same alpha whose mind had driven him back years ago. Ren sometimes shapeshifted into wolf form and joined their hunts, keeping his distance from the leader. He learned their hierarchy, their unspoken rules, their rituals before a kill.

Every wolf had a name, not given but known, carried in sound, scent, and things no human could sense. The alpha’s name was Rathar, a name that rolled like distant thunder. They gave Ren a name too: Korr, short and sharp like a snapped twig. Rathar never trusted him, his yellow eyes always watchful, but Ren made friends in the pack.

There was Veyra, a lean gray she-wolf with a sly tilt to her ears who could slip between hunters without being seen. Hask, a broad-shouldered male whose deep bark carried far in the valleys. And Tirn, the youngest, quick as wind, whose excitement often betrayed him during a hunt.

They thought he was just another wolf who had wandered in from far away. Ren never corrected them. In truth, he belonged to two worlds, yet in both he kept his secret.

The wolves spoke of dangers in the forest. Dark beasts that walked on more than four legs, things older than the pack’s oldest hunter. They told him to stay away. He obeyed. But in spirit form he sometimes drifted deeper, where moonlight barely touched the ground, and found strange gatherings of animals around old places. There were rules here that humans had never learned.

As months passed, Ren’s mastery grew. Skinchanging became smoother, shapeshifting faster. The two powers fed each other.

But there was one line he never crossed.

He never skinchanged into a human.

Not once.