Twilight of the Wolves (23 page)

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.

I think Death is different for humans and wolves but I want to know that they didn’t suffer and that they’re together again. Please, please tell me where they are and if they’ve finally been bound as one. Her mouth opens and her eyes clench shut but she makes no sound. She makes no sound but fills the space all around with her pain and all the forest cries for her now and she shakes her head and pounds her fist, No no no no no—her voice barely audible or comprehensible and then it becomes that of the wolves for moments that build upon one another and the air turns viscous and tacky with her emotions and to inhale is to bring her inside of me and I am greedy for her and swallow deep and long over and over because she can recreate me from the
inside and I will be her and she will be me and I will belong to her and be made by and for her and then the meniscus cracks and the sphere falls and she speaks in Limpa again—It’s not fair for this to be for me when I can’t feel you—she speaks not to me though I pretend it’s not so—when I can’t see you. Come back to me, please be with me again. Hreao and Faoi, mother, father, I don’t want to be human. I want to run with you across the moon again. You are the moon tonight bathing in starlight—her tears break through and the torrent shakes her body to nothing.

I descend to her unable to remain separate. Spacetime vibrates as her skin waits for mine and my fingertips touch like feathers against her cheek removing the salt of her tears and the hair from her face and she turns slowly to me and she sees me. She sees me. Whole and almost human and alone in the darkness above her. Pressing my palm to her cheek and the warmth of her impossible skin scorches my deadbody and I have been dead for years but never knew till now and I recoil but her eyes open to me and she takes my hand and I break apart into the Grey and disappear from her side.

Where did you go? her voice far away as if underwater or past the stars and I swim through the neverness but can never reach her and then his wolf vice upon my neck and his eyes devour me in horrible flames and madness rises all around and his voice is the mountains in transit growling me into the ash of eternity and the dust and sand that makes the Ocean’s shore and when I open my eyes I am alone and the suns rise but the clouds are thick within me and she is far away but I see her through the Grey. Her shadow and her Light and the bright blue sun she wears around her neck and I run for her.

Wait for me. I’m coming with you.

Within the Grey myriad stars burn but only one tastes and flares with twilight but all is dim and grows dimmer with every venture into the Grey. Have I lost it? I no longer belong and so it
rejects me and reveals nothing of the neverness and so I no longer see with clarity through the everness of Life and Light. The prism I have lived behind becomes opaque and barred from me but I enter nonetheless and search through the neverness to find what she needs for perhaps it will save her and them and all the rest. The Yi exist but where and for how long? All the world burns and constellations die away more every day and it’s all clear within the Grey. I will find it or die within this collapsing plane of shadow and Light. All of spacetime here where realities meet and mate with all the pasts and futures to birth the constant present. But there is nothing now but the stars of our lives and then it fades and I open my eyes to her wolfgirl heart and bloomgod steps, naked but for the bear pelt hanging from her shoulders.

He stares at the bluesun and she watches his face and today it becomes clear that they walk in circles and have perhaps for these many long years in the forest. There are other humans here but they avoid them constantly and the evershifting forest protects them from that which they do not want to see but the wolves are all around but never seen. Their howls fill the days and nights and winter has arrived with all the trees turned white and skeletal and the dead red leaves cover the ground as a thick cover now replaced by the collapsing sky of pure flurries.

I smell it everywhere but find it nowhere, he says in his double godvoice that quakes and grinds and consoles.

Are the Yi real?

He takes the stone around her neck between his fingers, They gave me this and told me to find them before you were born. Xhal says they’re real and—his eyes meet hers then drop—they told me of the Yi, too. But they told me to stay away.

Then why do we go there?

He puts his hand on the nape of her neck, his nails long and black and sharp, They’re the only hope left.

Sao, her eyes on the flickering stone then to his amber eyes, I
don’t want to be human.

He pulls her close and wraps her within his burning embrace and the power and love they share knocks me to my back but the bloodtears bead and streak and evaporate from his face.

The snow is falling and I smile while the flakes land lazily upon my face.

And then the pull. Reaches inside like a thousand blades. Torque and twist. Contracting and ripping. Disassemble and destroy. Disintegrate and decimate for all is desolate. My body. A cage. Burning, torching, gone. Dying. The snow is falling and I am dying. The boys are all dying and the world is a forest. The forest is the world and it is dying. The boys are dying. The world is dying. I am dying. Every movement: broken glass: shattering. The screams. The screams are mine and the trees echo. The sky bellows back yawning into eternity.

Her voice. Inside and all around.

The Grey. Pours into my mouth. Sludge. Drowning. Swallowing. It is within and filling leaving naught left for me. My body filled with Grey eaten by Grey all is Grey and I am Grey and She inside calling pulling dragging and the Light of Her Mother oh Mother burn for You burn with You disintegrate incinerate all is bright and all is Light and this one is I and we will die forever and the voice cries out come to me run from me save me kill me i am dead and we are dying and i died forever ago She Mother You bright Light Life calling taking contorting a song within the Ocean the shore my body belongs to You and i am no one no one filled Grey all Grey all is Light all is bright fragile form crumbling to dust Mother save me Mother this one is i and i am hers no longer Yours let me free free Mother dear sweet terrible Mother and the screams cut through the Grey and my eyes open to him and his hands are soft screams and Death and Life away all today go away die away my love for Life to die forever and ever and always forever over and over and take me
back before it begins my voice and my teeth shatter to dust to dust the sand coats and the Grey Grey Grey Mother oh Mother do not kill me with her need her where is she no Mother You Mother love Mother free Mother this one is i is no one always and forever daughter to the Mother but rises whole and the screams fracturing me apart but he takes me away though the pull tears me from this existence into the next and the Grey expands and contracts and I fight with all that I have but I cannot win or even live through this but screams and Death and Light Her Light Your Light Mother let this one go i have lost my taste searing Mother incandescent celestial forever suns too much golden Light The One Who Lives Your touch too much a thousand suns too much cracks and shambles and all the fibres unwind disassemble and even the sand falls apart the air desolate and nothing and naught Mother Light oh Mother watches this one sink without blink to nothing the Ocean rises the waves drown and the Grey Grey Grey the stars blinking wind drifting me away from i the sky is shouting and the boys are dying and the forest is the world is the forest and he lays me down in melting snow and the heat of the fire touches cold after his furnace touch but she falls on me and she falls on me and she falls on me and all the ghosts scatter and the Grey obliterates and Her voice, Your voice, Mother, oh Mother, bores in no more through her barrier keeping me alive and whole.

Her skin neither warm nor cold but liquid caressing me from an ageless depth and though my eyes see nothing and I have lost all from this world I will remember this when I become nothing forever and even beyond. Forsaken by the Mother Goddess I forsook, I will extinguish never to taste or revel in the unity of spacetime or the perfection of the Light and the Life but it matters nothing compared to this moment in her arms. Her skin covers me and fills me and all that I am dissolves into her, into everything. The trees live inside and the wolves breathe with my lungs and howl through my eyes as the suns race across the sky and the
moons grow and fade in smiles and gasps and smiles and frowns from their seven glowing faces until the suns return and collapse again and the stars carry the pawprints of the bodies all these trees left behind and I know where her wolves have gone and all the sights and worlds they have seen in the depths of space but they rest now on the fragmented moon where they were all born and the moon is a graveyard of the gods.