Twilight of the Wolves (26 page)

The midnight star breathing twilight was full of crashing waves and shipwrecks against the broken lighthouse of his human heart, but the wolf within him howled, begging to be freed.

He hurt so much and so deeply but he loved the wolfgirl and
she loved him, intimately, dreaming of the day when he would touch her, not as a daughter or sister, but as a lover. She believed that if he opened himself to the wolf inside him he would take her, finally, and the wolves would come to them and she would leave her humanity behind.

She took the lunarstone in her hand and clutched it, willing the life within it to heal her wolfdemon, her melancholic god.

The lunarstone was the key. It would lead them to the lunar flowers, which would lead them to the future of the wolf. If she could take them or even one and begin a new garden, a place for the lunar flowers to grow, she could bring the wolves together and make them one wolf, whole and complete. The Wolf who swallowed the Moon, the great black wolf of eternity, infinite, father of all. She would bring Him back and the forest would live. No longer would the wolves cry, their howls breaking her heart. No longer would the forest wail, but instead sing in perfection, the way she remembered from her earliest days whilst riding on the back of a god through the heart of the world, feeling its pulse fill and complete her.

The wolfgirl had only one desire in her heart: to heal him and make him whole. If she had to break the bounds of spacetime to do that, she would. If she had to bring all the wolves together again just to make his smile last, she’d do that, too. If she needed to become a wolf or eat the flesh of a thousand humans to make it all true, she would.

Even if she had to give up the best parts of her, the wolf parts, and be human again, she would. Without blinking.

She held onto his hand and forced the blood to redirect and flow with her life and she held onto all the memories she kept of him, and she pulled the bearskin around her, the clothes he made for her, and she still held the elkskin she had had since before memories existed within her. Gifts from him and she used them to cure the ailing, the wailing, the heartache.

Stopping, she pulled him towards her and threw her arms
around him and whispered, It’s not your fault. Slowly, his arms came around her and she felt the unsteadiness within and she said it again, It’s not your fault, her face buried on his chest, the tears rolling but not out of sadness. Out of everything, her very essence pouring out of her, her nebulous center rushing from her eyes. It’s not your fault, and his arms were around her waist and he was on his knees, his face pressed against her bare stomach, the bloody demon tears steaming from his face and she held onto his head, the softness of his wolf ears caressing her cheeks. His hair soft and white as snow but different than the fur. A furnace, he burnt alive, the air viscous and filling her lungs, connecting and binding them, not only to one another, but to the forest which was all the world.

They remained so until the moons opened like tired eyelids and the suns fell away. The shadow watched, silent as always, and she smiled at him, knocking him off his feet to disappear into the shadows all around once again, though he was always only the width of a hair away.

There you are. Come on, he taps his shoulder and lies on his stomach waiting for me, addressing me casually, in the familiar, diminutive.

Lord Alexander’s nude corpulent body lies like a mountain on a beach, covered in thick and curly grey and white hair, once yellow and brown. The stink of Death pours from him and he farts as I approach, as if I am no one and nothing but an animal he deigns to let touch him. All of my bones ache and I hobble to the bed softer than any material should be and I’m brought back to childhood, brought to the back of a wolf and her impossibly soft fur that I dissolved into for years. Climbing, it takes two tries to hop and hoist myself up, the bones creaking. I straddle him and begin to knead the loose skin.

Older than me but appearing younger, he was a young man when I was born and my home burnt to the ground. If nothing else, these barbarians age well. I rub my palms hard into his
upper back, right below the right shoulderblade, where his skin fuses with steel lined by silver and touched by intricate gold patterns. The muscles here hurt him most, the disproportionate weight throwing his back out of sync. For all this time, I’ve been the hands working the tension from his back and the thought brings my left hand to the knife, its cool dispassionate steel against my finger. In a moment I could erase all the years I’ve been forced into this bed where he now forces other girls, younger, prettier, and won’t even look at me, only calls me to knead his pain away. I feel his warm blood covering my hand and can taste his human heart but he groans and tells me to use both hands, that the pain’s bad today.

