Twilight of the Wolves (24 page)

Take me far away, I say or think or breathe and her words are in me but none of them stick inside but they echo through and fill all that is left of me. She is liquid. She is the ocean and I fall within her and lose the mes that are left. All the shattered fragments falling away into her to be one with her essence and to flow through her veins in her blood where I will reach her lungs and her lips.

My skin crawls electric and I gasp and tears fall from my deserteyes and her arms cling to my oncehollow chest now full of her. Her. She creates me in her dizzy fever dreams and I become one with her memories and her sleep and all that is human within her infects me and teaches my body what it is to live and how to breathe, how my heart is to beat.

Let me stay here forever alone together with her brilliant dualsun pulsing into and through and creating me for the first time alive and whole and I will rise a man but, please, let me stay here to lie forever for all these thousands of Deaths have been worth it if only to lead me here to her where I will live for the first time in this Light and her Life.

Curled around me, I am the fetal child and she is the mother.

He watches me and strokes her cheek damp with fevered sweat and he scowls at me, Dead thing, she has given you Life. Now go and leave us.

The fear surrounds but doesn’t penetrate for nothing reaches me here within her constructed womb.

The vibrations of her chest course through and send tingles up and down my spine and to the edge of every part of me and
I know her words before they form in her mouth, Don’t hurt him, Sao. He died. A thousand times. He was stolen from the world by the Goddess before he ever had a chance to live. I hear him all here. It all beats within his hollow body starved of Life and Light. All his world was taken by the wars and the humans and to save him was to kill him. Touched by a Goddess, he lost all that made him human. He loves, though. Like you he yet loves humans though no man has seen all that I see within him—her tears run down my back warm and then searing and then healing as her voice wrecks and withers—He has spent his halfdead existence herding the poor humans. All these humans, Sao. They die for no one and for nothing. They’re scared and alone and they scream and cry within him. They’re just like the forest but cacophonous instead of a harmonious. They don’t know how to be one but they will be at the Ocean where the eternal child dreams all of existence. I can see it all, feel it all, hear it all. The Mother cries for them and succours them. She weeps for us and her tears are all the stars and all the gods. Hreao and Faoi and all the others burnt from their trees. The humans cry and they all die. They’re dying, Sao. They’re dying and they’re afraid of one another. Is this what humanity is?

All my life I’ve searched for humanity, his dualvoice soft and echoing sonorously, but found it nowhere.

Then why do you want to be them, she presses her face into my back to hide the tears from him but I feel the words she doesn’t say or can’t say and I feel his hand, the soft and warm sensation of what shared love means, wiping the pain away as her breath steadies.

I’m sorry, Aya.

Sunbursts in my eyes and I’m filled by her name even as all that’s within her wrecks against the cliffs on a stark shoreline.

I am sorry. For everything.

Her tears are rain and there is no sun here.

She saved me and gave me Life and I no longer feel the pull of Death or Mother as if She was amputated from me leaving a hollow deep within me and a scar a lifetime thick but every day in the radiance of her Light I am brought new and glorious beginnings. The wolfgirl, the spring god, Aya.

Aya.

Ai-ya.

Within she grows and her name is the seed for all the world.

Winter melts away and my hair grows for the first time and I walk in the light of the suns no longer drifting through the shadows and I avoid the Grey though it exists still at the periphery haunting or stalking me but I fear nothing with her near me and I follow her through the seasons even still. The world blooms because of her and all the past eradicates from my memory as the lives inside me fade and drift away to wander the world as echoes until another will house them and record their histories.

This is how ghosts are born.

Where do circles end? Where do they begin?

With her. Only she can make them and only she can take them away, shatter them and redraw them.

Within the Grey and I know this is the last time as all fades away and turns desolate when I reach for it and I am rejected from all that will come after this. I have been made whole but have lost myself. Weeks and months within searching through the thickening fog of all this is and is not and finding only trace reminiscences and halfhearted echoes, the trail of Light flashes like lightning but in impossible blues and indigos and violets coruscating into the depths of a bottomless void where Grey turns black and I fall within plunging further and further and my heart of glass chips apart and I hold my breath to keep it together and my skin slivers away and my eyes dry to deserted worlds of ash
and desecrated forests and desiccated mountains. Here in the dark the twilight pulses and glows and all the Grey that turned black now alight with twin burning suns blasting out the shadows and revealing me to a city beneath everything, across a barrier, through a crack in the planes: Yiyuyan.

