"Jurassic Bonds: The Spirit Animal Pack"

The first breath in animal form is always a jolt. You never get used to it, not really. One moment, lungs like bellows, heart thundering in my chest, five clumsy human fingers reaching for the unseen currents; the next, my body blooms out into a memory from prehistory. Bones elongate, jaws extend, claws rasp against the ground—the world reorients as the new nerves flare to life.

This time, the pain gut-punched me before the wonder could set in.

I stumbled, tail dragging an awkward scar in the riverbank mud. My arms—massive, thick, coiling with sinew—ended in hooked claws like the scythes of ancient reapers. My jaws swept side to side, testing the air, catching the scent of distant thunder and closer, human concern.

But mostly, I tasted my own blood.

“Aidan!” Mia’s voice, high and piercing, cut through my haze. I tried to answer, but all that emerged was a low, shuddering groan. Every movement twisted hot glass through my left leg. I curled toward the river, breath coming hard, and could see the wound now—a fresh gouge in my thigh where the Allosaurus hewn from memory and fear had slashed before retreating. Instinct demanded I thrash. My friends demanded otherwise.

Finn appeared first, fur bristling, tail twitching, snout wrinkled. As a wolf, he was lean and eager, his eyes gold and lit with worry. He approached slowly, ears angled back, paws silent on mud. He pressed his nose gently to my ankle—my ankle, now the size of a small car—and whined.

“It’s deep,” Sasha called, her feathers fluffed as she glided down. She was a harpy eagle today, all grey bars and piercing black eyes. “Can you hear us, Aidan?”

I could. Their closeness anchored me in reality. For a second, the pain ebbed, washed away by that intangible thread that tied us all together.

Finn wasted no time. He snatched up the med-kit with his teeth—adapted to be wolf-accessible, since we’d been in enough scrapes for that—and flipped it open with a practiced paw. Sasha hovered near my face, her talons light on my neck. “Don’t move, okay? Let us clean it.”

I rumbled. The vibrations in my chest vibrated the earth. Sasha, undeterred, set to work—her fierce beak surprisingly gentle as she plucked away mud and debris. Finn pressed a gauze pad to the wound, careful even though he knew my hide was thicker than most.

It was agony. It was embarrassing: the largest, the “apex,” the one who’d pulled this form from the trailer’s storm-lit screen, now dependent on them.

But when I closed my eyes against the pain—just for a heartbeat—I felt something else: the weight of their faith holding me steady, the warmth of Finn’s body pressed protectively to my side, Sasha’s feathers stroking my muzzle as she murmured comfort.

“We’ve got you,” Finn said, voice almost lost in his chest. “We always do.”

For all his ancient muscle, for all the crushing jaws and sail of spines that crowned me king of Jurassic memory, I realized then how it was my friends who kept me unbroken. In the end, the spirit animal is more than ferocity. It’s the tribe, the pack.

I drew a deep, shaky breath. The world narrowed to their hands, their paws, their wings—my fear and pride abandoned beside the old river.

We would make it through. Together.

This story was generated by user kade with assistance by one of OpenAI’s large-scale language-generation model; prompts used to help generate the story are shown below.

Images were generated with OpenAI's AI system, DALL·E 2, or uploaded by the user.

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