Twilight of the Wolves (27 page)

Michiko told me once that Polina’s lover died that day in a gust of ash and flame fighting the Invaders.

The Arcanes are thought to be lost but we know many escaped, hiding, waiting, whispering through the shadows stretching across this invaded land, promising what comes next. Tonight.

They found me when I emerged as a ruined silhouette falling from the broken comfort of the heart of the world. I left the forest, the world, could no longer bear it or exist within it. I fell, naked and alone, falling apart beneath the fragmented moon.

They saw me, ran to me, took me in their metal hands and I screamed and raged and clawed at their eyes and throats until they bashed my skull in with their steel fists and all that I saw was the moons being swallowed by jaws of darkness.

My head hanging, bleeding, carried away, the slavers had me and I didn’t care, had already lost everything.

I wish I was the moon tonight, bathed in starlight. And I felt the canyons in me reaching almost to the otherside where they would be holes or tunnels through me like the great gash in the moon highlighted by the constant moondust making transient constellations of shimmering dust. I became dust. I am dust yet blowing in the gusts of other lives.

They locked me with the others and we travelled for delirious deleterious days, shrivelling beneath the suns, dehydrated, broken, empty. So empty that I chewed my fingers until they collared my neck and my hands to keep them apart.

I could no longer eat but there was no food.

The others ate rats, insects, spiders. They ate any and everything. Their children dying in their arms, their mothers dying in theirs. Husbands, fathers, lovers, mothers, daughters, all dying away and those who remained were forced to watch the last of their family ripped apart by the other slaves waiting to be consumed.

I stayed alive against my will. A lean mechanical guard took me and I bled between my legs upon him but he didn’t stop, told me he liked it best like this, made it easier for him, wet and sticky with the smell of life. He was a soldier or a slaver, not that it matters, not that they’re different. They dragged us, the crippled dying mob, across the land, always further and further west.

Some tried to run but the starved don’t outrun monsters or machines. They were monsters. My only fear for all my past life in the forest was that all I loved would disappear but on that trail of Death and tears I learnt that fear is everywhere that humans breathe. Fear is deep in their heart and the force behind every action. Fear is what makes them human and what controls them. It’s all they are and so it’s all they understand. Because they fear, every action becomes poisoned.

Disappear, I told myself. This is the last night in my body, I prayed when the soldiers came for me in the night. I didn’t scream, but escaped deeper within myself, clawing for where the wolf once lived, but all I ever saw was you, my Moon, my demon wolf, my blackstar. Your eyes smiling through the sadness of your whole life, taking all of me with you.

You promised me.

The Deathwalkers shadowed us and took what was left of the corpses away to the Goddess and we moaned as they drifted to dust to become mud in the rain or dirt on the road.

They fed us one another and laughed at our concave stomachs and piercing bones wearing away the thin boundary of our skin, coating us more as a mucous than a layer.

Falling away, deeper and deeper into the nebula of my core where all the galaxies shrunk and compacted and I held onto a stone that smelt of the moon and shined like Twilight where I felt his heartbeat, holding it close, pressing it against the decaying meat of my heart where the only part of me that mattered was ripped asunder.

Sao, you promised me.

And through the delirium, the hazed halflife, rose the once-great Luca, the greatest landport of all the world and I prayed and chanted, silently, repetitively, This is the last night in my body. Staring at the fragmented moon fading into the morning, my body fissured and cracked and fell apart the way that moon did thousands and thousands of years ago, changing the shape of the planet and this ecosystem of moons and suns and gods and mortals. And I remembered the day I discovered gods could die and loved ones could lie. I remembered his eyes flashing out of existence and my shadow saving my unwilling and indifferent life with all the love he carried for me. I turned to dust and waited only for that final kiss.

Willing to be set free. All the love I would never feel again, let go, and see the ocean, the Goddess, my wolves, and you, to be you again. All of you.