Viscous and murky, the air full of blight and Death and fear and pain. The blood of wolves pours like waterfalls into rivers and I hear them howling and growling and dying and always dying and the world is a forest and the forest is the world but the wolves do not come here but I smell them and their pain and the reasons they left and will never come back.

All their history swirls before me and the hearts of a thousand dualmen breathing and beating as one walk these desolate streets moaning with moonlight and a thousand years cascades and washes against the surface of this hidden civilisation caught between worlds and planes and even spacetimes beyond the Grey’s comprehension.

I see it all from the grand edifices to the rise of the dualgods, the men and women who live as one and unite as wolves do for eternity. The humans who learnt from the wolves in order to become them but were burnt apart and lost to spacetime by their own greed and desires. The elevation to godhood and the desecration of the old gods and Mother and Death.

Together we will live Forever branded upon every heart and mind and deep into the alloy essence that informs all else and their language is one of forging. They built the new gods within themselves and adorned them with twilight and moonlight.

The lunar flowers saved from humanity yet stolen from the wolves all the same bloom here in this multiplanar city of collected and conflicting Light and Life but free of Death.

Death shall have no Dominion here forged into the anatomy of their hearts and scarred upon their flesh in intricate designs to ward off the gods of order and Light and Life in order to bring forth their chaos of infinites and neverending lives.

They do not mate but build new Yi and they are constructed one syllable at a time in a language both incomprehensible and fundamental. A disease that converts and contaminates the flesh of the living and dead to push them onwards away from Death’s kingdom and dominion to a Life of eternal moments and shared existence bound by this clanging language ringing through the hollow all around.

But there is a pain here. Deep and frightening. A moaning cry of mourning as the chains that lock them into Life rust and the lunar petals begin to wilt. They wilt and they cry and all the Yi kneel around them and wail their metallic songs into the meniscus of their constructed sky containing their contaminated civilisation. The song blusters through and a thousand sets of eyes find me in the eradicated shadows and the wavering Grey and the song of the petals and their percussive words strike and assault all that is me and seep through the cracks and pores of my skin to reassemble me and they listen to me, each note hearing the notes of my body and the pulse of my heartbeat and the words hear and see my thoughts to wrap round and take hold and understand and it is inside of me changing and everything wilts and I expand beyond my shallow skin which slides away and falls away and their metal hands stretch towards me but I feel them all within me already and their skin crawls with ink that swirls beneath and over their exteriors and their voices rise as one in twinlife polyphonic susurrations bent and echoing through their metal lungs.

The wilting and my heart pours through my veins and drains into them and it hears me and takes me more and more and further and further but I open my eyes and open my eyes and open my eyes and scream my own words in the language deepest within me in syllables and consonants and vowels if only to fight and show that I can and I dive back through the collapsing Grey and away from the twilight nightmare chasing me through the viscosity of eternity and the Grey is a shipwreck
in a raging storm on the Ocean but I don’t look to the shore but to the sky and swim through the apex where the constellations die away by the hundreds and then more and then I see her, Aya, my Aya, the dualsun blaze and he stretches his hands towards me through the Grey with his wolfheart shattering limits and boundaries and the Grey expels me and I am cold but in his burning arms and Aya, Aya, oh Aya, touches a hand to my back which soothes away the fear and trembling and I collapse again to watch the night fall into day and all the twilight of these sister suns washes through me and waters the garden of my withered heart.

The Twilight Days, my birthday, and they rise together to sit and breathe in silence in their new-god nakedness. His face placid but sad as if he prays for sunlight and receives only rain. His is the face of a man who dreams of the end but always wakes. Again. Alone. There is a sadness as deep as his power or maybe deeper and older. The sorrow of a man who has lost all that was his Life. His pointed wolf ears droop and his sickle moons’ obsidian incandescence, two blackstars ripping the suns from the sky but washed in twilight. He hears my heartbeat and sees my every thought but I fear him and his dark eminence. A reluctant god trudging after dreams and the promise of better days: the past. He longs for the humanity he lost so many years ago and his heart no longer beats but his blood still lives if only for her, Aya.

She is the fulcrum of this universe we have found ourselves in. Without her there is no us. She is the pillar of our lives and we chase after her to make us human again.

