Ars Ressurectio: The Beast - Coming Back Dire

Resurrection as Beast

It is the reminder allowed to be full and feral.

You were not done.
And so the beast in you refused to go.
It curled around the wound.
It's jaws shut around you.
Swallowed you whole.
Until you grew to fill it.
Together, now one
you tore a path back from a past you remember, but no longer care for.
And now you walk on paws, with your eyes full of ghosts.

This is not lycanthropy.
Not a curse. Not an infection.
This is the remembering—of what you were deep beneath the skin.
Now outside, imploded, inverted.

Your resurrection is a refusal: not to die without meaning. Not to die alone.
You return as beast.
But not merely beast.

You are Dire.

Caitlyn Rose

What Makes a Beast Dire

You are not just alive. You are more alive than alive.
You are the truth you should have died with,
who has shed all its pretenses,
and now is cloaked only in fur and fang and claw.

Every Dire beast is:

Magical – Your form carries power. Claws that rend armor. Chitin like glimmering pearls. Compound eyes that see the heart of things. Pawed feet that move so lightly they may have been a shadow. A bark that breaks silence like a blade. Each part of your body and each sense is its own Bestial Heroic (Feat Heroic), invocable when your world-scent is triggered, and bound in your body. Snout. Ears. Spittle. Poison Gland.
Congruent – This form feels right. It may be singular. A wolf. It may be some hybrid, feared or shunned for its many congruencies (YOU WILL BE HUNTED). Moth-stag. You move in this skin like you've never had any other. The world is never in doubt if you can do what a beast of your kind can do. It is never on the axis of consequence whether your cat-form will land on its feet. Consequences come on another axis.
Knowing, Doing, Speaking – You are not human, but you know humans. You see their scent, taste their ache, feel their kinship. Those near and dear to you will understand the secret language of your movements. You can summon the human tongue briefly—to say names, curse enemies, whisper “I remember.”
Skinwalking – Name a condition for a bond. A rare one. When it is true, you may walk in your old shape (with none of your instincts), or the human may take on a form akin to yours for one night. The young lover was not turned Dire by rage, but walked into the forest—and never came back.
Fertile – You can mate. With beast, Dire, or human. The offspring may be strange, gifted, dangerous.

Magical Form

Every Dire beast’s form is magical—but not in the way humans think of magic.

There are no spells.
No gestures.
No mana.
Nothing to measure.
No words.
There is only clarity in claw.

The Dire body is its own miracle.
Each fang, paw, and howl carries the emotional weight of a weapon or a gift.
You do not channel your magic—you are it.

Your form may be animal, hybrid, or mythic. It must feel emotionally true and physically present.

Examples:

A dire red fox with silver fur and eyes that reflect grief.
A panther with black feathers instead of fur and a voice like thunder over water.
A dire centipede made of iron, whose body smells of childhood and rot.

Bestial Heroics are magical truths your body enacts when your primal nature is triggered—by world-scent, strong emotion, or bond. Like Feats Heroic, but sensory, immediate. And like instincts, there is a trigger, but that trigger is inchoate, bound to when the beast feels.

Examples:

“My claws tear through walls and falsehoods.”
“My breath fogs with frost and drives the greedy back.”
“My tail becomes smoke, and I vanish from sight.”

Congruency – This Form Is Right

You move like a truth that’s finally been spoken.
You land like a question that no longer needs answering.
This is not your mask.
This is your name made flesh.

The Dire beast does not wear a body.
It is the body.

You do not wonder if you can leap that high, smell that fear, or crush that lock between your jaws.

You do not ask for permission from physics, nor plead with plausibility.
You act—and the world must deal with it.
Else there is no exhileration in being feral.

The cat-form lands on its feet not because of a rule,
but because the world already knows that it will.

Playing Congruency

You may always do what your form should be able to do.
If a creature like you should be able to sense, leap, squeeze, scent, claw, or vanish—then you do. No cost. No uncertainty.
Let your body guide your action.
Ask:

What would my beast do if it felt safe?
What would my body do if it stopped pretending to be human?
What movement feels like truth right now?

