Twilight of the Wolves

by Edward J. Rathke

  The girl has it.

  Do you know why they want you?

  He looked down and spread his hands, I imagine whatever they want will take more of me than I can give and so I will give it to her and remake her. Human. Perhaps she will live then as a woman.

  The sky rumbles far away but it shakes the ground and she wakes for a moment beneath the warm cover of skins with a faint howl escaping between her teeth but seeing the creature causes her to sit up and she watches him and the short fiendish creature.

  Who is that, Sao?

  The creature turns, I am Xhal and I must be going, it turns back to him and puts a hand on his chest, I am sorry. If you look for Yi, you are close but you may never find it. If it is truly from a lunar flower then the Yi are more advanced than we expected. You may need a wolf but I can smell the wolf in both of you. Trace the scent and you will find the Yi and their hidden temple. This shall be the last time we meet if you seek them. Goodbye.

  Thank you, Xhal, he put his hand over the long clawed hand of the creature who pulled its hand away and disappeared into the trees and then the sky becoming a silhouette against the moons peeking through clouds leaving the air thick with coming rain.

  Who are the Yi, her voice dripping from dreams and converting all within to her aims.

  They’re a strange people. They’re who we’ve been searching for since before you were born.

  She yawns, Can they turn you back?

  Ng, he points, With that, they may be able to.

  Taking the stone in her hand it shines brighter and illuminates her gorgeous face and the profile repeats endlessly on every tree and in every star, in every blade of grass, leaf, and particle of dirt and it silences the pull breaking all and everything. She says, Let’s go, her smile flashes and her eyes swirl in the cold night. I want to be the one to save you the way you saved me, she says.

  They sleep in each other’s arms holding the twilight stone beside the dying fire.

  The Grey expands and the stone erupts like a distant star but bright enough to burn the skin and hands and the search for another or for its sister or brother or mother or father and the Grey is all of spacetime bound and refracted and evanescent. Expanding and contracting but never bending to us and our desire but only to the dead and showing the daughters where they must go as the stars flicker away or rise again as a new day but the twilight star bears no reflections within the Grey though the hands swim and the lungs torque through the pang of a self and the movements undictated but chosen and the actions stab beneath the fingernails and eyelids and the blood is a sludge beating black as tar through the Grey till it opens and the wet grass tickles the skin even as all within vacates and leaves only the void but a promise of escape from this circle of Death and Life.

  The water is cold and the skin reacts harshly. A shiver and the skin freezes with the burn and the gasp full of ice. Bristled skull that water runs over and the knife pulls it away. With every day we are born again not as men—neither men nor women and neither alive nor dead. All this halflit existence devoted to the child Goddess of Light and Life and Death. Daughter to the Mother of all things who is a child dreaming at the eternity of the shore of the Ocean which holds all things and all of spacetime falls into its unfathomable depths meant only for Mother, our Mother. Watch over this one from sun to sun through moon and moons but there are no moons these short freezing rainfall days covered by the long dark clouds blotting out even the suns and all warmth. Make this one whole and last forever between ever and never. This one is. This one is. The eyes shake and the hands tremble and fall into the mud and the knees weak and unstable fall as the rain falls upon the back. My back. My back and the base of the spine burns and cracks and a shout raises to the throat clawing to be released and Mother. Oh Mother. This one belongs nowhere. To live is to die but first we died but she fills this one with Life. This new spring goddess. The pull not an ache or a deep pang but an elation. She brings this one to Life for the first time in all these years of Death. She brings. She resurrects. Me. I. I will rise though my body breaks and the breath turns to sludge and chokes and the coughs rake the lungs and the throat and the eyes—my eyes—blur and see nothing as the Grey expands and I scream. Scream. Screaming. A sound horrible and relieving but warbling and cracking and I cannot sustain it but she will put me back together. We give everything to Mother, for we are daughters and we will die forever but now we—I—will live. I will follow her—you—beautiful wolfgirl. Rise from this ablution a man. Alive. I am alive. The tears burn against my cheeks and mingle with the rain but I feel them holding the weight of all this halflife spent shepherding the newdead to Mother, my eternal child Goddess, but Mother did not save me. She demanded so much of me and took even more and the sobs hurt. This shell is alive and it hurts and it burns.

