Twilight of the Wolves (31 page)

Jealous and full of rage, my body playing with me, begging for his touch even as the revulsion grows, filling me with bile and hate. I watch him in the mirror above us as he watches me and there is nothing. This constant betrayal, this love and hate, this begging, this kicking and screaming in my lungs, in my brain, in my heart.

His breath evens and sleep takes him but I wait, staring at my grotesque reflection above in the candlelight. I came here a child and leave here an old shrivelled being, bent by age and rage and humiliation and shame.

Rolling from my captor, I creep to the kitchen where they wait with bated breath until they see my face. Question after whispered question, they part for me and I take the knife and return, feeling a thousand days away, watching myself through the prism of my nightly dream, swimming in the ocean of his blood.

His snorting contorted face, proud even in sleep, unbent by age, confident in his immortality. My hands shake and the tears claw out my eyes as he stirs, his eyelids flutter but he does not wake and my heart is stone. It is a stone dropped into still water.

But he’s there with his children, with our children. At the festivals where he allows us to have our rituals and dances and songs and games. He touches me softly with the back of his hand, grazing it against my cheek, whispering of my beauty. Alexi riding on his shoulders, smiling, pretending to fly.

I slap his face and he wheezes awake and sees me above him, the confusion and candlelight and the metal plate turn his features monstrous. His mouth agape and I’m kicking and screaming within the hollows of his eyes, staying alive, calling out your name to bring you back, and then I feel the vibrations within him. He is about to speak and I put the point of the blade to his throat and he stops, the vibrations run up my arm and I murder the words before they can reach his lips. Aghast, his eyes
soft, pleading, telling me he loves me, and I plunge the blade in as far as it will go. When I pull it back, the blood gurgles and he drowns and I stab his stomach again and again, his hands clutching everywhere, trying to contain his deadblood within him. New strength filling me and I climb on top and take the knife high above my head and run it deep into his chest, the shock of metal on bone and the reverberations of the steel grinding against it and the blood slicking my hands and the handle causes the knife to leave my hands, slicing the palm. Taking it again and again, jamming it down into his chest, hearing the bones chip away, feeling the vibrations, my breath heavy and ragged, his eyes, twin bluesuns in the darkness watching as I lick the blood from my hands, stick my fingers inside him and wrap my hands around his heart to drink him one drop at a time until I am purified.

Spacetime broke. It stuttered and stopped. Hacked to pieces and a life turns in on itself and back around. All these lives inside of me that I lived. From wolf to human, I have walked alone but I remember so much and all the past rushes into the night, written on the sky, projected by the stars. Sao, my Moon, fragmented and morose. Faoi and Hreao dazzling in the sky, pulsing against the blackness of spacetime. The past is alive and the present thins and stretches like a sheet pressed to the blade of humanity. The future. The blank page scarred by all that came before it, dictating how and what may go there. It is mine and ours to write but all the words are old, chosen by a lifetime of broken promises. The weight of my regrets and the pain inflicted by forces I still don’t understand grabs me by the throat and twists the knife deeper and all I taste is blood and his face shines before me. Those golden eyes and those sicklemoons. It never ends. A cycle revolving over and over until we leave this world.

Beyond the walls and through the city of Luca built on the ashes of its own namesake where no one once ruled comes the voice of a multitude, all the youth gathered and their voice
growing in cacophony but together, trying to be one, all words united and the drumbeat kicks through stronger and stronger but the voices rise above.

Humanity rises together against itself, a circle looping over and over. They don’t remember and I wasn’t there but I heard the stories and felt the thousands of deadlives within his cold, cold chest beating only for me. My shadow. All those boys dying with their bodies broken and brutalised, their screams filling the night. What I remember are the trees and the wolves who gave their life for me.

And him.

I loved him.

And he loved me.

I love you.

I still see your face, so sad, and feel the heat of your skin coursing through me and making me stronger, making me whole, filling the hole humanity left within. The humanity I was and am cursed with, the bane that makes this body and life, but I hold onto the wolf inside me. The one who truly is me and the ones who made me. The only family that ever mattered to me.

