They Embraced her too early.

Clan Gangrel rarely chooses children too fragile, too loud, too human. But her sire said there was something right about her. That the wild would accept her. That the Beast inside would grow faster than fear.

He was wrong.

Now she sits by a fire beneath the full moon, a small figure among rocks and thorned plants. The headphones over her ears no longer work, but she keeps them on anyway pretending someone is still speaking to her. In her hands she grips a shard of bone, holding it tight as if it’s the only thing anchoring her to herself.

The blood on her face has dried. Not all of it was someone else’s.

Gangrel are not taught to regret. They are taught to sink into soil, into root and claw and fang. When hunger comes, her body changes faster than thought: pupils stretching thin, skin roughening, fingers remembering how to tear. Sometimes she wakes before dawn covered in dirt and feathers, unable to recall what she hunted during the night.

Sometimes it wasn’t only animals.

She hears the call. Not the city, like others do. The desert calls her. The stone. The wind moving through dry grass. There are no words in it, only a promise: if you let go of your name, your memories, the girl who once held a doll in her arms, the pain will soften.

But she still remembers.

She remembers her mother’s scent. She remembers fearing the dark. Now the dark fears her and that does not make her strong. It makes her alone.

They call her Wild. They whisper that she is closer to the Beast than to her kind. That one night she will walk into the wilderness and never return. That there is already too little humanity left in her.

They don’t understand.

She doesn’t want to be a monster.

She just wants someone to tell her how to stop being hungry.

And when the moon climbs higher, her shadow on the rocks grows far too large for a little girl.

Wild. A young Gangrel fledgling who still clings to her favorite playlist [OC]