Twilight of the Wolves

by Edward J. Rathke

  Cerill blinked then laughed, deep from his bulbous stomach, That’s the thing about civilisation: nothing compares to its barbarism.

  Born to Death to live again. The grass so soft beyond the walls. The walls, our walls, so pale and alive in the sunslight. Twilight Days, born today, live for the dead to take them to Her. Mother. The grass so soft against the feet, every step takes one further away and into this shepherding life in the halflit world where the men take each other away from the Life and the Light and one must lead them to Death and to Mother to join in unity.

  The gates of the living, one falls under the tree’s shade and all time washes away. The monastery glows through the gauze of Her Light but this one will return once the journey’s done. Through the tears there is Her face and Her voice within full of promise and supplication. Mother of us all, the vision blurs but a hand wipes it away for one must go on for one is needed beyond the walls.

  The feet step closer and the beat of the world drives within and fills this shell and the breath shudders in the lungs blown from the living and on through the boundary this one tiptoes through the shadows watching the play of Light as the darkness dances to its song.

  The threshold of Light and Life and the abyss of darkness, Light of the world, shadow of the Dream, keep safe this servant ushering the humans to Death’s bright door.

  Crossing the treeline the knees hit the ground and the hands clench in the dirt, a sensation of drowning nothing can grow accustomed to. Eyes clenched tight, teeth clattering and echoing in the skull and vibrating through the spine setting the limbs to pins and needles of fire to the very tips of fingers and toes and the cough racks the lungs and the tears fall but every moment softens the world and the living. Slow and even, in through the nose, out through the mouth, over and over until the weight settles in the center and rises from the soft grass and dirt. Step by step plunging deeper into the living and the scents that attack the lungs and the nose causing sneezes and coughs and air so full and bright sucking it in if only to hold it within and to understand what a man or a woman feels when they walk in this world of Life but this one walks between the shadows and through the dark stretches between daylight and the sunsrays.

  The sound of animals and the song of birds so different from the Ravens’ cold aura of blinding pressure vibrating through the shell carried and housing. The steps grow light and the air thinner, so free from oppressive glares and emptiness. The world is so full! So bright and so green. So green and so lovely! Hard and rough, these trees blot out the sky but are warm to the touch from Life coursing through only a finger’s space beyond this shielded exterior. The hands warm against it and the face fits here and there is a song heard. Soft and deep as if from the Ocean. It does not rush or stampede but drifts through the wood and the body sets to tingle, its atoms vibrating with the deep resonance, as deep as the Grey one must navigate to usher the living to the shore. This vast world within the tree so alive and unknown.

  To go on and go on but it is cold and alone without the touch of the tree and its song pressed against the heart and the brain. But the music is not within but all around and the shell floats from the ground behind closed eyes drifting through the canopy to the stars and the moons and the warmth of the suns destroys this shell and becomes one with all and everything and the Dream is both in and all around like this music of the forest and to live is to take part in this communion of that which has lived longer than human history.

  Each step towards Life and the boundary blurs but it can be seen. The Grey. The space between the living and the dead, the path one must walk if one is to return.

  To live is to die and to die is to live.

  By giving Life one will die forever and share eternally in this everness. From that which never was to that which always is, we are the hands of the Mother who gave shape and texture to all existence. We are the pigments in the Dream and the weavers at the loom of Life and Death.

  All expands in the Grey, this halfworld one walks perennially through. All the trees loom high and every animal is felt and their hearts beat within and all around like the threads of a vast robe all interwoven and vibrating distinctly but in unison to a music they cannot hear but which causes their very lives to continue. Every flower, every leaf, every blade of grass vibrating through the vast empty Grey. We walk through without touching yet grooming.

  Within the Grey spacetime fragments and falls apart to be rearranged as pieces to a puzzle. All the living and the dead cast across the board of eternity. A great river coursing through the everness with the living on one shore and the dead on the other. The dead drift away from the shore wandering into the grand nothingness of nonexistence and the eternal unity with Mother while the living sit alone together upon the shore and wait for one to take them across to share in the Memory of the World and to finally wash in the Dream. This endless river of Life and Death the final barrier between that which is and that which no longer is.

  It flutters more than flies with wings the color of leaves and skies. Floating through the air in chaotic patterns without direction but moving as if pulled by the fecund gravity of overpowering Life. First here, then there, now forward and back, higher and lower, drawn by a million compulsions and no mind to decide which is the way it wants to go. As it flutters by the wind lifts and takes it away in search of new scents and thicker Life.

  The air is like liquid one must swim through but constantly resurface to breathe. Every step is submersion and ablution and emergence, a constant wash. Life is to be reborn continually with every breath and movement and one flies through this pulsing world on the wings of millennia of beating hearts and growing plants. The insects chirp and whistle and fly and jump all round and there are not hundreds but millions, one for each blade of grass, ten for each petal or leaf.