  Mother, dear Mother. What have I done? The pull rips at the bowels as a blade cutting me apart from the inside and dragging me to You but I cannot let go of the wolfgirl and I will never see Your brilliance again, Mother, The One Who Lives.

  Forgive me, Mother, but this one is weak and can no longer remain Your daughter. Forgive this one, Your miserable servant. This one was no one but now I am alive and I burn for her from every aspect of my being from my heart to my head to the cells of my skin crawling and even from the depths of my hollow center that You claw and bite and tear apart even as You tore me apart with that knife so long ago. You made me unwhole and never again to be a man but perhaps she can save me. She can do what You never could. She can fill this hollowness and she does with every glimpse of her unlikely beauty. Not eternal as Yours but flawed and cracked and mortal. The beauty that will fade which makes it all the more perfect and undeniable. This imperfect goddess of springs and wolves, I love her and will die again, permanently, for the last time, and forever if it means I can just stand behind her and follow where she goes. My maimed body and crippled heart, You did this from the very start, but I will love You always though I no longer deserve Your Light as I give myself to another.

  I was Your daughter but I rise from this river a man no longer dying but finally living.

  I do not deserve Your Light or the Dream and when I die I will be alone without You or all of existence and spacetime.

  Goodbye, Mother, dear sweet Mother. I have died a thousand times for You and now I will live for her if only to die forever alone tomorrow. As long as I can touch her and feel her skin against me. Inside.

  Goodbye.

  These collapsing footsteps through ever and never only to reach her and the legs—my legs—new as if the last six years have washed away from me in the river and I feel every icy raindrop and know their names and all they hold inside their infinitesimal splash and to breathe in the humid clogged air is to drink in the new world even as this one dies and the forest cries with a constant wailing but there she is sitting in the branches of an immense tree. The shadows no longer bind and walk in the Light for to exist fully is to leave behind the shadows and the Grey. Her square jaw and her round nose, I can see her with my eyes closed, through the Grey and through the leaves as the distance contracts and I am beside her and above her and only the ground watching her with the eyes of my unstable existence but the Grey weakens and falls away more and more with each step and breath as a living creature and the memories within drift out of their honeycombed compartments and into my bloodstream giving me the thousand lives of the dead but she smiles with the stone in her hands glowing in blues and purples I cannot name and her face illuminates by its incandescence. To sit here and stare forever though the rain never ends would be enough. It is enough. The Light of the world shines from within her in radiance immortal.

  He watches me but I do not fear him while the heat of her Light touches my skin that lives only for her, the circle breaker. My god of spring and new Life.

  The Grey expands but fades and so I call it again and it takes and I swim through it in search of twilight stars to lead her away and give her what she needs. Within the stone exists a power anci
ent and powerful, the lunar flowers they spoke of will heal the wolf inside her and perhaps save him and make him human again or make me whole and erase these scars that leave my bowels tied and the skin between my legs puckered and numb. The pull claws but I push past the constellations and the Grey turns gelatinous attempting to bind me and drown me within this neverness and lock me away from her and so I hold my breath and claw back at the pull and tear through the bubble encasing and stealing the promise of new moons and the touch of wind and if I never see the dawn then all is naught for without the dualsun of my wolfgirl I am but a shadow washing away in the emptiness of spacetime. A flickering far away and it is her and I run and swim and fly and ingest this caulking Grey to be with her once more as the Grey collapses and leaves me to gasp and splinter in the grass.

  The suns shine and the moons peak through the thin barrier of the world and galactic ash and a smile pounds against my cheeks.

  Another day. I will find the way for her. I will find the stone’s reflection no matter the time or distance or cost.

  The clouds part and the seven moons shine in orange and red and her voice vibrates through the air, Why do you follow us?