Shifting uncomfortably, she watches him so still and far away and it hurts her to see him so sad. Every day her heart breaks for him but he cannot see it. Selfabsorbed yet selfless, he gives all to her but cannot even see the one thing she wants. The one thing she dreams of and prays for every night.

The suns circle the horizon and all the world is a forest is the
world is Twilight.

The wolves howl and she smiles but it cracks and he takes her hand in his and she opens her eyes and turns to his stillness. She squeezes and I feel it within me: elation.

Night never descends but they lie to rest and he kisses her forehead and enters the trees to run with the wolves or speak to the moon or escape from his cursed godhood.

She speaks knowing I’m already here and have been and will always be, All I want is for him to smile and mean it. Only once, to be happy.

I move into the firelight and sit across from her.

You still dress like a dead thing but you’re alive now and soon it’ll be warm again. Summer. Will you still wear that dark heavy robe?

I drop the hood covering me.

Your hair’s growing, she smiles and lies back to the myriad stars and holds the stone to her face, Do you remember when you said you’d help me? She rolls onto her side and her eyes shift between me and the stone.

I will do anything for you.

Sitting up and then crawling to me, she puts her arms around me and my body melts into her skin to be carried away and she breathes into my ear, Thank you.

I am the moon and the voice of a thousand thousand wolves running through the twilit sky with only trees to guide me. The wind on my fur, the grass on my paws, and all our voices united, no longer in mourning, but calling for the night, for the time of eternal twilight where the seven moons and the two suns reign and all the world is a forest and the forest is all the world. The scent of the moon and we race after the lunar bloom and revel in their white petals. Nothing will ever feel like this and our hearts swell and burst in ecstasy and the wolves multiply and we all stitch together to the great black wolf of eternity whose blood beats through all of us and whose voice speaks for all of us. The Wolf who swallowed the Moon and begot our people. The Wolf who conquers the night and the Light. And He rolls through the petals and drinks in their scent, expands beyond his skin and fur to connect beyond only wolfhood and becomes all things, from woman to tree and even to the rivers and oceans. But then the field is on fire and we scream and growl within the great Wolf who embodies us all and the doublemen with redskin and metal voices clang and attack and they take Him but He does not scream, only stares at me with those sad wolfeyes and I wake gasping, the tears streaming as Alexi opens the door of the dormitory, the light following him in.

He tells us to wake in accented Limpa though it’s his mother’s tongue, stolen from him by these yellowhaired barbarians and their guttural bellows. His smile wide and dirty, Today is the day, he says, rubbing his dark hands through his redhair. He peers back to the closed door and claps once, dances a few kicks, Today is the day!

We rise and the stench of sweat and old sex is thick in the air but the decrepit odors locked within me halt my breath. Something or everything rots within me after nearly thirty years of waking and living and sleeping. All that is within begins to decay and I’ve not long left to live. Every bone aches, from my knuckles to my toes, the knees and hips especially, the bones
chipped and cracked and wearing away more with each passing day. The nights get harder to sleep through and my chest is full of phlegm and withered blood vessels making every breath shallow. My sagging breasts and broken heart, signs and metaphors.

I roll from my low bed, Genevieve’s thick lips in a puckered smile pungent with the foul scent of youthful human dreams and grotesque on her breath when she laughs and calls me Auntie. Still a child but she believes she’ll live forever, as we all do, at one time and then several more. Tonight is the beginning of something great. Or so the silent whispers would have us believe but I’ve grown too old for belief in the silent words that burrow deepest inside.

Genevieve. An Invader’s name, but she’s slaveborn, her father Vulpen and mother Garasun, giving her the features of both but the memory of neither. She screamed when she was born and then her father screamed as he watched the blood drain from his lover. The echoes fill this house, all the dead screaming over lovers, mothers, children, and sisters. When her father died, she became just another orphan to this city without memories.

We rise and begin the day though the suns have yet to dawn but today is different. A jolt of energy through the air and the young men and women around me smiling, squeezing hands, a song building inside of them.

Alexi touches my hand and shoulder smiling with broken teeth, all ten years of his life bursting through his blue eyes, The revolution begins tonight, Mother Wolf.

The revolution begins tonight and thousands more will die. Another generation lost to violence and blood and mud. No one left remembers the old days of fire and I wasn’t a part of them but when I emerged the halfmetal men with white skin and bluesun eyes ruled everything, burning down the forest to make their cruel monuments to a sphere covered with faces.