  The heart skips and the world dims and one is drawn from the living. The scent of burning flesh and spilling blood and the howling of men not long for this shore. The chest caves in and the knees fall to the grass and dirt and the face rubbing against the great root for this pain within that is the pain of Life leaving and Death calling, the tension of a being on the needle’s eye between existential fields. The Grey expands and the distance is in the eye happening here and now and every ashing being rips at the planes of spacetime, calling for Mother but we are Her hands and She is our mouth and we will sing for them to bring them away and the feet move through this halflit precipice of being and naught. Though the forest surrounds and evershifts round we are unbound by spacetime and living laws and one can never be lost with the guiding Light and the Grey revealing all.

  The boy is dying. His blood pools around him and there are many more reflecting this image collapsing and corroding all round. The colors and hues of Life tarnished and burnt to ash. All black but this twilight softens the massacre. The boy is dying and he has no hands. His hands are gone. His skin bubbles from the fires and the hole in his neck gurgles from the blood that pours away. The blood pours away and runs to the mud beneath. All the grass is scorched away and the greyblack clouds pushed by the timid wind graze like animals over the field of violet sky. All is violent. All is violence. The boy is dying. He has no hands. His hands blown away and his skin melted away turned black and red and raw and tight. The boy is dying. The boys die all around. Filled by sulphur and excrement and ash and blood and mortification and moribund boys, the breath comes shallow and labored.

  The boy’s heavy head in the hands. The scenery fades leaving only the sensations of a life with all its smells and touches and tastes, all its pains and pangs and ecstasies and heartaches and the world burns down and grows again with the wind howling through the chest and the eyes are open but there is no light but the light comes from within emitting back and the life projects visible all around. His eyes glossed, the Grey expands: the memories rush within and without and he runs through life from infancy to his second year when life slows and a mother dies from disease and a father disappears one morning down the mine and other women and
men pass him by and one of them with almond eyes offers grain and bread and apples and a year of holding on and surviving with thin bones that push against his skin and rashes that red his skin he is taken by a fat black women who finds him beside the river eating his excrement for lack of all else and the bejewelled woman takes him in her arms and washes the foulness from his body and takes him away by carriage to a new world with long low walls and midnight bearded faces who smile at him and rub his redhair and speak in words he cannot recognise but which he will learn and he does after months of sleep and nourishment and comfortable cushions and tender caresses and the years go by and his own language grows thick in his mouth but he speaks it to the trees and to the other boys of different colors at the home he lives in and the woman comes less and less as years add and roll on and she grows weary and sad and often cries alone in her room but he and the pale boy listen and bite their lips and wring their hands and promise one another that they are brothers and will be forever and they will never forget their mother who saved them from Death and despair but after seven moons of prayer she gets sicker and less bejewelled and she bids them all a long tearful goodbye and large armored men usher them out of his home for the last three years and he and his pale brother head north and find the road to Luca and spend many moons cycles there on the bridge and at the market but the pale brother fights with him and they separate and he takes the train alone to Valencia where he meets actors and more boys and the women take a liking to him because he is tall and strong with a square jaw and thick red curls and one takes him from the market and keeps him for half a year until he steals the maidenhead of her daughter and son and is prisoned for his unstable love and capacity for it and there is no light and little food and he grows weak and he defecates and smears it on himself and on the walls demanding them to set him free and sores grow on him but after the many days of darkness that may have been month they open the door and he steps free for the first time and they drown him in water over and over until he is clean and his sores are closed by an Arcane with skin blacker than moonless nights with a thick jewel hanging from his forehead who tells him all will be well and he believes for a moment that the pain he feels and the torture he endured can be balanced by the strange words of this strange man and then there is a knife in his hand that becomes a sword that becomes a spear and his feet go from walking to straddling and then the country expands but burns around him through forests and forests and forests that never end until the fire is everywhere and his hands erupt in violence and the scorched plain takes him to this land of constant pain so short but forever too long.

  This one sings, and the dying boy’s eyes focus but he looks through and he stands at the shore. The hands take his and he climbs aboard and the boat takes him to the other shore and he stands with Her. Her. Mother. Mother. So young and so old. Infinite Life, Your hair so black as to put Raven’s to shame. The emptiness of space, an eternal midnight upon Your forever head. You sing and the melodies fall together as a double helix spinning round its center, the boundary of everything, of Life and Death held between Your lips. Your face so pure and Your eyes like twilight smoke that swirls and consumes all that step within that violet hazeworld where all memories of all worlds past and future tornado and there exists the Dream and with a final breath he passes from existence to You and there is nothing in the hands as the ash swirls away to mix with the other transformed lives.

  The song rings through the air so thick with carnage but the work never ends for men will always die. The boy is dying and the hands take him. The boy is dying and the Grey expands.

  The river is cold and the suns shine at the horizons in these Twilight Days of indigo and lavender. The Death drips from the hands and new Life rises. 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.