We will always be together, even after this life, my dear. Go ahead, he pushes his finger into my knee, Keep massaging. I want to talk to you like this. It might be the last time we share words. I can feel it, you know. Death. What you savages call Mother. Really, I will never truly understand your people’s obsession with Death and leaving nothing behind, as if your past lives didn’t matter or your future ones didn’t concern you. This very well could be the last day I spend in this body before it’s interred—he laughs, his body quivering and then coughing—I’d like to be buried right here, beneath where we are, with you beside me, he opens his eye and I avoid its gaze and his smile.

Yes, master.

I know you’re smarter than you let on and it’s why I still love you and want you by my side. I’m sure you can understand the significance of my love for you, the savage princess who swallowed the heart of the civilised gentleman.

You see, all of man longs for the understanding and love of another. No, more than long: we need it. For you females it is simply an expectation—a facet of life—because your weakness is what gives you to one another. Weak of mind and body and spirit and so you cling to others, weaving webs of connections, and it is this weakness that’s made man strong. Without your sex’s natural deficiencies, none of this—he lifts a hand and gestures to the room—civilisation, art, none of it would exist. We would be thousands of men dragging a woman and children around with us, beating away others. For men, it is our individuality that marks us. We step away from society so that we may forge it. By standing outside as an observer we can shape its flow and destiny. We create the world but your sex maintains it. Both are important and necessary and our sexes are naturally predisposed for one or the other. This is an axiom and it’s why your savage lands fell as they did. Councils of women! It was almost too absurd to even be real and for many years I didn’t believe. I wish you had been there when my uncle told me of this bestial land full of walking gods and impenetrable woods. Even as a child I knew such a world couldn’t sustain itself. But man, see, though our sex is the stronger and closest to gods, we are those who most need love. We need another. It is a necessity as eating is a necessity. Our lives are spent alone, creating and changing the grand scope of existence, but it isn’t until we find the other, the one who belongs to us, wholly, that we take on meaning and all our accumulated signs move from symbols to metaphors. Where lust becomes desire and love.

You see, my dear, women are not fit to govern anything beyond a household. Too emotional and hysterical. But I’ve lost myself in the explanation.

The point is this: To choose you is to elevate you. The world is full of signs and ciphers. My skin is a sign of my heredity and my natural standing in the hierarchy of man, while yours is another. Not quite a Garasun who are not quite Dragonlords who will never be us. We are touched by the light of distant stars, not these coarse blues and reds that color the people of this land. Our light travels farthest to reach us and make us and so it is only natural that it’s stronger. Our god does not slumber and watch us die. He is all of us and we are all him and his infinite sphere. You people obsess over shadow and light and Death and life, but we insist on living, and so we create ourselves as simply as we created our god. All is within man’s hands, within his right! We have built a better world and will build one for you too. It saddens me that I will never see it and that you won’t share it with me, but we will reap its benefits when we are born again. These are the signs of true power. Gold and steel and the hands. Man’s hands can do anything, from creation to destruction.

The metal you see embedded in my body is a sign of my immortality and the highest reaches of man. The gold veined through it is a sign of the way I, personally, have stepped higher than most. The wrinkles and ruin of my skin are signs of man’s limitations and the life I have created and the way the world has tried to fight against me. I have weathered every storm spacetime offers and yet I stand, unbent.

He rubs my knee as if comforting me, It will not last. Even signs fade and change and wash away. All of this power and prowess will disappear into the ether. And I choose to spend eternity with you. All future lives as we have spent this one, as we have spent the previous ones, with you by my side.

Do you know, when I first saw Luca, I knew it would be my legacy. I would make this city with my hands and mind into something that could never and will never exist again. The dances, the songs, the markets, even the temples, the eclectic nature of this place opened up the world to a far grander reality
than one I had ever imagined. But I knew it would soon fall and it would be my responsibility to give it back to the world. And so I have. With every breath for the last twenty years, I have taken the best of the old Luca and the best of me and made the greatest city this continent has ever seen.

It’s for you, my dear. My wolf. My heart. All that I do is for you. To make you mine.