Twenty years and all is forgot. Almost 20,000 days since the
day I lost everything that mattered. Since I became human. Since I became a slave.

But tonight the revolution begins yet it is only sadness that creases my face. I am old and all the wolves have left me.

All the wolves died and the nights and days crash and echo cruelly in the howling absence.

Twenty years of bondage and tonight they rise and I will watch, a crippled and lame and cataracted old wolf.

I will not last long.

They talked and she watched but listened to her heart beating in double, one for humanity and one for the wolf inside. The man, her shining midnight star, and the eunuch, her shadow. The journey to Yi—the nameless eunuch spoke sparingly as if it hurt him, his face contorting and his voice raw—will be treacherous.

You can take us there. You know the way. I will rip down spacetime if it will take us there.

You may have to, Darkstar.

The eunuch never spoke his name and trembled beneath his glare. Sao was not tall but he towered over the shadow who cowered and crept, never standing straight or walking unbent. The wraith and the demon, the wolfgirl’s only family.

Her double heartbeat connected to the veins and arteries of the forest which are the veins of the entire world. Her shadow stretched directly to the heart of the world. She felt every palpitation as if the very center of her was connected by the strings of an immense harp binding every tree to the world to the wolves to her and even to Sao though Sao, as far as the girl knew or could tell, was unaware of the true power within him: the same power that courses through all existence and energises the planet. He carried the weight of the world within him because he didn’t understand that he was everything and it was all him, if only he opened his heart to the nature of the wolf. Speaking with their wolftongues and beating with their wolfhearts but he came late to this wolflife and so it was unnatural to him and he fought
endlessly against his godhood and tried to remain human. The humans he hated and loved in equal measure. The humans he spent his entire life trying to be a member only to be rejected and so he ran from them even as he sought them.

His heart had only been broken and shattered but never put together. His shadow and darkness so thick and opaque they coruscated with and without him.

When the wolfgirl held him in her arms she smelt the scent of an ancient memory and heard an echo deep in his heart when she kept her ear pressed tight. A name in a language she didn’t know. Laska. A name from before her birth but deep in the forest and she traced the name and the song of the trees down the many veins away from the heart and center of the world to a small enclosed village stained by the blood of gods. Wolfeaters, murderers, and her face: dark and red and so much like the wolfgirl but so incomparably different that she did not blame her shining wolfdemon for his youthful love and the way he relived all those ancient tender touches when the night fell upon him.

The Yi will bring only pain, the shadow said and Sao snorted, raging within, but he contained it, his neck muscles pulsing violently, grinding his teeth and telling the shadow that the Yi are their only hope, that the Yi hold the secret to solving all of this, to turning him back, to bringing the future, possibly revitalising the forest, saving the world and the shadow only shook his head staring at the ground muttering his noes and begging Sao not to go, not to take the wolfgirl.

The wolfgirl asked the shadow if he would help her and reminded him of a promise and the shadow fell to his knees, face in his hands, quivering like an autumn leaf, muttering, Please don’t go there, over and over. This one begs you not to go to them.

The house is alive with us, the servants, the nameless and faceless, the shadows forced to build, to clean, to cook, to die, but never to live. Most are young, born to this life, exchanging
knowing nods and meaningful hand squeezes, calling one another Sister, the old way, from before they were born, calling me and the few other survivors from before the Invasion Auntie.

Limpa, the language of insurrection, even amongst the Garasun and Drache here in Luca, the language spoken when the Invaders aren’t in earshot or when the youth are feeling exceptionally petulant. They don’t remember and I wasn’t there but I’ve seen the mutilated bodies of the children who died in the Generational War that tore through the three peoples of this land. Vulpe was once a symbol of freedom, a loose federation of states and peoples all united under the same banner and a single council governed by women. I’ve heard the stories just as these children have, all the aunties feeding it to them in the dark dormitories, telling them of freedom, of the choices available, of the things to be seen. No one mentions the destruction wrought upon the world by these same wondrous times of the past. No one talks of wolves and trees. No one talks of the boys and young men sent to burn alive on the battlefields spread everywhere.

I wasn’t there but I’ve seen them dying. The boys are dying, a sentence, an echo that lunged within me and will never leave me.

I once had a shadow who showed me a Goddess and the Deaths of thousands. Children with smoldering faces and melted limbs or missing limbs. I saw a shore and an ocean and the child Goddess dreaming everything. A cycle, endless and in constant repetition.