  Day after day the fires singe the air and the Grey is everywhere. The boys are dying but who will live? The boys die and die and the forests burn and burn and the smoke covers the land but it never seems to end and the tug is always there pulling across nations and forests to carry these boys to our Mother and sing for them so one may sing with Her and hear Your perfect voice. All for You, Mother, to die forever.

  The burnt trees cry when touched but cry loudest when they’re not. Trees are old. Older than humans and this tree comes from the very beginning, before this scar on the planet and before the forest it incinerated was a forest. Centuries upon centuries it stood here and watched the forest made around it by the wolves. From there the timeline bends into two divergent paths. One on through the female and one to the male, two lives began centuries before they found one another again. Born from the moon, the first generation of wolves from thousands and thousands of centuries ago. The fragmented moon before it fragmented when all the wolves slumbered within it like an embryo within an egg but then they woke and the moon broke and they came through space to this empty and lonely rock covered in water and empty deserts of evershifting dirt. The wolves emerged and watched the suns and counted the planet’s revolutions and brought forth plants from deep within the soil and animals sprang from the falling stars in the sky. She went one way and he the other and they traversed the planet a thousand thousand times only to meet after a thousand years of travelling like discovering one’s reflection for the first time. They copulated for centuries and sprang forth thousands of pups and then united long before the transmogrification of humanity or even of Angels. Now they are only a burnt stump crying out across spacetime to their descendants who may no longer live but if they do then they will hear and they will know that the world is changing. The draw and the heart shrivels and the jaws chatter and the spine will not settle but spasms and this one will not be afraid though the boys are dying and will not stop. All must die but first they live and we die in order to live and die forever. We are Your hands and Your silent mouths. This one belongs to You and will die over and over, forever and ever after. Mother, our Mother. Ash and cinder and smoke and blood and Death, the boys are dying and the Grey expands.

  Moribund fields of burning soil with all the colors washed red and black from the fires and the smokes and the blood. New redblood turns black and old blackblood turns the boys to Death. There is no shelter and the forests disappear with every battle. All around daughters sing and the song rises as water in a basin growing texture and depth and the voice rises to meet it and all the boys are dying though they hold onto life but we do not ease their fear or their pain. Make it end, the hands and the song and the words unspoken only take them far away from this Death and deliver them to You, Mother.

  Mother, is there not another way? Must all die so? The books told of lives that ended without violence and blood and all the unfathomable pain in their young eyes. Why do the young die, Mother, and where are the old and the feeble? Has all of humanity gone but the boys and so only they must die?

  Mother, You are the words that fill us daughters but this one is lost.

  The Grey expands and the voice sings and the shores grow closer with the shore of Death expanding the shore of Life falling into the river. And the boy is dying and the hands take his limp head but his eyes are not here but the sensations of a life fill and swirl and coagulate in the air that becomes viscous and the pains and loves and aches cause the breath to cease and the brain to break. The threads spin into the sky but the hands have forgotten and this one cannot hold them together, the memories twisting and turning on one another, tangling and the Grey expands and the voice is another’s within and this boy’s Life enters and beats against the walls like the waves of the Ocean on a long lost shore. You appear, Mother, oh Mother, eternal child dreaming all of this in that neverness. The Ocean and the shore and You, Mother, our Mother. W
e are Your daughter and we will die forever. And with a breath the shell flutters away in ash to mix with the other dead and dying boys.

  He is alive inside and the Life that was his floats all around and Mother, oh Mother, this one needs You and Your midnight reality or Your starburst dreamt incarnation. The One Who Lives, Her voice inside as a promise and a touch that sets the skin to fire and this shell aches and screams for You, Mother, oh Mother, but it takes the face of another and the boy is dying and the blood is gushing and the head disconnects from the body but the hands do not let go though they tremble and the Grey forms with each unsteady breath and step that this one takes.

  The pull and the boys are dying and the Grey expands but no movement made. The pull again, harder, deeper, the spine ratch-eting towards the Grey but no movement made. The shell grows heavy and weak and the head droops and sight slips away and the pull is deeper and this one retches into the cold browning grass. Tears stream and a scream rises but no sound comes. All that is within burns and itches and writhes and the pull rips at all that is within and without. The breeze turns to a gale but no movement made. Lungs full of shattered glass and jaws that creak and eyes that melt away to see nothing but the Grey and the limbs fall away and the boys who die today and the reek of Death and Life lost assaults in clumsy barrages that beat against the bones breaking and cracking and all that is within splinters and the heart is made of glass shattered. The Grey is everywhere and the sky is closed to visions and memories and dreams. The Grey blots out all the world and all the dead lie around singing and the song is always wrong, out of tune and gone too long. The world capsizes and the Grey swallows and the boys are dying and the breath makes them drift away while they walk the shore with You to share their last moment of existence with You, oh Mother.