Consequences come on a different axis.
Not: “Can I do this?”
But: “What other thing can't you do? Where does your form also take you”
Emotionally. Relationally. Physically.

Your body is a story already told.

The question is whether the pack understands the ending.

This feels right. Jesse Balmer

In a Pack or Alone

You are not alone. You are bonded.

1. Name your Pack-Bonded.
These are those you protect, ache for, or return to. Anyone you’ve fed, howled with, or curled around in sleep. When they commit to action for you, write the bond. You also gain a sense of them.
If they name you back, the bond locks in—they gain a sense of you too.

2. When near a packmate:
You may invoke any Bestial Heroic freely to protect, comfort, or respond to them.
If your bestial nature might harm them, you may instead offer the Bite—a gift of transformation, not trauma.

3. Packmate Senses: any or more than these, befitting the beast and its deep empathy or cold calculation:

You feel when they hurt.
You may track them across unnatural distances.
You may call to them in dreams or scent alone. The message is not clear—but the emotion always reaches them.

This is yours to invoke, beast. This is a venue to be explored, and a possibility to insert yourself into the situation faster or slower than anyone else: Come to someones aid. Slink at the edges with your congruency.
Your bestial nature may be triggered by your packmate’s actions—if they touch you, cry out, remind you of something your beast cannot ignore:
You may be forced by the world act with instinct and choose: Fight, offer the Bite, or flee. Any of these count as following your nature fully.

Even safety can awaken the beast.

Bestial nature

When not near a packmate, or at a moment where you believe yourself alone, your instincts rise like a tide. This is your bestial nature

Core Rule:
When you think you are alone, you may ask the world for a feral omen. The world will answer:

Demanding a truth
Showing you what must be done
Letting your bestial nature surge

You must follow your bestial nature

The world may:

Ask for control
force you to offer the Bite, or flee. Any of these count as following your nature fully.
Or require you to worsen the situation in a poetic, destructive way

Healing Through Ferality

If you follow your bestial nature fully—hiding, hunting, grooming, howling, skittering, curling, laying a thousand eggs —you may, regardless of outcome, choose to:

Recover:

Clear a bond’s emotional strain
Soothe shame
Heal bodily
Restore your sense of self

Reform:

Create or reframe a Trait or Bestial Heroic, marked [Lone]

Example:
“My howl is no longer fear. It draws those who need me.”

Cost:
If your bestial nature may conflict with a non-pack bond. They can seek to calm you—but you must choose to fight, bite, or flee.
You cannot love halfway when the beast is loud.

B.R Guthrie

Knowing, Speaking, Doing, Skinwalking

How the Beast Lives Truth

You remember who you were—
but only in the scent of someone else’s grief.
You remember your mother’s last touch,
your lover’s rage,
your friend’s shame when they let you fall.

The Dire beast knows not in language, but in ache.
It knows others by how they made you feel,
or how they smelled when they touched your dying body.
It does not remember logic, reasons, or plans.
It remembers taste.
It remembers emotion as scent, gesture, wound.

Your memory is relational.
Your sense of self is embodied.
You do not reflect. You react.

Knowing
You remember what others did to you, for you, with you.
You feel their intent like warmth left in a bed.
You do not recall your motives—but you recall what was stirred in you.
Your body remembers and interprets what you did before.

You do not remember why you hated them.
You remember that you wanted to strike at their throat.
Was it with claw and fang, or something silver?
But you remember the bloodstains on their coat.
And the sound of their voice when they said your name with shame.

Speaking
Your mouth is not made for human speech anymore.
But sometimes, it finds it.

You may speak briefly—a name, a plea, a curse, a whispered memory.
These moments are rare, intimate, and heavy.

Speaking more than a phrase triggers your bestial nature at the next notice.
Your words are usually present-tense, compact, and visceral.