The revolution begins tonight. It begins now.

Thousands of boys, another generation led to die. And they will and I’m afraid. His blood tacky on my skin and thick in my throat as I watch our boys and girls march through the night. The suns will rise in an hour or two and even as I dread I’m filled with hope. Tonight, I’m still alive. We’re still alive. Screaming through the silence, through twenty years of violence. Their voices rise and I hear mine with them.

Perhaps this will be our last night. The last night in my body and I spend it with you. Your reflection in the glass, in the blood I see upon myself. You’re still alive and you’re with me. The moons glow and maybe one is you, my brilliant Moon, my eternal twilight.

We are the moon tonight and we shall drink the daylight.

This could all last. We march as one and there are no soldiers yet. Maybe Alexi was right and all worked as he planned.

They storm the room and stop before me, covered in his blood. Akira and Akio, Ioan, Remus and Rodica, Dacia, even little Alexandra all staring at me and I drop the knife. The twins take the fat dead Lord Alexander along with Ioan and Remus and throw him through the window, screaming and cursing, laughing and snorting, the glass shattering and I can hear Alexi laughing across the city, echoing through the night, the chaos he started, his hands raising us higher and filling us with hope even as they choke out forgiveness and blot everything in shades of vengeance.

The Yi stood and watched the wolfgirl, her shadow, and her Moon. Waiting, restless, insatiable, their hearts beating and vibrating all of Yiyuyan and then two approached.

Wolf!::Young wolf!::You have::come::brought even another::but also::also Death stands beside you::Wolf!::dear wolf!:: We knew you::you would come::so long ago and::so many years have we waited:: for you::to come to us::yes::yes yes yes::but you are here::you are here and::now::we may begin::come with us::wolf::perfect wolf::and what a perfect wolf!::and who::who is this girl?

They slithered, their bodies ecstatic but the sound of their metal limbs moving, their metal hearts steaming turned their mystique to horror, malevolent and deceptive, and when they approached the wolfgirl, Sao growled and demanded they not touch her.

She didn’t know what to think but she felt afraid and at peace, as if all the world belonged to her and now she had made him whole, opened his heart and set him free, to be the wolf he was born to be.

Oh wolf::wolf wolf::wolf::we would never hurt the girl::wolfgirl::but you brought Death::to the land of Life::to the place::where we no longer::die::why::why why?

Sao snorted and that was enough. Their bodies all swayed together as if this was a dance or a ritual.

It was. Both. Everything else.

The wolfgirl was afraid so she clung to Sao and the shadow kept close because he was most afraid. Quivering, his vibrations working in opposite direction to the Yi, counteracting their sway and their dance, but Sao stepped within it and bent it to his will, the seismic aberrations coursing through the air changing the wolfgirl’s heartbeat, the cadence and rhythm of her blood and she walked with him and would never be afraid because of the promises made.

But the grey shadow, her eunuch, fought every step and begged to leave.

Then the drums and then the steam and then the fire and then the songs. Metallic pounding and grating, loud and deep and boring inside, collapsing veins and closing arteries. The towers rose and spit steam and the bowels of the world vomited fire and all was red and hot, the air wavering from their song and dance. Sao’s heat kept her alive, kept her breathing, and she dove inside of him, his obsidian fur swallowing her, guarding her from all that was without.

Their odd metallurgic voices rising and tinging like a storm of swords raining twisted metal, their inhuman sound a gash through the bubble that contained them, fragmenting spacetime all around and with each drumbeat, caustic and on fire, the ripples became waves, but Sao followed them deeper into the heart of Yiyuyan.

A city of fire and iron, Death and poison, where organic and construct met and mated and recreated life. Spires and chapels, steam thick in the air from yawning cavities deep into the world glowing red from an uncanny heatsource deep in the bowels of a world they pulled from the ether and inhabited with metallic mutilated men singing merrily in language that clanged and pounded. It worked its way inside her, a parasite needling into
her brain, into her body, listening to her, hearing her, copying and multiplying, becoming more and more within, feeding off her life and her pulse and her very thoughts, her fears and desires. The language dove within and did not rewrite but copied until the copies became too much to be ignored and her brain took note and began to decipher the code even as the metal words stole away the old ones, the wolf ones and the human ones, and all turned to iron.

