In the moments following my burning, I recalled my wolf puppets to me. I needed to see if I was actually aflame. So panicked was I that I hardly noticed my new mental faculties, or the enhancement that my puppets’ eyes had experienced.
My wolves greedily drank in the scents of the forest as they sprinted to where I grew. A hypnotic sweetness brushed against their snouts, carefully masking the stench of rot and death below. The acrid odor of burning wood was mercifully absent, but that did not exclude other forms of damage to my body.
From the underbrush they emerged into my clearing and ascended the mound of bones and rotting carcasses surrounding my roots. Through their eyes, I saw myself for what I consider the first time, and through my own senses, I saw my wolves.
My trunk was unharmed, though it was still caked in the dried blood of the countless woodland creatures my wolves brought me so to fertilize my soil. My branches stretched towards the sky, towering proudly over the surrounding trees. Each branch contained hundreds of new buds, every one of which would grow into another leaf for me to feed on the sun with.
My wolves smiled for the first time ever when they saw the new growth. Although I didn’t consciously know it at the time, the growth was in reaction to whatever had caused my burning.
As their eyes continued to look me over, I saw my lures dangling from my branches; long tendrils covered with extremely sweet-smelling flowers that promised a tasty treat to whatever smelled them, only for them to be snatched up by the pair of puppets that I control. I also saw my sensory bulbs, little round growths on every branch that let me see the world around myself whenever my wolves weren’t there.
But the thing I was the most shocked at were the ten little pods dangling from my longest branch. Each of those pods — transmitter seeds, I would later call them — was what I used to make and command my wolves. Through them, my magic flows out and gathers the dead wood and plant detritus to form a new wolf. I had only ever been able to grow two at a time, only growing another once the first was lost, and yet here I was with a total of twelve transmitter seeds.
Though I am a tree, my body is not entirely immobile. Gathering my strength first, I shook the seeds off and let them fall to the forest floor below. With a thought, one of my wolves disintegrated, sacrificing its wood for its brethren. The broken branches gathered around the pods, forming a self-propelled cocoon around the seeds.
The other wolf grinned, reacting to my delight. As it and the eleven seeds raced off to gather freshly fallen timber with which to build up my wolves, I was already planning without realizing that I had never had the ability of forethought before.
There were other timberwolf trees near me; I could hear their voices in the wind, and feel their thoughts where their roots brushed up against my own. They were my pack, and we hunted together for fresh meat. Yet never before had they seemed so quiet, or so simple. Even Pack Leader seemed tired and slow in comparison to my foggy pre-burn memories.
My elation remained. He, with his impressive five wolves, now was nothing compared to me, and I knew it.
Ambition. Another concept so alien to me and my kind, and yet I found myself embracing it fully. I was better than them now. Why shouldn’t I be Pack Leader now? After all, for us, might makes right.
One by one, my transmitter seeds awoke, sending a flood of information to me as they did. Nine... ten... eleven wolves stood proudly in the forest, all bearing my favorite expression, a grin.
The last seed was different. Larger than the others, it kept drawing in more and more of my magic, pulling from a reserve that I was sure would run dry, and yet always had just a bit more to give. More and more wood flew towards it, building it up and up, while the wood that was already there broke into smaller pieces and rearranged to fit even more compactly. Sap oozed out from the wood and rapidly dried into amber along where the bones of a real creature would be. I say creature, for the figure that was born from my seed was no wolf.
The others looked upon its massive form, bringing a single word to mind: lycanthrope. With front paws warped into hands, a body built for bipedal walking, and a form far more detailed and articulate that before, I recognized that it was potentially my most important puppet.
The clouds parted above, letting the moonlight fall through the forest canopy and spill across my Lycan’s face. Its chest started to convulse, and a strange sound emerged from its mouth. Though I had never heard it before, as far as I am aware, I knew at once what that sound — and the feeling that came with it — was: laughter.
