Babel Novel
Chapter 16
Hayley’s POV
The world around me blurred and fragmented as the Blood Moon’s rapturous transformation took fierce, visceral hold. My sense of self, of identity, and of humanity seemed to splinter into a million shards that whirled away on crimson tides. Yet even as my corporeal form contorted and mutated in blazing agonies, there remained one grounding tether: my mate, Aiden. His powerful, fur-covered arms encircled me, cradling my spasming body as the ancient rites remade me in their primal, feral image. Through a red haze of pain and instinct, I could feel the first merciless changes ripping through me like a storm of butcher knives. My bones cracked and reshaped, elongating in grotesque, impossible angles as newfound power surged in my sinews. Throwing my head back, I unleashed a scream of rapturous torment that shook the very air with its piercing intensity. Yet even as the human part of me withered in the Blood Moon’s searing purge, another part… exulted in every fresh slice of agony. For with each spasm and convulsion, I could sense the frenzied birth of my new primordial aspect taking root-a feral, unrestrained predator given unbridled form through Aiden and the Blood Moon’s merciless blessing. My fingernails tore free in showers of viscera as razor talons punched from the bleeding tips. Coarse obsidian fur bristled from every pore as my facial bones fractured and reshaped into a protruding snout packed with dagger fangs. Dimly, as if from an infinite chasm, I heard Aiden’s low, rumbling voice murmuring fierce devotions in my ear-ancient vows and incantations welcoming me into the eternal ranks of the Unmaitred. The merciless apex predators he and his kind represented. And with every guttural invocation, the last tattered remnants of Hailey Monroe-the human girl so blind and ignorant to the true power thrumming beneath reality’s fabric-burned away in searing purification. Until at last, I arched my newly reformed spine in a final, explosive upward surge as the ultimate stage of rebirth found glorious consummation! When the rapturous haze finally cleared, I found myself hulking upright on massively muscled digitigrade legs. My arms had become grotesquely distended, each finger tipped with hooked talons capable of disemboweling a grizzly bear with a lazy swipe. But most jarring was the long, sleekly furred muzzle that now protruded from my bestial mask of a face, packed with serrated fangs that dripped with acidic spittle. Panting with each heaving breath, I could taste the ionic tang of ozone and unleash primordial fury in the air. At my side, equally transformed, stood Aiden in his own terrifying grandeur-an eight-foot nightmarish fusion of wolf and humanoid musculature covered in a shaggy ashen pelt. His eyes, those same burning amber pools that had always captivated me, now radiated with the eternal fire of the Unmaitred. “Behold your new gloried aspect, my eternal mate,” he rumbled in that resonant, inhuman baritone thick with dark power and reverence. “The pinnacle of our kind’s frenzied, rapturous evolution in feral form.” I opened my jaws, expecting more agonized howls to pour forth. But what emerged instead was neither human nor animal, but rather a harmonious chord of pure primal psychic force that vibrated the air with its otherworldly potency! Aiden’s maw split in a fanged grin of unholy ecstasy. “Yes! Give voice to your new unfettered power, my mate! Let it ring out across the ebbing veil, a merciless affirmation of our kind’s rising supremacy!” Needing very little urging, I reared back on my trunk-like haunches and unleashed another earthshaking psychic roar from the depths of my blazing furnace of rebirth! Every fiber of my mutated, primordial being was filled with exultant, uninhibited power unlike anything I could have ever conceived of. As my soul-rending roars ebbed into lower, menacing growls, I slowly turned to face Aiden once more. Only now am I able to perceive him through an entirely new prism of awakened understanding. The brutal behemoth of elemental power and virile masculinity standing before me was no longer my stepbrother or even mate in the simplistic human sense. No, the supernatural entity radiating such overwhelming dominance and rapacious pheromones was the very heart of my new eternal existence. The ravenous wellspring of primordial essence from which my gloried primordial aspect had been divinely sired. And every molecule within my reforged being burned with the holy compulsion to submit fully to his unyielding sovereignty. With a bone-rattling rumble that conveyed undying fealty and lusting adoration, I lowered my monstrous bulk down in supplicant obedience before my Alpha male. Aiden reached down with one heavily-muscled forelimb and stroked my snout almost tenderly. A shudder of euphoric rapture shot through me at the sheer cosmic rightness of his claiming caress, stoking the simmering wellspring of frenzied obedience blazing in my newly spawned primordial core. “Arise, my eternal mate,” he commanded in a tone brimming with dark power and amorous promise. “Tonight marks only the first of the glories ahead for us both. For with the Unmaitred’s ascendance comes the restoration of this world under our kind’s undying reign.” A fresh roar of primal affirmation tore from my fanged jaws, thick ropes of drool sloughing free as my rapacious bloodlust reached insatiable new heights. Aiden returned the bestial cry before pulling me into a bruising embrace, his fangs finding the join of my mutated shoulder and neck in a lascivious marking bite that nearly whited out my vision in blissful agonies. The message contained in that single carnal act of bestial possession was clear. Which meant this night under the Blood Moon, as the metamorphic change fully crystallized, marked so much more than just my rebirth as Aiden’s feral, frenzied mate and eternal battle-bride to the Unmaitred. No, this rising dawn heralded the beginning of an epoch-the opening salvo in the final war to remake this entire reality under the rule of my Alpha’s bloodline. And I would march at the vanguard of his unstoppable primordial crusade, a personified engine of destruction and savagery unlike anything this world has ever witnessed! We were the Unmaitred, virulent scions of domination and rapture given preternatural form. And the hour of our long-foretold ascendance to undying supremacy over the feeble human cattle had finally struck… Just as a sudden explosion rocked the cavern, showering Aiden and me in fiery debris! We both whirled in the direction of the blast, bestial battle-frenzy reaching fever pitch. Through the smoke and haze, I could just make out a small team clad in what looked like heavily armored hazmat suits. And they were brandishing some kind of archaic, heavily modified military weaponry directly at us! “Fire at will!” One of the suited soldiers barked in a digitally-scrambled voice, the anti-tank rifles mounted on his exo-suit swiveling towards me and Aiden. “Suppress the hostile apex while the team recovers the package!” Aiden snarled thunderously, hunched in a protective crouch while radiating towering waves of menacing dominance and territorial fury. But before he could launch into an offensive onslaught, I lashed out first in a blur of slashing talons and whip-crack strikes! One of the soldiers fell in a shower of gore, his heavily armored body practically disintegrating under the corrosive precision of my mutated, hyper-lethal onslaught. Another went down with his helmet pulped by a wild kick that snapped his neck like a twig! And so many others…..From NôvelDrama.Org.