Twilight of the Wolves (19 page)

He felt it then, tactile and all around, an aberration, refracting spacetime glossing over reality, turning everything vibrant and acute, thick with violence, the air round them congealing,
flowing rippling with energy. His lips moved but made no sound, only mouthing No no no, clenching his eyelids shut.

Hreao burst through the trees, toppling the first cart and tossing away the mauled and mangled limbs. Faoi came from the south coursing through the long line of slavedrivers. Sao watched the rifles appear and his heart burst, the impact of the ironball deep into Faoi who did not stop running but came to the shooter and took his head, the alloy crunching and cracking between her teeth. Screams and growls and violence, all action slowed and Sao’s own scream filled the air, crowding out all else, the pain of the ironball deep within him.

Aya screamed and her tears drowned all action, locking her in the moment she watched the rifle fire, the plume of smoke and sulphur, and the ironball enter. Every sensation alive inside her, the ironballs piercing, the blood pouring out, the crack of bones, the fear, the taste of iron, the eyes and shadow of Death.

Struck again and a fourth time, Faoi vomited blood but lunged forward, taking another man before Hreao appeared, his fury an electric eruption coursing through the viscous atmosphere, shattering the will of the humans. They died loading their heavy rifles and Hreao ripped the man apart coating himself in the human blood and then took an ironball through the neck, his head jerked to the side, following the projectile as it left his body. His great amber eyes blanked for a moment and he fell to the dragonstone. Rising slowly, gasping, Faoi whimpering and growling and dying, she hobbled to him and pressed her head against his, their blood mingling as another shot took Hreao in the stomach and his growl shook the earth and the air but the elasticity of spacetime bent and normalised.

Sao, screaming still, his body a supernova, consumed by a dark flame, his anatomy changing, the atoms spinning in new directions, combining, forming molecules, rebuilding cells, creating new ones, stronger, faster, and he was bright as the Death of the suns, a sonicboom levelled all who stood. Shining
still, emanating, the sickle moons on his cheeks an obsidian glimmer, two blackholes, a beckoning blackness, his hair turned white and his eyes the same amber as Hreao’s, the pointed ears of the wolf sprouting from his skull. The white men stared at him from their backs as he appeared over them, one after the other, and ripped out their hearts, feeding on them.

Aya crawled to Hreao gasping, her body shaking, cold, empty, she put her quivering hands to him against the Death throes and felt his Life and the pain of the journey to Death. Within him, his eyes saw nothing but Faoi from a thousand years ago in a forest of white flowers as bright as the moon. Lunar flowers, the kiss of the moon in every petal and the immense happiness, the peace of that place. Letting go, Faoi whimpered, Do not go, Heart. Do not go without me. Faoi pressed her forehead against his, licking away the blood, calling him back, Wait for me, Heart. Even a moment without you will hurt more than this Death. Wait for me, I’m coming with you. Faoi, dying, the blood pouring from her, Aya holding her, on top of her, crying, screaming into her fur, begging her not to die, pleading with the sky, with the suns, with the humans around her, with herself, with the Goddess she did not name.

Sao knelt down beside her, bloody tears burning away from his cheeks, his mouth thick with human blood. He took Aya in his arms and pulled her face to his chest, feeling the tears steam away and he promised her that she will never hurt like this again, his voice thick and seismic, an added dimension to his human voice.

I will protect you. Always.

With every day we are born again not as men or women but as the guardians of existence, as daughters to the Mother. Mother, our Mother, watch over this one from sun to sun through moon and moons. Make this one whole and last forever between ever and never. This one is Yours. To live is to die but first we must die. We give everything to You, Mother, for we are Your daughters, and we will die forever.

Who are you?

The throat clicks full of sand and the words drop through the chattering teeth, This one is no one.

Who am I?

The One Who Lives. Mother. Death. Life. The Light.

She smiles, radiant and the eyes cower but will not look away but instead bathe in Her Light for there is nothing else in all the world and its endless histories that eclipses this Light. Her eyes spotlight and burn the flesh and Her thick lips hide the eternal Light of the Dream, Are you ready, no one?

This one belongs to You and will do all and anything for You, Mother, our Mother, the head touches the cold marble, This one is Your hands and mouth and will die forever.

Rise, no one, Her hand breaks the distance and the skin burns from Her almost touch and then the heat races through and within illuminating and eradicating all darkness and all the long silent days devoted to Her, Do you know what day it is today?

This one died today.

Her incandescent eyes brighter than the suns warm all that is within and without and Her smiling lips holding back starlight break all shackles and chains of this shell and it falls away disintegrating into the empty spaces created by her dazzling touch. The Light, the Life, The One Who Lives. She says, And what is tomorrow?

This one was born tomorrow in order to die forever.

Tomorrow we shall say farewell and you will gather the lost
and the dead. You are the shadow of Life and the Light. Without the Light there is no shadow but the shadow is part of the Light just as Death is part of Life. The humans continue to kill and die thousands at a time. The war may outlast them all for they cannot contain or sustain it. A white flame looms from the west and all may be lost to the sisters of this land. They kill each other today to be murdered by foreigners tomorrow. Remember, no one, you may look but never touch. You are My hands and mouth. You live so you may die forever. Remember Me and forget this frame you wield, this shell that contains Life and Death. Go now, no one. Go to die that all may live and reunite with the Dream.

