To die is to carry the dead to the Ocean where You dance and sing always on that infinite shore as an eternal child. Your midnight hair and Twilight eyes, Oh Goddess, Mother, our Mother, to hear Your song and feel the touch of Your skin, this one will die forever only to grow nearer to Your impossible Light and the shades of the Dream You carry within that falls from the depths of Your slumber to create all of existence and all of us. The world woven by You, Mother, sweet Mother.
The pull rips through spacetime and us daughters usher humanity to the waves breaking against the shore but there is another gravity.
Who is this new god walking after that embodied nebula? He is a wolf and a man. He is neither and both, his essence lost at the precipice of ever and never, of wolf and man. She. She is the suns at apex and the world in bloom with the music of the forest echoing through her young body.
Young gods. Who is she, Mother, dear Mother? Who is this wolfgirl with undeniable magnetism pulling pulling pulling. The boys are dying and we sing the song until they are all gone to ash and to the mud of their blood but spacetime contracts and she stands clear and bright and new. So new with the constant scent of blossomed dew.
Mother, oh Mother, who is this force shimmering and blotting out the Light of You? Clogging the Grey and swirling through this everness, she is the temptress Moon taking all away and rewriting all that came since birth and Death. Life explodes from her and corrodes all these old words written within and carved against the caverns housing all the heartbeats of a thousand dead boys.
The boys die, the wolves howl, and the pull never ends but it now drags in two directions from different places: the bowels and the heart.
The water is warm and the suns blush and bruise the sky. 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.
Clean and new, soon we will be You.
But there she is shining.
She sits amongst the flowers and a bird hops so near she could touch it if only she tried. Not taking the flowers but only touching them and running her fingers along the petals. Yellow splashed by orange, the flower’s pliant in her delicate hands. The wrists so thin and dirty as if she never washes and the smell of her intoxicates and overpowers all flora. Sweat and cinder and fecundity cling to her unreachable skin but to smell is to live for the first time filled by memories unlived but understood.
Tilting her head back she bathes in the sunslight casting dual shadows for her dual heart. The red and the blue mixing to wolf purple.
He returns or never left but the world flutters around him as if he is constantly bending reality and restructuring existence in order for him to stand within it undisturbed. His wolfears fidget and respond to the vibrations in the air and he hears across the land and through the sky. He hears her heartbeat and even the one beating within. The stone in his hand, he brings it to his nose and inhales long with his eyes closed and his ears fall to the side of his head parallel to the ground. The stone glows in curious blues and purples and in the Grey it becomes a tiny sun filling all the Grey with Light that obliterates the very nature of the place and so it disappears and crumbles away as if all of this is reality and the Grey is its reflection rather than its source and the home of the Dream inside of everything.
The stars cry and die all from the sky and he watches with his corrosive wolfeyes and his dark flamed heart beating the blackness through his veins and the veins of this shell.
She watches the fire squeezing the bearskin to her nakedness. Neither of them speak. For months dragged after their silent gravity watching them exchange their sorrowful glances and open their mouths only to exhale in a splintered cold gasp.
I can still hear them howling, she says and her voice is a song with depth and melody and it wraps round the lungs and fills them and they drown on her words and her soft syllables. A seed planted and growing and becoming more within as its roots stretch through the heart and the bowels to the very fibre comprising this shell and from these roots and this seed a tree blossoms within branching to all the memories and bearing thousands of fruit of countless colors and none of them grey but full of twilight and tasting of moonlight from the wolfgirl who created Life even within Death and the heart beats for her and the blood is hers.
He fingers the violet stone shining in his hand and his voice comes as two voices, one deep and dark and harsh while the other is soft and gentle like the wind through trees, They live inside you. They always will. Faoi—
Please, her voice fractures and cuts through the Grey and the world and the breath within freezes, Please don’t say her name.
His ears twitch and fall to the pain in her voice, She is inside of you. She has been for almost your whole life. Without her, you would’ve died soon after you were born.
Where was I born, her voice lacks inflection and her eyelids droop against the dancing flames.
Far away in a city that no longer exists. You’re the only survivor of the greatest landport in the world. Luca. I saw the soldiers marching there and I ran ahead to warn them all to leave but there was a plague already killing them all away. No one listened and then the soldiers came with their rifles and their fires and their masks and burnt it all away and killed all who tried to leave. Your mother was burning and dying and she gave you to me. You escaped. Only you.
Then it’s true. The story she told me so long ago that I thought was about you and me.
It is. You cried so much and there was no food for you. I tried to feed you but you couldn’t eat. Nothing worked and she said you needed milk. I was afraid and you nearly died. I was afraid that you’d be like me. No longer human. That the wolf milk would change you.