But Sao rose, his fur bristling, his tails waving, and he spoke within her, his voice everything, a thousand voices but only his, the ocean inside a mountain or the waterfall within a well, Do not fear them and do not listen.

The wolfwords rushed through and washed away the ironwords, the poison language of Yiyuyan, the city deep in the bowels of the space between worlds, where spacetime refracts and only just stays together.

A great spire of white smooth metal rose straight up and unimaginably high surrounded by the lunar flowers and Sao’s body scorched and soothed and the wolfgirl dipped inside him to feel what he felt but he blocked her and instead stepped within her and sang for her. He sang for her along with the lunar flowers and her body melted into his and they existed within the blaring and tumultuous metallic cacophony, a dissonant percussive flood and they all sang and danced and beat their metal again and again until their voices rose and Sao slid the girl from his back.

He pressed his snout into the wolfgirl’s face and nuzzled her as she threw her arms around him. Her heart faltered and cracked but she could not say why. The look in his eyes and she started screaming but couldn’t make a sound as he stepped towards them and their metal arms and fiery skin and black lifeless eyes. Sao walked away from her and she felt the absence as a vortex ripping her into a thousand pieces and into a thousand directions. But her shadow was there and he covered
her. For the first time, he initiated contact and touched her and she felt all that was within him again. All the Deaths and lives and memories swirling around the hollow of his body and she knew that he was barely alive, a small flickering flame caught within the hurricane of demons and gods. He held her tight and he smelt of ash and cinder and nothing. Nothing and no one, he clung to her and spoke, There are better worlds than these, but she didn’t understand, didn’t want to understand, for her Moon was walking away to the flowers, to that great white spire glistening in the light of distant stars, of different realities.

The Yi spoke but she could not understand and Sao reached the base of the spire and turned to her. His face and body flashing from human to demon to wolf and cycling so over and over but his eyes remained the same deep amber eyes, even when his body became human, he kept the eyes of the wolf. His tiny lithe frame and his great hulking wolf body, a transient temporality.

He smiled weakly, his eyes washing out, tears flooding and she felt them in her own eyes and the shadow spoke again, There are better worlds than these, but still she didn’t understand but only kept shaking her head mouthing No no no in every way she knew how but just not ever aloud.

He howled and her vision went black and the Yi fell silent and she heard him disappear, his life rushing out with each pulse of his heartbeat. The scent of godblood was thick in the air, transforming it, and the Yi erupted and her chest burned and she screamed from the pain and pang that she already knew would never end. She felt her body changing, parts of her falling away, new ones growing, but most of what she felt was a fade and the pain and confusion blotted out the loss of Sao, her Moon, her everything, and she was unaware of the violence swallowing them or the way her shadow fought to keep her alive and she would spend the rest of her life wondering if it was worth it, to stay alive, to breathe without Sao.

They came for her and Death took her by the hand and
erupted into spacetime, a grey world swallowing them and she felt him fading and dying with every moment they spent inside that hazed halflife. The fury beyond them in Yiyuyan escalated and Sao’s body was ripped apart and she saw his blood on their faces, in their mouths, and his eyes. His eyes watched her still without blinking, without dying. He watched her for as long as he still existed with all Yiyuyan crumbling to ash and dust around him.

And then she was awake in the forest and she was human. The forest was silent and her shadow lay beside her.

Shaking him, her shadow, he was soft and pliant and fragile as if his skin was made of paper and his bones were made of twigs. His body gave way beneath her hand and she rolled him to face the light and she saw his contorted face without eyes or a tongue. Handless and bloodless, he was shrivelled and dead but there was no one to take him home to the Goddess he left behind. He died alone for her and she knew he loved her and if she had tears within her she would have given him all that he asked for.