The spacious halls, purple Soarean rugs and arched ceilings lit by ornate chandeliers, covered in tapestries and opulent finery: statues and paintings of their sphere and their kings and nobles and so on, ostentatious, all given to dramatic flourishes and dark colors and religiosity. The sphere. Large and gold with a thousand faces covering its surface.

Seeing them conjures him and the heavy metal hand he forced onto my shoulder, instructing me:

Now, my dear, the sphere of faces represent all the dead who
watch over us from beyond the Gates of Life and who we will become after we die. There are only so many of us that exist. A fixed number of lives for this world and we are in a constant and continual cycle of living and dying, of being and nonexistence. Each face is a soul and a soul is in each of us, here—his human hand pressing against my chest—It is the soul that animates us. Do you understand?

I nodded and he laughed, Some day you will. We are all of us in there—he pointed to the sphere of faces—Every life that has ever lived and will ever live exists there. All pasts and futures are written there and our actions in this life determine our next life. Your continent is a sad and sorry one populated by the degraded, but your next life may be your salvation. You may be Rocan or even my bride. Or maybe a goddess.

His laughter, a thousand needles in my spine.

At first they fought the Deathwalkers, our shadows, the Crows, who they considered a stupid primitivism. His deep voice, and his stench covering me. Naked in the corner of his bed, cowering but not crying, his every word was a knife.

Your land is an ancient and confused one. The people here have no sense of value or pride or honor. Still basking in the superstitions and myths, binding your own hands and will by the false gods and ancient lies that cover this land as your forest swallows the continent. Your land is soft and beautiful and it mystifies you causing you to believe some force beyond you is at work, this child goddess or the wolves. The trees that you worship, it would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. Beasts and plants and dreams. This land is a dream, a miracle, but it demands to be used. To be formed. There is only wildness here, wild thoughts and wild hearts. Roca is a land of fire and rock and iron and smoke. Over centuries, we created the world from nothing. The suns burn life away and the winter freezes it away and the rocks choke it away, but we bled it into existence. All is in our hands. All things are possible. As we created life from the dead and
inert islands of Roca, so too did we create the sphere and the cycle after shedding the blood of the old gods. Those gods never existed and neither do yours. The wolves and deer are not gods but beasts who learnt to talk.

He talked on and the images and lives given to me by the eunuch gave me hope. One cannot fight a war against Death no matter the effort. Death will always win, singing everyone to their end, to the ocean and the shore. And I disappeared within myself to those trees I was born to.

The insects flying, the fecundity of grass and roots and leaves swirling like a vortex within me, in the hollow recesses left by all that I lost.

The Goddess is everywhere and forever. She’s not a matter of belief or trust, just the inevitability of our mortality.

Hello, Auntie, Dacia’s voice thick with smoke from years ago, from the Invasion. Old enough to remember, her Limpa lacks the awkward constructions of those born into slavery, those who learn in secret and hide in plain sight.

Morning, Dacia. What today?

She sighs and wipes her hands on her dress, Bastards want elk.

Give them deer. They couldn’t tell fish from pig.

We don’t have any deer.

Give them cat.

Dacia laughs, a thick smoky bellow. When she can speak she tells Alexandra to catch one of the house cats and I dice the carrots and potatoes to fry in the catfat.

The war ended but not in peace. Two generations of men lost and all the land scarred from the constant fighting and all the people starving, raising arms in revolution against their own rulers, the humans here were weak and dying, already dead, when the Invaders came, the halfmetal monsters, these white barbarians.

To listen to them at the square or when they speak to us or
over the noisemachines they brought with them, one would think they saved us. Maybe they did. Maybe without them the humans of this land would’ve continued to die and die and die and burn. They came by the thousand and marched right into Vulpe and Glass and Drache and ordered surrender. In a matter of weeks the war was over and the land fell under their rule. The Federation, the Kingdom, and the Dragonlords all fell beneath their steel heel. They saved us from ourselves. They call us savages and animals, forestdwelling creatures and so they have bent their nature that way, debasing us while they civilise us. To be a wolf again, I would trade all the long years I lived since that day. That day when your eyes closed and I felt it all, but the tears come again already, so easy, even to think, to remember is to die again the way I’ve died every day since that one. Thousands and thousands and thousands and nothing will put me back together.