One bite and the curse is yours.
You are born over the threshold or you are not. A bite forces it, badly, and often fails.
Born versus bitten
Reproduction · Wound and marrowCopperplate · LCAN · Plate XII · Born and bitten
Horizontal spread is slow and irreversible. Each success adds a carrier. Germline-adjacent stem-cell hits can, rarely, make a bite heritable in descendants.
Inheritance is polygenic and quantitative. You are born over the threshold or you are not. Bite transmission is not a clean viral gift. It is an attempt to force LERV expression and associated regulatory cargo through a wound into a host whose germline does not already carry the cassette at threshold. Success is partial, dangerous, and produces a high rate of the failed-shift types in Part Six.
The bitten are not equivalent to the born. Their methylation landscape, density, and mitochondrial preparation were not built across a childhood of sub-threshold lunar pulses. Folklore flattened a distinction the biology refuses to flatten. Contagion exists. It is not the main reproductive strategy. Eight hundred thousand years of germline integration is.
Ch. 4
Werewolves in Theory