Packmates may understand your movements, scent, and breath as language.
This allows complex communication—but it takes time.
It is difficult in moments where the bestial nature takes hold.
In those cases, you can only speak single words through your body language.
Failing to do so may have the world escalate.

You understand a packmate’s body language deeply.
Hiding it from you is a feat.
This is not translation. It is recognition.

Your growl is not just threat.
Your whimper is not just fear.
Your yawn is a secret only they can read.

Doing
You circle the dying. Your body knows they are.
You lick the crying—and the tears dry.
You scratch the ground where betrayal once stood.

You may act without knowing why.
These are offerings from the world.

Your actions are meaningful—even when they surprise you.
Your body moves in truths your mind cannot phrase.

You may perform a ritual because you once did.
And without the means to do it "properly."
A salt-circle doesn’t need to be perfect when your centipede legs draw in it.
A sword doesn’t need to be in hand—it can be in your mouth.
Not precise, but just as deadly.

You may mount or kneel with a kind of love that doesn’t need memory to be real.

Skinwalking
Sometimes, the boundary between present and past thins.
And in the presence of certain bonds, the old shape returns.

This is not lycanthropy.
It is not a curse.
It is a shared truth—briefly made visible.

You may name a Skinwalking Condition:
A rare truth of bond or circumstance, tied to your past.

When this condition is met:

You may walk in your human form until the condition ends.
You do not retain your instincts.
You may speak freely.
You may choose to forget what your claws felt like.

Or, a bonded human may take on your form for one night:

Their senses heighten.
Their instincts stir.
Their words falter—but their body knows.

The young lover was not turned Dire in rage.
They chose to walk into the forest.
They never came back.

Skinwalking is not control.
It is invitation.
It is mirroring.
It is reverence.

Bill Mayer

The Scent of Nature

What the Beast Knows

The beast does not love nature.
It simply knows what is off.
A wound in the world smells like blood.
A joy in the city feels like moss on stone.

Every Dire beast is attuned—not to purity, but to balance.
To flow. To hunger and offering.
To places that mean something.

Some curl in gutters.
Others lair in sacred groves.
A Dire rat may nest in sewage.
A Dire serpent may call a library home.

But they all know when something breaks.

This is not about green versus steel.
It is about presence versus rupture.

Some growl at pipelines.
Others howl at abandoned lovers.
Some sleep in graveyards and call it good.

Alignment

Choose 1–3 world-scents your Dire beast responds to:

Decay — Is it invited, or denied?
Warmth — Is it shared, or hoarded?
Place — Is it marked, known, or desecrated?
Cycle — Is something being stopped from dying, or forced to end?
Memory — What is being erased?

When a scent is triggered, your body reacts before thinking to the truth.
You may also always ask, and receive a true answer.

You may:

Pace
Growl
Whine
Fuck
Salivate
Skitter
Flee
Bite

You can resist the reaction.
But that is just forcing down bile. And the world will hold your bestial nature over you like a sword: Clarity now costs you clarity, connection, or the ability to act at alllater.

Your beast knows before you do.

Lauren Marx

The Bite

Gift, Curse, Claim, Weapon

The bite is not infection.
It is a gift. Or a curse. Or a claim.
Sometimes, it’s just a threat that leaves teeth-marks.

When a Dire beast bites—or when their poison sinks into your veins, or their scratch lingers, or their glare burns through you—
something changes.

The bite is a moment of transmission.
The Dire beast offers you:

A terrible wound
A lasting madness
Or ferality—a partial transformation

This is not a power fantasy.
It is feral intimacy.
It is also a tool.

A Dire beast may:

Bite an enemy to punish, warn, or break them
Bite a packmate to protect
Bite a lover to invite
Bite a stranger to haunt

Bite Outcome

The bitten chooses what happens to them:

A terrifying Wound (physical, magical, or symbolic)
A persistent Madness (delusion, urge, sensory curse)
A temporary Feral Change

If Feral Change is chosen, the Dire beast may grant any or all of:

An Instinct

“Protect what’s mine.”
“Fuck or fight.”
“Run fast. Bite first.”