The wolfgirl stayed awake at night listening to her blackstar shine like the fragmented moon above. A smile leapt across her lips and she held on tight to the stone full of ephemeral glowing clouds of light.

We’ll be there soon, she said to the darkness, to her shadow, We’ll be there and we’ll make this all whole. You’re afraid, I know, but don’t be. No harm will come to us with Sao here. Nothing can stop him and he will do anything to protect me. To protect me is to protect you. He may not like you but it’s only because of what you once were just as he hates himself for what he has become. Don’t take it to heart. Do you have a heart? He means you no harm. Can you hear it? His heart beating. It’s connected to the rivers and the pulse of the forest, the heartbeat of the world. I have a feeling that the Yi live at the center of the world where they cry out loud for the wolves, for the gods. No, not like that. Not a center inside the planet but a center where all life began. Where the Lunar Sea once was, where the lunar flowers still are. What I understand about spacetime is that we perceive it confused. One moment follows the other. That’s how we experience it but I don’t think that’s how it is. When you live with a wolf or even only see one I think it becomes obvious that it’s not like that. Today will be followed by last year and then six months from now. If time is a wheel that rolls onward then something about it becoming tangible bends and distorts it. My memories of the past happen even now, this moment, alongside my voice. I see the reds of the falling leaves and feel the summer sun on my back even as I hear your stillness. You know, it’s the
most noticeable thing about you. That silence. The complete and utter lack of noise. When I talk to you I feel less alone but I also sometimes wonder if you’re even here. But I feel you, your heart like a piece of string clinging to the thick wires of the forest, of life. You’re a shadow but one that’s barely there.

The shadow spoke with its wobbling and crushed voice, It is not safe there. The Yi are not like normal humans. The metal has driven them insane.

Over the soft carpet and hard marble, I shake the touch of Lord Alexander away and wipe myself free of his scent that clings to me, drifts inside me. Were the Yi discovered by the Invaders all those years ago, before this was ever imagined? If they saw the Yi, fighting for immortality, constructing new life and grafting it to the organic. If these white men saw the halfmetal red men and became them. The Yi are as much a myth and enigma now as they were twenty or one hundred years ago. Meat men with metal hearts.

Alexi opens the door soberly and closes it quietly, then does a rotating dance of fast steps while he revolves once in a tight circle, smiling hard, eyes clenched shut.

What is it? Alyosha says, an adolescent mixed boy with blue eyes and redhair and redbrown skin, another of the bastards of Lord Alexander.

They all tell him to spit it out, to tell, already smiling, waiting for the answer. Misha, the Alexandras, Dacia, Akira and Akio—twins, Garasun, but Akio has soft feminine features and Akira has the face of a hawk—Octa, and Alina crowd around. Most of them are still children and they have different names when speaking with the Invaders but we all do.

Alexi stops dancing, covers his mouth with his hands as if containing it a moment longer is torture more for him than for us, then, slowly, his fingers fluttering, he parts his hands, There is news from Glass and Valencia! A shouted whisper, accented Limpa, he dances again, tapping his feet noiselessly and
spinning, pumping his fists.

We beg for him to speak, to say more, to tell us everything. Even me, my heart racing, feeling the touch of Lord Alexander’s fingers upon my knees and remembering the pungent reek of his sex, of the purple bulb and the thick coarse hair covering his awful body. The way he once touched me and stared at me, not with desire but with lust, and then the way he attacked me and plunged himself inside me, silencing my screams with fists and soft padded palms. I learnt to disappear, to collapse inward and cling to all that remained of my wolfheart, of my wolfgod, the glittering black demon who gave me life. Breaking down the walls of spacetime and returning to the past which happens now if one only bothers to cut through the layers of reality and fabric of time and the bones of existence to see the folds in dimensions and walk hand in hand with past selves. His hands on me became different hands, burning like fire, wrapping me in starlight, bathing in moonlight, and all my disassembled selves were washed and cleaned and brought back together in his arms, the shore to my ocean or the ocean to my shore, a metaphor I’ve lost the distinction to.