This soul is not my own.
It is made of splinters, past lives, past armageddons.
Feral voices cry in my dreams.
The kingfisher warbles, longing to stretch her wings and fly free.
The fox snickers and shrieks, deteriorating, quiet, but felt.
The coyote howls, lunging against the cage of my ribs.
The deer keens, missing the sunlight and the leaves and the wind.
The wolf snarls and tears at its prison, physically painful.
The thundering hoofbeats of the wild horse echo in my mind.
The bobcat cries, loudest of all, and forces it’s being into my limbs and mind, digging phantom claws into dirt under my fingers, listening with unseen ears, never quite able to take full control but always right there in case the chance arises.
My claws, my ears, my tail, my fangs.
I am human, but my soul is not.
I am human, but only barely so.
I’ve been the wolf and kingfisher in my dreams, felt the limbs of the deer and bobcat, howled like the coyote, thought like the fox, all of my fragments fight for my control, fight to be free, and I feel like they will tear me apart form the inside out.
But… I like this. This in-between. The souls that have fled from their tragedy, and have clung to mine, they make me who I am. I am Therian, not otherkin or were or demon, and I am proud.