  My heart collapses and burns as the dirigibles from so long ago and I long to speak but my chest is full of bees and my throat clicks and my jaw gnashes grinding my teeth to dust.

  The flickering fire dances light and shadows around her lying in the grass, Don’t be frightened for Sao is away breathing in the fragmented moon and trying to discover its scent. He says you follow me. He says you love me, her voice is soft and caressing against the interior of my skull and rubbing Life into my lungs.

  Oh, to speak! To show her, tell her that it is true, that I belong only to you but my words die at my lips quivering for her and I creep closer on hands and knees.

  He says you belong to the Goddess of Death and that you’re no longer human. Like us. We’ve all lost the parts that make us human and we all walk together through the land of the gods. The old gods.

  No longer, no longer, I scream but they shatter in my lungs, I belong no longer to the Goddess!

  We walk through the land of the gods but see none of them. Ariel. That’s what Xhal is. A legend and a myth flying through the air and living lost somewhere in the world. Sao says he smells like mountains but I’ve never seen a mountain. I’ve never seen anything except for the trees. And the dragonstone road. They speak to me but Sao can’t understand them. It’s different, I think, with me because I was raised within this language but Sao was pushed into it as a man. He used to say he was cursed and he feared the day that he would become what the humans call a demon. There’s immense power in him. He doesn’t feel or sound like a wolf for he burns from within as if his body can barely contain his Light and Life. Even still, he is afraid. You were there, weren’t you—Yes, yes! I have been here since then—and so you saw him eat the human hearts. The loss of control, that is what he feared and still fears. A prisoner to his own awesome power, he abstains from all appetites in order to hold onto his human heart but it beats less and less with every passing day. He is a darkstar shining through the blackness and pulling all the Light from the sky. The marks of the wolf are so much deeper than when I was a child. They are so black they almost terrify even me. He is horrible to see in anger but you were there. We stay in the land of the gods away from the humans even though they decimate this place because he fears the power he holds. Like a god trapped within him, he binds it and runs from it. He will never kill again. I know it. Even if for me, he would never forgive himself for taking another life. He still searches for a way to turn it all back and become human again but I don’t think we can ever be. What is it like to be you, Deathwalker? You smell different than before. Why won’t you speak—Dear wolfgirl, my wolfgirl, let these thoughts reach her, these words I cannot speak, these words that drift like ash within me—Is that another aspect you had to give to the Goddess? It feels like night and waves when you’re around. Do you not hear the trees crying? They call to you and your Goddess for supplication. Do you know what it is for a wolf to beg? They’re desperate but no one comes and no one helps. The humans destroy everything. I was born human but never again will I be able to see them with anything but hate. Savages who murder and burn the world away. They even forced Sao away and he loves them. He says he doesn’t but he does. Only Sao exists in this world without hate. So full of love, it’s why it all pains him so. To be a god in the way he is means he can no longer be human and so his feelings for them drift away. He forgets what it is and what it means to be human and it pains him deep into the blackhole at his center. It swallows him from within, his burning darkness. Only he is unclouded by hate but he cannot save the world just as he cannot save himself. You follow me, Deathwalker, but it is him you should love and worship. I am a demon, neither wolf nor human, and I hate what I was born as. I reject them and will never forgive them. I will never be human and if I had the strength, I would remove them from this world to save the forest. The world is the forest and the forest is the world. When it dies, all will fade away, even the stars will blink out and the moons will crash upon us.

  The pain and hate flared within her and the stone’s light danced before her face and her lips pulled into a smile revealing sharpteeth and furious eyes. To touch her and hold her and make her whole again. Her tiny fists longing to save the world but she is yet a wolfgirl. My voice finds a space within me and I begin to pour through it.

  Jagged and coarse and crumbling, I will help you, I say and she bolts up and stares at me and I feel naked and alone and sweating through the cold autumn air.

  She smiles and lies down to dream and my heart erupts in blood. Real and living blood. Human, perhaps.