A Trait

Heightened scent.
Rough skin.
Fur where there was none.
Heat in the blood.
Territorial rage.

A Partial Form

Fangs. Claws. Paws. Slitted pupils.
A tail that betrays mood.

A Need

To return to the beast.
To belong.
To howl.
To be fucked in fur.
To lie at someone’s feet and be scratched until sobbing.

While the mark lasts, the Dire has world-like power to offer ferality when they themselves act to the bitten, if madness or feral change was chosen. The bitten shares in the forms congruency then in uncanny ways.

"You lope with me."
"we both slink across the moor."
"protect my brood"

The change lasts until:

A moon passes
The beast licks the wound
The bitten completes a symbolic act of their choice
(e.g., leaves the pack, gives birth, bites another, kills the thing they used to be)
Or—the bitten accepts it

If accepted, the change becomes permanent.
Enough acceptance leads to full Dire transformation.

Some resist it.
Some beg for it.
Some run forever with the ache.
Some never go back.

I cannot read the signature. But it bites.

Becoming Dire – How the Beast Returns

You were not done.
The wild in you knew it.
And so it clawed a path back.
Now you walk in fur, in fang, in truth.

There is no single rite.
But always, something refuses to end.
Your death was unaccepted, and your return is what fills the space.
There are as many blood-pit rites and wild returns as there are beasts in the wild
But there is only one way to coax a friend to keep living.
That is to lie beside.

🩸 The Blood-Pit Rite

Two dying bodies. One climbs out alive.

Thrown into a pit, or found side by side in the mud—
A dying human. A dying beast.
Maybe they were partners.
Or maybe a druid tried to see a venue for resurrection.
They fight. Or curl around each other. Or simply wait.

Sometimes the human wins, and takes the beast’s body.
Sometimes the beast wins, and keeps the human’s essence.
Sometimes neither wins.
But something crawls out anyway.
It is neither and both in any case.

Sometimes it is not a pit.
Sometimes it is a battlefield.
A mouth around a heart.
A jaw closed over a throat.
A feral claim in the final moment.

Common world-scents:

Dominance
Hunger
Territory
Vigilance
Memory

Form:
Dire wolf. Dire bear. Dire badger.
Anything that could have been thrown in the pit and battled for dear life.

🐾 The Wild Return

You ran—and did not come back the same.

No rite. No witness. Just instinct.
You fled into the woods. Or dove into the sea.
You bled out behind a thornbush, or beneath the roots of a hollow tree.

And in that moment of silence, something inside you said:
Not yet.
Not like this.
And it returned. Beast-shaped.

Common world-scents:

Freedom
Cycle
Self-knowing
Desire without audience

Form:
Liminal, nimble creatures—
Fox. Hare. Cat. Crow. Smoke-snake.
Always with something uncanny in the eyes.

Performed without words. Answered with instinct.
Each step is slow. Let it be played out, felt.
These are not rules. They are entanglements.

1. The Touch That Remembers

One (or more) lies beside the dying body.

Touches it. Breathes with it.
Offers skin, memory, warmth.
Says (aloud or in gesture): “I will go with you.”
Or: “I will do anything to make you stay.”

They must mean it. Ask:

Why do they mean it?
How do they show it?

If the dying loved any of those beside them—or needed them, feared to leave them, or could not rest because of them—
the beast inside stirs.

The world or GM may describe:

A twitch of claw beneath the skin
A rumble in the chest
A pull toward scent or warmth

The dying may choose to stay.
If they do, the return has begun.

2. The Joining

Bodies pressed. Breath matched.
Death tarries—afraid of something more ancient.

You may:

Kiss
Nest
Rut
Cry
Sleep nose to throat
Touch one another as people one last time

This is not only an act of passion.
It is an act of resonance.

3. The Beast Named by Love

You do not name your beast.
They do.