It did.
I know.
She turns to him and their eyes meet for the first time since the wolves died.
I’m cold, she says and scoots close to him and then sidles into his body which accepts her with an open arm and the heat leaving him appears as a wavering haze like the space around a star. The fire cracks and they do not move and the heart within fissures and breaks and the throat dries and the vision blurs with jaws closing against the meat of this shell and the bones quiver with the power pulsing in the air from their union. His darkstar and her dualsun, they will burn this world apart together.
Her voice quiet and just beyond fingertip reach, What are you now?
Smelling the stone and the scent of an unearthly perfume drifts and surrounds them, I don’t know.
Is this what you ran from?
Ng. I’m no longer human.
But neither am I.
The vibrations of his chest set a reaction through the air making it solidify, I’m sorry, his voice shaking and crumbling all spacetime around to pieces to be blown away and scattered by the fluid wind.
Her arms wrap around him and hold him tighter, closer, their heat rising. A furnace of bodies transformed into gods by their own accidental collisions with the immortals. The wolves who found her and made her one of them and he brims with their moonglow but also something darker and more ancient and black.
She clings to him and he weeps into her.
The Grey and she is a birthing star caught in the arms of his nebulous wolfheart fighting to remain human. A flickering flame before a gale, he holds on without fingers to a ledge made of glass.
They speak in growls and moans from the language of wolves. Incomprehensible but the emotions float between them and she laughs and this one is lost. Mother, dear Mother, this one is lost here in the wake of this goddess of spring.
She wears the stone around her neck and takes his hand in hers through the changing leaves. All the world was green but now it all bleeds and his eyes turn reddish when he turns and sees with a fangtoothed smil
e that bites through all that is within.
The pull and the Grey but to leave is to lose her and fall out of the crush of her gravity and the radiance of her dualsun heart. The pain and sickness of resistance and the Grey envelopes and spacetime collapses and the scent of Death is everywhere. The boys are dying and the world is crying.
The water is cold and the days become short with her always at its center pulsing and dragging this one dancing after. 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. But Mother, oh Mother, who is this new goddess with her impossible nature of night and Light? Is she Your shadow, Mother, dear Mother? The skin crawls and the throat clicks and a tension at the very center from the depths within rises like demons from the Ocean clawing at the nerves and everything that makes this shell exist. Make this one whole and last forever between ever and never. Never whole without Your touch but never whole without her face and thick lips and tiny frame. She fills all the hollowness within and captures the meat of the heart that beats now for and because of her powerful Light and her consoling Life. 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. Mother, sweet Mother, eternal Life and Light, child of forever, this one is lost within the goddess of spring and even the Grey becomes painted by her Light.
Help Your daughter, Mother, our Mother.
Lost in the depths of the forest so far from the reality sweeping across the world where humans are burnt alive or killed by boys dressed as demons, the rain follows her even as the dead follow You, Mother, sweet Mother. The sorrowful songs course through the forest no matter how far they go and though the sky greys for days and days she still burns. Illuminating the sky and the forest and the dark crevices within where all the memories are bound and arranged.
In the cold of the night she sleeps beneath and this one protects her from the rain. Her face tranquil and so alive and the stone smelling of moonlight and the blood of wolves. Goddess of blossoms, sleep sweet and let the dreams escape so that the taste may be known and the lips will no longer be dried and cracked from the moments spent without her.
She’s not dead, his voice cracks and pulverises. You hunt and haunt us but not because we’re dying. What do you want?
He sits and his eyes immobilise and immolate but he remains where he is only watching.
What is it you haunt us for, his eyes follow to the girl, Is it for her? You stalk us like animals. Like crows. Is it only for her? Ng. I’ve heard you cannot speak but more than that I’ve heard you do not live. That you are neither man nor ghost but have even given up your virility and manhood to be one with your god. What does a eunuch want with a young girl?
To hold her. To have her hold this one. The lips quiver but no sound. No, not for him. No, only for You, Mother. This one will never forget. Your hands and mouth and this one will die forever even as he reaches inside and rips the words away clawing after You, Mother, sweet Mother.
She’s only a child and you’re only a phantom. Do not touch her or I’ll eat you.
The pull and the sickness from being ripped in opposite directions. For the love and devotion of all or the pilgrimage following this new bloomed goddess and her demonwolf who hears and see all that this one does. Pulling and tearing and ripping, the Grey expands and contracts and the lungs collapse and the bones all fragment and split and splinter and the teeth crack to shards while the shell dismantles and burns and burns and corrodes obliterated by the Light and the Life and Death calls and the song consumes from the inside and spacetime flashes back and forth and there she is and there You are but the faces cycle rapidly and the scent of all this bloodmade mud covering the earth but there is the rain to wash the pain away and make a new world without strife and war and with only Life and the Light and You, Mother, dear Mother, but she rises through the Grey with her heart of all and everything and flowers bloom in her fecund footprints.
