Chapter 76 Edmund's Redemption (Edmund POV)
The transformation was agony beyond anything I'd imagined in eighteen years of hunting werewolves.
My bones broke. Not cleanly, not quickly, but with grinding pressure that felt like being crushed from the inside out. Femur snapping, reforming longer. Ribs cracking, reshaping into a barrel chest designed for running. Spine extending, vertebrae multiplying to accommodate a tail I'd never wanted.
My muscles tore. Shredded themselves and rebuilt in patterns that made no sense to human biology. Quadruped locomotion replacing bipedal. Jaw extending into a muzzle filled with teeth meant for tearing flesh. Hands becoming paws with claws that erupted through my fingertips.
The screaming was involuntary. My human vocal cords disintegrating, replaced by something that could howl, that could produce sounds in frequencies humans couldn't hear.
Through the agony, I could hear Vivienne apologizing. Could feel her maintaining the Silvermane compulsion that was forcing my body to change against every instinct of self-preservation.
This was what I'd done to Lyanna. Shot her while she transformed. Killed her during a change that felt like being torn apart and rebuilt simultaneously. Murdered my wife while she experienced this same agony, trying to protect our daughter from my fear.
I'd been a monster. Not because I was human. Because I'd refused to understand.
The transformation completed after ninety seconds that felt like hours.
I lay on the floor of the command center in wolf form, panting with exhaustion, my consciousness barely coherent through the shock of forced change.
Everything was different.
My vision sharper, catching movement I'd never noticed before. My hearing amplified, detecting heartbeats and breathing patterns and the subtle sounds of machinery that human ears filtered out. My sense of smell overwhelming… I could scent Vivienne's fear and determination, the residual silver poisoning in my new system, the gas already leaking from the sealed chamber below.
And underneath all of it, a presence in my mind that was me but also not-me. Wolf instincts older than human consciousness, genetic memory that stretched back millennia, the visceral understanding of what it meant to be predator instead of prey.
"Dad." Vivienne's voice. "Can you hear me? Can you understand?"
I tried to shift to human form… needed to speak, needed to tell her I understood now… but the transformation was clumsy. Managed only partial shift, leaving me covered in fur with a face still partially lupine.
"I can feel it," I gasped, my voice distorted by the incomplete change. "The wolf. Inside my mind. Part of me now. Is this what your mother felt? What you feel?"
"Yes."
"It's not... it's not what I expected. Not a monster. Just... more. Everything amplified. Everything clearer." I looked at my clawed hands… hands that had killed Lyanna, that had injected Vivienne with silver, that had built this facility to commit genocide. "I've been hunting this my entire life and I never understood what it actually was."
The monitor showed the timer.
TIME TO CRITICAL SATURATION: 02:14
Two minutes and fourteen seconds until concentrated silver gas killed everyone still on campus. Everyone I'd spent eighteen years claiming to protect. Everyone who'd survived my trap only to die from my paranoid safeguards.
Unless I fixed what I'd broken.
"I need to go," I said, shifting fully to wolf form because it came easier than maintaining partial transformation. Then back to human to practice the change I'd need to operate mechanical controls.
My body fought me. New werewolf instincts warring with eighteen years of human muscle memory. But the third transformation was smoother. The fourth even more so.
Fast learner. Even when learning to be the thing I'd hunted.
"Sublevel one," Vivienne said, pointing. "Through that door. The chamber entrance will be sealed. You'll need to break through."
I shifted to wolf form one final time, feeling the change settle into something almost natural. Ran before she could insist on coming with me… before I could lose my nerve and let everyone die because I was afraid of pain.
Down the corridor. Down the stairs. My new wolf senses guiding me through the administrative building I'd used as command center for tonight's genocide attempt.
Reached sublevel one. Found the sealed chamber door… reinforced steel designed to contain silver gas, designed to prevent escape, designed by me to be unbreachable from outside.
But I'd designed it to stop humans. Not werewolves with supernatural strength amplified by desperation.
I backed up. Charged. Hit the door with every bit of force my new body could generate.
The steel buckled but held.
Again. Running start, full impact, claws scraping against metal as I tried to find purchase.
The door frame cracked.
Third time. Something in my shoulder gave way… bone breaking, injury that would've crippled my human form but that werewolf healing was already starting to repair.