Through the forest, all Life pours within and beats down but elevates and makes all clear as still water but the world is so vibrant and loud that the shell slips disoriented by the constant assault of Life. The breathing rushes and rages and warbles and into the grass so soft and so green the skin it touches crawling with the caress of thousands of blades. The sky above the perfect Twilight ripped ragged by dark clouds stretching as Raven fingers and the rain rushes from a yawning chasm of spacetime bellowing from impossibly deep and always beyond fingertip reach. So close as if the mouth could taste it and the eyes could swim within it and make all existence swirl away in its dark otherworld hues.

The Grey expands and the stars project through the hazed canopy of trees and the rained artillery. Millions of hearts beating in time with the songs of the trees and the whispers of forgotten stars from millennia ago caught in the rings of the seven sister moons.

Mother, oh Mother, this gift will never be forgotten, sweet Mother, dear Mother. To rest here beneath everything, the Dream becomes tangible as it soars through the sky and beyond this planet into the infinity of space where You have slept for
thousands and thousands of cycles of Life amongst the echoes of all past and future existences. Mother, oh Mother, we are Your hands and mouth and we will die forever. For You, Mother. Always for You.

Within the Grey we are boundless and tied together, the perfect unity of plurality, all our deadlives living and dying for the singular purpose. Sisters, my sisters, daughters of Mother, we are mouths and hands counting in the millions all grafted together, constellations of Her perfect vision. The Dream never ending, existing beyond never and ever.

The black ground of mud and sludge made of ash and blood and this roaring storm and the wind slashes the water across the men waiting to die as they rush forth into the jaws of their enemies, their sisters. They are all men barely more than boys beating with the same meat and the same blood and the same will with only one thought: to live.

There is only the sound of rain slapping the wet ground and then there is nothing but the blasts of rifles and the screams. The screams that freeze this day washed in midnight and blood where all of them turn to mud and then to dust. The clouds of smoke erupting from the rifles haze and condense in the rain forming thick clouds that surround and sting. We daughters exist at the periphery of battle in and out of the Grey as shadow flickering as dark candles in an unreachable wind that neither cools nor comforts but simply goes on.

Their faces disappear in the downpour and they don’t exist in the Grey but their lives glimmer and the battle turns into the collision of thousands of shooting stars blinking in and out of existence and the beauty of the image distends and disconnects from the pain consuming with the burning flames of these beating stars screaming out loud to the center of the world where all beat as one and they disappear in breaths of galactic dust to become the mud where future Death will join and all the land
that was once a perpetual forest now becomes a grave where the echoes push out Life even as it calls for it forever into the future out of the past and in the Grey all exists now and the world changes but humans never do. They will always die too soon and never in the way they choose. Locked in this neverness of confused Life, the humans last too long even as they die together perennially.

The fractured skull of iron with the face of a demon masks the dying expression of a child. Cracked red lips muttering in silent gasps and his eyes look across the immense cavern of spacetime and see nothing and no one and he feels no rain and no skin. The holes through his chest frothing his life away and becoming one with the world. Brown bloodshot eyes rattle unblinking and tracking no movement, the song we sing heard only by those crossing the threshold of Death where spacetime and Life mate and separate casting forth all the newdead in fitful throes.

The ironhelm falls away sinking into the mud and the hands hold his head and his arms clutch, pulling his face close, his eyes focused, listening, Where do circles end? the shattered words hewn from his own fatality. Again and again, he says it, screams it, until his heart no longer beats and his blood no longer lives but he rests hand in hand at the shore with Mother, oh Mother, eternal child with ravenhair and stardust eyes of gaseous twilight consuming with Your impossible Light and Your perfect song. To remain here forever with Your Twilight eyes and Your forever Light. Mother, dear sweet Mother, to behold the eternal child, this perfected visage for all of expanded and contracted spacetime. This one is Your mouth and hands made to die forever. With one breath the boy leaves his body and his Life is written in the mud and within where he will exist forever or until the suns yawn out.

The pain of his Life courses within dismantling all that comprises this shell and the echoes of him crawl beneath the skin
like countless legs of memory’s insects. The song we sing together houses us within the river of being and naught untouched by the physicality of this plane but observing all of it from its wreckage and carnage to its ecstasies and brilliant sublimity.

The boy is dead and one with everything. The boy is dead and countless more are dying, their blood drying within their veins turning to dust and washing away in the rain or blown away as dust in the wind.

Where do circles end? The words return again and again, the leaves springing to Life and blooming green to their fiery autumnal reds until they brown and fall and wither only to be swallowed by the roots to become leaves of green and leaves of red and fall as leaves of brown in an endless loop repeated over and over and over from now into forever.

The One Who Lives is always another from before time first cast a shadow to be measured and on to the future past humanity’s conclusion. Mother, our Mother, dear sweet Mother, only You will live forever in a thousand different skins that are always the same heart born from the Womb of the World carrying all the memories of spacetime from past to future and their collision that becomes now. Where do circles begin?