The sickness and the retching of all that is not within erupting from between the teeth and the head in the mud and the mouth gasping and bubbling in the soaked ground of this dying and bleeding world and all the boys are dying and their heads in the hands and their limbs scattered and the blood and the blood and the blood but she washes away all the pain if for only an instant with her flaring redhair and her redbrown skin touched by starlight and her deep almond eyes holding only the future for if spacetime all exists now then she holds within her a new line and a new frame and a new existence and a new way to measure space and time and sequentiality and simultaneity for if it all happens now and the past and present and future are Yours and the present is the collision of the experienced with the to be experienced then what is it in her eyes? Not only dreams and Light and Life but all those things made flesh and embodied within her perfect shell that can never be only a shell because it is her. Her. If You are the Goddess of Death can she be the Lady of Light? Are all things Yours and she is but an aspect of Your infinite perfection?
But the shell implodes and the pull rips spacetime apart and the shell cannot sustain this fire and consumption.
Please, Mother, dear Mother, take this pain from Your daughter and let Light show brighter. Make this rain to stop and this heart to heal and let it be that Your lost daughter may never forget her. Mother, sweetest Mother, this one is lost and requires Your succour.
The pull and the sickness, the Grey expands and takes this one far from here. All Life given to die forever and be Your hands and mouth. The circle without beginning or end.
The fulminating firmament and the world shakes but she smiles into the cascade and the flash of booming electricity as its veins scorch and cleave the sky. Her face lit by lightning and the dance of gods and she whispers Dragons even as her voice is drowned out by the shrieking night.
The water soothes the skin and the blade takes the hair away from scalp and from above the eyes. Cold and refreshing the water heals the sickness and the pull must be sated but there is a new call from within her. A dream. 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. She smiles full of moonlight and her voice tinkles like the rush of falling leaves. Make this one whole and last forever between ever and never. This one is Yours. This one is hers. To live is to die but first we must die. To live beside her if only for one uninterrupted day and speak her words and hear her words directed so. We give everything to You, Mother, for we are Your daughters, and we will die forever. She lives with the wolf inside and all around.
The creature follows us, he says and his voice is harsh against the steaming snow.
Who?
You don’t smell his reek of Death?
I can’t see him.
Ng.
What?
I thought you could. He haunts us. He haunts you.
Crows only follow the dead.
We are not dead.
One of us will be soon, she takes his hand and the stab twists.
I won’t let any harm come to you. Not now or ever again.
The snow steams from his heat and she grasps his fire.
A creature falls from the sky with a tail and the look of a demon. It speaks to him in quiet and direct words.
You have changed, it says, But you are all right.
Ng. A year ago. All is lost.
I am sorry I could not help you but there are better worlds than this and you do not seem the terrifying beast you feared to become. The world beyond the forest is vast and the humans are determined to destroy it and themselves.
Humanity no longer concerns me.
When last we met you were chasing women and trying to save the world.
I’m no longer human.
So I see. You are an impressive sight and smell and feeling. And you have some followers but she is not w
hat she appears to be either.
Don’t wake her.
What is she? She is not like you but neither is she like a human child.
She was weaned by a wolf.
And what of the Deathwalker?
Their eyes fall and the roots seize and lock all that is this shell beating sludge with the fangs of the wolf clenched around the heart that belongs to her.
It follows her. I think it loves her.
Can such a thing love?
I don’t know. I suppose it still believes it is a man and maybe its heart still is.
What will you do now?
His eyes fall upon her sleeping body listening to her even breath and the muttered wolfdreams in that language she speaks to herself and to him.
Protect her.
From what?
Humanity.
The war will not last. Men from across the ocean come already. They have waited for this war and now they will rule all the humans of this land and the forest will be but a memory. They are slavers and barbarians with yellow hair and icy eyes.
I’ve met them. They’re like all humans.
You have turned your back on your people.
If I can make her human again, it will all be worth it. Do you know where the Yi are?
Is that who you have searched for all these long years? The promises of the Yi are not to be trusted and I have long heard they searched for a wolf. A wolf to fulfil a prophecy and return them to this world.
What world is theirs?
There are worlds worse than this, my friend.
They gave me a stone infused with lunar flowers.
The creature’s emotionless face seemed to shift and scowl and chew on these words. Its tail uncoiled and waved through the air then coiled around its waist once more, its ears flickering as if homing in on some secret signifier caught in his voice, Lunar flowers. May I see the stone?
Twilight of the Wolves Page 19