I don’t even know why I was laughing, nor did I care. I felt amazing, that day was amazing, and I wanted to laugh.
The ideas that came with my awakening never came in a great flood. There was no great flash of inspiration, no sudden eruption of memory. In fact, save for the fact that I could quite clearly recall the number of days that it had been since my awakening, it was almost as if I had learned everything a long time ago. I had no idea what I knew, and yet the moment I encountered something that reminded me of it (including my own thoughts), I remembered whatever new bit of information as if it was always there.
Don’t get me wrong; I was and still am a timberwolf tree that possessed all its former instincts and intelligence. It’s just that now I am more than what I was.
For instance, the old me would have used one of my wolves to pursue a little chicken-lizards and push it towards the other. Now, I have my Lycan ready near a pit trap that I dug, armed with rocks and a stone-tipped wooden spear to kill it with. Using that setup, I’ve caught nine of them in the last week, more than I ever had before, plus several other small animals.
Having so many puppets has another benefit: I can leave some behind to defend myself with while the others bring me prey to eat. With my catch in tow, my puppets make the trek back to my clearing, where the rest of them have remained. There, they distribute the chicken-lizards and the rabbits among themselves. Roots extend from their transmitter seeds and pierce the hides of the animals, eagerly drinking a little of the blood to nourish themselves.
Once each has taken its fill, I command the wolves to tear into the fresh meat. As for my Lycan, I use him to bring a dead but otherwise unmarred lizard-chicken to the base of my trunk. With the flick of a stone blade, the now headless beast spills its still-warm blood onto my roots. The magic within the blood flows into me as I greedily drink it up.
I don’t know why these lizard-chickens have so much more magic than my usual prey, but I’m not complaining. Ever since I discovered that property of their blood, I’ve made sure to spill some on my roots at every meal, and my health has improved greatly for it. I’ve never flowered so bountifully or grown so fast before, and I am sure that I am now one of the tallest of my kind.
The first of the wolves is done with their meal. As it approaches me, my Lycan hears the wolf’s wood grinding away at the remains inside it. As they quiet down, a reddish-brown ooze seeps from between the logs and branches of its body, letting me know that what remains of the prey is ready for me. The wolf gags and then regurgitates the chewed and ground-up remains on my mound. The juices seep into the ground, causing my roots to squirm as they lap up every last drop.
Delicious.
The others repeat this process, leaving my branches sagging in contentment at the end. Never before have I eaten this well, never before have I been this satisfied, never before have I been this strong, and never before have I been this happy.
Yes, I was happy.
And now I was bored. Hunting had become easy, and with my sudden intelligence, I craved a stimulation that hunting could no longer provide. For a time, I merely thought; introspective and curious, I started listing out the things I knew. Eventually, that list grew so long that I started writing it in the dirt, starting with the fact that I could write as point number one.
That didn’t last too long, though, as I grew weary of thinking of myself. Then, I tried writing other things — descriptions of people and places that I had never seen, and yet somehow knew. Slowly, I came to the realization that whatever that burning was that had created me, it hadn’t created my mind from scratch. Someone, somewhere, had been the base from which I had been created.
Very shortly after that, I experienced my first — and last — existential crisis.
It was a thing that happened. I won’t bother going into details there; it's not something I'm particularly keen on mentioning. I would like to keep at least smidgen of my pride, after all.
It was very un-wolflike, to put it simply.
After coming to the very philosophical conclusion that I am a person, and I am me, I decided to name myself. A short time later, I settled on the name Jack.
No, I did not choose that name just because of the pun.
Ok, fine, maybe I did.
And maybe I went a little overboard with the puns when I first realized that I could make them. I’m sure you can forgive me; I was board. Board. Get it?
I’m not sorry.
But as the days turned into weeks, and the weeks into months, the monotony and isolation was starting to wear at the sanity I so treasured. But then, as I was considering lighting myself on fire just to see what color I burned (not really), she appeared.