I do.

How long have you lived here?

Lived not worked, not enslaved, not forced upon, but only lived. No name. Say my name. My real name. I press and pull his doughy flesh and feel the hard metal beneath and say, Eighty years, master.

He laughs, the vibrations against the alloy within him, Eighteen, he says, not eighty. After all this time you’d think you’d learn to speak, my dear.

My dear, the same words for his dogs, for the many girls and boys he takes from crying mothers into his bed. Blind, the fires burning, the blade on my hip pressing against my own skin and I will bleed if it will keep me calm. Working down his back, the once-strong contours now weak, the once smooth skin now loose and folded. He was once a man, I know. At least born so, but the metal poisons everything. The Invaders choose to kill all that is good inside them with this metal mutilation.

But the transmogrification from human to not, maybe it’s better this way. They leave humanity behind and so they see us as beasts, organic meat to use the way they use the planet, taking and plundering all things. Burning, killing, raping, consuming. If humans are a sickness then these barbarians are a pestilence.

His hand reaches back and his fingers rub against my knee, stopping me, locking me in the last twenty years.

I will not live forever, he says in his barking language though his voice is soft. I am already far too old to be living and soon I won’t be. Man never lasts as long as we hope to. Ah, to live forever and escape the cycle of life and Death. Your Deathwalkers will take me and make me ash. I believe I will be the only man honored by both the gods of your land and my own. I’ve lived in your land since before you were born and I have loved it since I first saw it, and even more since I first saw you. I’m sorry if I mistreated you or hurt you. You must understand, to see you then, all those years ago, it was like a rapture. A torrent. A storm, the skies burst open and there you were—radiant and wild—unable to speak with or understand me. In your sleep you growled like an animal. My blood was so hot then and I burned for you every day. Just to be near you was like kissing the suns and holding the moons against my cock, penetrating the skies. I meant to be gentle but the way you looked at me—defiant. Why couldn’t you love me the way I loved and adored you? But, more than that, why couldn’t you just touch me without asking? It was always so difficult with you, even when I knew you cared. I know you do. A part of me believes you only still live to be near me. When I die, you will, too. I know it. You can’t live without me just as I can’t live in a world without you. Did you know there are cultures here that were structured so? When one died, both died. It’s beautiful. So much of your backwards continent is so beautiful it almost makes me weep.

He exhales loud and turns his face so his living eye watches me, All of this world and all existence beyond it is built around cycles. We revolve around the suns, figure-eighting through space, the moons wander around us, the seasons turn and roll, even the planet spins. History repeats itself over and over, and love always returns to where it began. For me, all of love came clear when I first saw you, fighting against my men, bleeding
from the mouth, your eye black and closed, when you spit out that soldier’s finger. Do you remember? I brought you here then. Made you a member of my household. I saved you from the whorehouse. I saved you but your eyes seethed. Dark and desperate and dangerous. You were an inferno. Wild and powerful. But my heart opened upon seeing you and I knew I had to have you. My biggest regret is that you’re barren but maybe it’s for the best. I’ve enough bastards around as is. But my love began with you. That day was the beginning of my heart, the moment I saw you was the first time my heart beat. And now I want you to be here when it beats its last. In my final moments, you will be here. If you go first, I will be there, too. I will come with you, my dear. Aya. My wolfgirl.

My hands stop and vision is a haze of wolves ripping his head from his neck, the sound of metal and bone crunching between alabaster fangs. The forbidden words. He’s not meant to say my savage name, a secret never to be mentioned before the Invaders. He believes it’s a sign of his devotion to me, to speak to me using my real name, the name given to me as a gift, not forced upon me. He calls me by the name I call myself instead of my slavename. Who told him my name I’ll never know but nor shall I forgive this final humiliation. My teeth grinding to dust to keep from chattering, my whole body tossed to seismic convulsions, I press the knife into my thigh to keep from drinking his blood and eating his heart.