  The squirrel runs in short bursts collecting nuts. He stops and stares at me and his nose twitches and then he hops on with his peculiar almost human features. Its tiny grasping hands groping and scavenging and then it stops and sits upright with its double-curved tail bushing out from its legs which appear as if it wears loose furry trousers rather than its skin.

  It stops beside me and does not notice until I move and then its head jolts in my direction and we wait unmoving.

  She laughs and I fall and the Grey rises and I swim through the shadows and return to the realm of living but she no longer smiles. Her expression one of curiosity and confusion but his eyes never left me for he sees all.

  The pull becomes a dull ache and I spend all these days almost human yet caught within this neverness though the suns continue to blare and her beauty refuses to fade.

  One day I will be you and I will be whole.

  The suns shine and she sits beside the water against her reflection. To see her as one but to see her doubled and joined so by nature’s mirror. Perfection reflection and I do not breathe or blink for fear that anything will be missed. She does, though. The turn of her head and the strands of hair that fall against her cheek, her face in profile, and the wind rises and blows tossing her hair into the air as a red aural flourish. Her hand pulls the loose strands behind her ear and she lowers her eyes and her chin and her heavy eyelids and dark eyelashes capture me as the stars crash down around and the Grey melts away from my very Life. The redleaves frame her body and contrast with her dark skin while appearing as an extension of her scarlet hair as if from her head pours all the forest and all of autumn. A bird sings and her thick lips pull back in a smile creating dimples in her soft round cheeks. So smooth, like glass alight with golden rays. The bird’s trills bring her eyes skyward and she basks in the suns’ ablution dancing through her redhair and touching it with purples and reds and the stone round her neck comes alive and beats with the brightness of these suns but the suns within her shame the celestial bodies.

  Dipping her hand into the water, her doubleself disturbed and oscillating in the concentric arcs that follow the movement of her hand. Those soft tiny hands and thin fingers stretched from a rusted bronze wrist so delicate I fear it will snap against the surface tension and the
creases at the juncture of arm and hand carry the writings of her name and her past and future selves.

  So full of power and potential, she is a waterfall trapped inside the sea and the volcano caught within the belly of a mountain and a star waiting to explode and a galaxy waiting to be born and a sun frozen below the horizon and the dark caught within a nebula.

  My heart falls through my chest and into my hands and I eat it over and over again begging her to share it with me or take it all even if only for today or this moment or forever.

  The darkstar phantoms into the night and leaves her alone beside the fire and her eyes glaze with memories and the pain of the mourning song all the trees sing together in polyphonic harmonies. She tosses and turns but cannot see me watching and swallowing her breaths and counting her heartbeats.

  I hear you, her voice punches through me in gentle syllables like a wavering blade against the center of all that is me and freeing me cutting me loose of all these harbored deadmemories from all those brought to the Goddess, our Mother. You’re here above me, she says and sniffs hard with her eyes closed, I have a question for you. She rolls over and faces the flames, the bearskin wrapped round her, and memories whirl in the dancing flames as they reveal her everchanging effigy. Tears shimmer against the curve of her cheeks like tiny diamonds.

  I long to speak but I grow here in the darkness unable to contain myself with her so near and her warmth so close yet beyond my reach and I’m whole here with her so long as she speaks and her heart beats.

  You said you would help me and I know you meant it. You’ve been with us all this long year and maybe even longer. You were there when they died—her words falter and stumble on collapsing legs—and when Sao became a god but I want to know—the sobs thicken her voice but she pushes through—What is Death like? What is it for?

  The pain in her voice shocks through me and the pieces constructing me sift and begin to fall apart as if this is all sand and I am the mountain becoming a desert. There are no words inside me only a thousand thousand memories that I long to share and to show her because Death is not the end but the grandest beginning leading to a vast expanse of nonexistence within the unity of Life and Light with Mother, our Goddess who is beyond eternity and forever greater than infinity and all that is within me and all around me oscillates and if I could just touch her face, only reach her body.