Who is it? Who is it? I hear you but I cannot see you. I can feel you. The air’s different, the texture thick and tacky, sticking to me. My chest full of bricks, who is it?

Speak. I hear you and feel you, can almost taste you. Cold and wet and dark, sour.

It’s you, aye? It’s come to this.

Where am I?

Where are my men? Has it come to this? Locked in my body, sightless with the Crows. Come, come, take me away. I’ve heard your song before. Many times. But I have never seen the Goddess child, never felt the cold hands of Death upon my face, but now
the time has come, aye? Aye. Death be not proud, She comes for us all.

She comes for us all, but what happens to me? To live. To live forever and so I left nothing to die for.

Nothing and no one. Everyone I once knew has been taken and drowned under the tides of war and I have not seen home since seven Twilights ago.

All is dead or dying. I am nothing but another man dying to meet Her, aye.

Hold me, please. Don’t let me go. You’re a man, no, a boy. A child. Are all you Crows children? Please, don’t let me go. I’m drowning, I think, on my own blood. I can’t feel anything, not even your hands on my face. Please, I don’t want to die.

Within fills and without withers. Color rots and slips from the world that humans destroy day after day and season after season. The forest murdered more and more by their caustic and callous hands. The many lives inside swirl and slosh around in the honeycombs within where all the memories recorded wait to be copied down a day or a year or a century from now. All the pain, the suffering of civilisation, the Death of a generation of a species. The pull calls and tugs at the center and the Grey expands to Life’s antithesis. All is black and blood and Death and hate. The Dream distorted and perverted by the million hands of humanity.

Where do circles end?

Nothing changes but the faces that disintegrate and drift away in the final breath of the song when they see Mother, dear Mother, and Her song carries them home.

War all of the time.

His skin melts to the bone and fuses with the armor he wears though the rifleshots bore through as if the steel were paper. His
eyelids gone and he stares into the bright bluesun sky seeing the moment he became a man through the Deathfog surrounding him and the memory cascades and his lipless face bares rotten teeth.

She came to him in the grove where wild roses sometimes grew and her hair was black as her skin and her eyes were velvet and she spoke in rhymes begging him to follow her through the maze where he lost himself inside of her until her father appeared and chased him through the bushes into the thicket but he escaped into the forest and returned home by way of the mountain stream.

His boneclaw hand stretches weakly into the space where his memories project in the corner of the sky beginning to blush with the redsun. His memory dissolves with his feet in the Ocean and Mother holding him, Her song pure and carrying him away.

The dirigibles fight overhead with men swinging back and forth between them while some fall the great distance to the world where their bodies liquefy against the ground. Fire rains and the forest screams ablaze with millennia of memories burning away while the scent of burning hair and flesh reeks across the battlefield.

A roar, the hurricane of beating wings sonicbooms through the air and the dirigibles erupt in dualpulses. The dragon swoops through the air neither silent nor fearful but with the rage and wisdom of eternity. The very air quakes and the suns eclipse behind his wings beating against the world and everything becomes stagnant and frozen but the dragon who rips through spacetime and covers the distances between points without travelling them. The gods of the sky and the sun, older than wolves, the first children. Volcano heart, the fire inside that burns the very sky away.

Havoc on the battlefield, the dragon swallowing and killing and maiming soldiers by the hundreds, changing the shape of the battle and burning humanity to scorched meat and ash. Nothing
is left behind from the blaze. Not bone or skin or even echoes.

Dragons eradicate existence.

Circles end with dragons.

It lands and roars fracturing the sky and blotting the suns crippling the humans who hear.

In the Grey the dragon sees us and we hide in this reality of suffering less the dragon rip through the boundaries and enter the Grey to find Mother, sweet Mother. The One Who Lives, and the hands squeeze with the dragon holding all the rage from within pouring out.

The shell is weak and there is no escape from dragons. This one shall not fear Death but carry these incinerated corpses and the handfuls of ashes to Mother, dear Mother.

The water is cool and the skin accepts the moisture while all the deadskin scrubs away and leaves the shell clean and pure. With every day we are born again not as men or women but as the guardians of existence, as daughters to the Mother. Mother, our Mother, watch over this one from sun to sun through moon and moons. Make this one whole and last forever between ever and never. This one is Yours. To live is to die but first we must die. We give everything to You, Mother, for we are Your daughters, and we will die forever. In the blackness behind the eyes the dragons grow and punch through the sky and through eternity. Large and furious and made only for Death, the terrifying gods of the skies born from the suns’ communion. Forever they last, they reign, consume, destroy, but rebuild. The stories are of their capacity for more. Their eternal minds create and expand all human endeavors and so the dragons are their sisters and mothers and gods and inventors. Within the Grey dragons are not light or shadow but whole. Dragons. Scales and fire and stone and fiery blood and wind and a body that never ends. A circle of power that breaks the cycles of humanity. Dear Mother, our Mother, protect us forever. Protect us in this neverness of
shadow and stars. This one will die forever for you, Mother, sweet Mother.