You tremble, dear. I’m sorry. I just wanted you to know I love you. I always have and I always will, and we will always be together, as we certainly were in our past lives, and will be again in all future lives. Circles never end or begin, they continue on forever.

There once was a man who was not a man who told me the same thing and another man who became a god who showed me it wasn’t true.

The jaws of time will take Lord Alexander and all these
monsters away and time is a fabric blowing in the wind as the drapes of this room and its curves and bends show me times that were and people I was so many years ago, huddled again after being locked in this room, listening to Polina tell us our history.

Something to hold onto, even though it wasn’t mine. Even though I wasn’t there. I was never there.

Children, do you remember the Arcanes? Aye, that’s right. They spoke to the Angels and were almost like gods. They fought the longest, the Arcanes, because they had everything to lose. Many of you have never seen an Arcane or an Angel and maybe never will, if I’m to be honest with all of you, but the Angels would not fight or did not fight or forgot to fight. They’re an unusual species of creature I’m told. Indifferent, like all the old gods. They watch humans and permit humans to exist but they refuse to intercede in any way. They neither protect nor attack humanity. They treat humans dispassionately, like the orphans of a stranger’s land. And maybe we are. Might be we never belonged and so the Angels let this happen and all the gods had let us go after a generation of burning down the planet with war. Some will say we deserved it, to be cast adrift by the gods, but no one deserves this. Slavery. The Arcanes, lovers of the gods, were abandoned by them. That’s what matters. All the gods left us long ago when the humans drove them out and attacked the forest. The world is the forest and the forest is the world. I did not believe it when I was a child in Drache but I believe it now.

But the Arcanes, an entire legion of them, it was terrifying, calling on the darkness and the light and even Death to attack the Invaders.

Rapt, all of us focused and listened through the screams through the walls and pretended we didn’t know the damage being done to whoever it was that night.

The Invaders, Polina said, and their columns of rifles and artillery and their dirigibles and war ships came over the horizon. The great rolling machines that tear across the land, felling trees
and villages, carrying soldiers and bringing always Death, or the threat of It. The Goddess followed them and the Crows crowded out the suns.

This was in Glass, she nodded at the Garasun girls, the last to fall and Arcanes remained a strong presence there till the end, defending even after all else had long lost hope. When the Invaders came into sight, the Arcanes began a dance as if they weaved the very air that made the sky. They reached inside and took hold of their still pumping blood and made many of them their dolls, turning the Invaders against one another, pulling the strings of their veins and arteries as if they were all macabre marionettes, killing their brothers and lovers and fathers and sons. The screaming incantations of Language ripping the white men apart. None of you have heard Language and neither had I till that day. It’s a truly rare sight to see an Arcane fight. Beautiful and dangerous. The ironballs of the Invaders flew but the Arcanes held them in air and made great lumbering metal beasts with the artillery and smashed through the lines, leaving a wake of broken and lifeless bodies. And when the fire rained they took that, too, dolls of flames incinerating the Invaders as an effervescent dragon bleeding across the sky causing the dirigibles to explode. Oh! It was an awesome and beautiful sight, the Deaths of the Invaders, the look on their faces as they retreated only to be murdered by their generals as punishment for cowardice. This was the glory of the Arcanes and all their secret knowledge handed them by the Angels, their lovers. The Glass capital was destroyed that day in fire and smoke and golems and the multitude of ironballs ripping through flesh and crumbling mortar and brick and shattering even the glass back into sand.

They held them for hours and the boys who were too young to be soldiers took up arms and joined the attack but the Invaders took them all and the Arcanes could not last. Their fatalistic dance as a last chance for our people. For all people. Awesome and godlike as they were that day, they were but men
and women and their vitality gave out. Some of them fought themselves to Death, collapsing or turning to dust and ash midsentence, the echoing Language caught in their breath, changing the shape of the air around them.

Polina’s eyes dropped and we hung on her silence, the screams no longer audible, but we all saw what she saw, all those years ago, when this land was ours in more than just words. Tears fell and she wiped them away but said no more.