This step applies to all involved.

Each of you looks at the other.
Not with pity. Not with fear.
With longing. With knowing.

Each now names what they see.
Each non-dying go first, and offers one vision to the dying.
The dying names all non-dying.

“You are sleek and watching—panther.”
“You twitch like prey, but bite like hunger—stoat.”
“Your heat has always come from beneath—serpent.”
“I dreamed of you as fur and flame—fox.”

These names are not suggestions.
They are truths spoken by the bond.
The dire to die goes last.

You may not reject what they see.
You may only choose:

To become it (if multiple forms are offered, the dying chooses)
To remain—marked, scarred, craving, but still human
One (or more) may yield: “Yes. Your form I also take.”
And all may take the same form.
A mirrored surrender. A pack of one skin.

If no one chooses to become dire, the ritual fails. The nearly dead die again—after a final act of love.

If multiple choose to become:

The world may blend their visions into hybrid beasts:
Panther-wolves. Moth-stags. Dire river-otters with mirrored eyes.
Each keep their own form. A pack of different beasts with one howl.

Those who become choose a Skinwalking condition for themselves in secret:

“When they are alone, they see the others as they once were.
Or as beasts.
Sometimes they speak in dreams.”

If any choose to remain human:

They are marked:

A tail-tip they never had
Slitted eyes that see ghosts
A scent only beasts can smell
Heat in the blood that never cools

They gain:

A [Bonded] Trait
A Skinwalking condition for the Dire that they gift to them.

4. The Mutual Recognition

Each names one thing they ache for, love, or remember about the other.
Each names one thing they would give up to remain together.

These two shape the Dire beasts that follow. A good pointer is that (but any interpretation is valid):

A memory dear, a trait, a bond, or a legend may become a world-scent

“Grief shared in the orchard” becomes scent: desecration
A pain, power, or goal may become a bestial heroic

“You were tricked in the court of the fae” becomes “My claws break every mask that once fooled me”
A trait may become literal or inverted.

A limp becomes a stalking grace
A knack for gardening becomes a scent like apples
Riches may be fur like gold

Love feeds the body.
Loss gives it claws.

5. The After

You wake beside each other.
All are now pactbonded.

All Dire must surrender to their bestial nature.
marked packmate may call them back.

The Dire may:

Speak a single word
Bite the other
Run away

The marked one may:

Collapse in sobs
Howl without knowing why
Try to talk sense into that feral thing

The world is not the same.
The bond is sealed.

The pack awakens. Arkadiusz Danowski

Smut, Feral longing and furry play

This resurrection path—Ars Bestia, if you will—is for those who dream of teeth and tenderness.
For those who feel more real on four legs, with claws, with scent, with need.
For those who want to be seen, held, loved, or rutted as something not quite human—and more than human for it.

This is a smutty fantasy.
It invites play that is feral, embodied, and emotionally real.
It welcomes power, surrender, instinct, transformation. It may involve:

Switchy dynamics between beast and bonded
Feral loyalty, subby curling, or dominant hunger
Nuzzling, rutting, scent-marking, or being called good beast
Deep smut that doesn’t speak, but feels
Being mounted or mounting someone in return
Tenderness without words
It is not about degradation unless you want it to be.
Humour. Bestial nature can be funny too. A constant itch becomes a need for scritches. It is playful. You will find out how.

It is about letting go of containment.
It is about coming back as your true form and being recognized.
It is the furry costume inverted:

This path is explicitly written to give space for furries, for animal-hearted players, for those who want to embody beastliness with beauty, danger, humor, and desire. Whether you're a feral wolf dom or a curling centipede sub, there's a place for you here.

Your fur is not a costume.
Your instincts are not shameful.
Your need to be held, scratched, ridden, or followed into the woods is not a joke.
It is a kind of holiness.
And this is a place to play with it.

I am not so feral myself, so it was harder to write concretely how it smuts. Instead i wrote some prose to express it.

Imagine me this!

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