The door tore free from its frame, crashing inward.
Silver gas billowed out.
The moment I inhaled, I understood why this was a suicide mission.
Concentrated silver aerosol flooding my lungs, burning tissue faster than werewolf healing could repair. My new supernatural regeneration fighting poison designed specifically to kill what I'd just become. Every breath searing. Every heartbeat pumping toxin deeper into my system.
But I didn't stop.
Shifted to human because human hands could operate mechanical controls. Sprinted into the chamber through gas so thick I could barely see three meters ahead.
My hunter knowledge of the facility guided me. I'd designed this chamber. Knew exactly where the manual shutoff was located. Twenty meters straight ahead, controls positioned at the far wall specifically to ensure anyone attempting to disable them would die from maximum exposure.
Ten meters. My legs were weakening. Silver poisoning spreading through my bloodstream faster than my new healing factor could process. Werewolf biology buying me time but not immunity.
Fifteen meters. I collapsed. Couldn't feel my legs. Couldn't breathe without my lungs seizing. The gas was too concentrated, my body too new to transformation to handle this level of toxin.
Crawled. Claws scraping against concrete. Every movement agony. Every breath potentially my last.
Eighteen meters. Nineteen.
My vision was darkening. Not from gas obscuring sight… from silver poisoning shutting down my nervous system. Werewolf healing trying desperately to keep vital organs functional but losing the battle against toxin saturating every cell.
Twenty meters.
Reached the controls. Series of valves and levers designed to be operated in sequence, fail-safes built into fail-safes because I'd been thorough in making sure nobody could stop my traps.
First valve. Turned it clockwise with hands that were blistering from silver contact. The werewolf healing kept my fingers functional despite tissue damage that should've made them useless.
Second lever. Pulled down with both hands, my strength fading but still enough to move the mechanism.
Third valve. This one was corroded, jammed from months of disuse since I'd installed it as theoretical backup. Wouldn't turn.
I used both hands. Channeled every bit of werewolf strength into forcing the valve to move. Something in my wrist broke… bones snapping under the pressure.
The valve turned.
The hissing sound of gas deployment cut off.
Silence. Blessed, deadly silence as the final protocol stopped flooding poison into the air.
I collapsed beside the controls, my broken body finally giving up the fight against accumulated silver that had saturated every system.
The irony wasn't lost on me. Eighteen years hunting werewolves. Eighteen years building traps designed to kill them. And in the end, I died as one of them, poisoned by my own paranoid safeguards, killed by weapons I'd installed specifically to eliminate the thing I'd become.
But everyone else would live. The wolves and hunters still evacuating would survive because I'd disabled the final protocol. The gas would dissipate. The immediate threat would end.
My children would live.
That had to be enough.
I tried to shift to human form… wanted to die as myself, wanted my last moments to be recognizably Edmund Ashford instead of the gray-brown wolf who'd crawled through poison to save people he'd tried to murder.
The transformation wouldn't complete. Too injured. Too poisoned. My body couldn't manage the change.
So I'd die as werewolf. Die as the thing I'd feared and hated and spent eighteen years trying to eliminate.
Fitting punishment for eighteen years of being wrong.
My consciousness was fragmenting. Human thoughts mixing with wolf instincts, genetic memory from the forced transformation bleeding through, awareness expanding in ways that made no sense but felt inevitable.
And suddenly I could understand things I'd never understood before.
The ancient tongue. The language Lyanna had spoken during labor, words I'd interpreted as threats but that were actually protection. The language Vivienne used to command werewolves, older than human civilization, carrying meaning that bypassed conscious thought and spoke directly to genetic imperatives.
I understood it now. Could feel the words forming without conscious decision, my dying brain accessing knowledge that came with werewolf transformation.
"Rethas en'koreth, Lyanna." I'm sorry, Lyanna.
The words felt right in ways English never had. Felt like truth distilled into sound, like confession that bypassed pride and fear and all the human complications that had destroyed my family.
"Grathas mor'ashul." I understand now.
Lyanna hadn't been a monster. She'd been a woman who transformed under the moon. A Silvermane Alpha with power that could protect or destroy depending on intent. A mother trying to save her daughter from her father's fear.
And I'd murdered her for it.
Eighteen years too late, I finally understood.
"Verith karath sen'al." Protect our children.