Twilight of the Wolves Page 18

  The boy is dead and one with everything. The boy is dead and countless more are dying, their blood drying within their veins turning to dust and washing away in the rain or blown away as dust in the wind.

  Where do circles end? The words return again and again, the leaves springing to Life and blooming green to their fiery autumnal reds until they brown and fall and wither only to be swallowed by the roots to become leaves of green and leaves of red and fall as leaves of brown in an endless loop repeated over and over and over from now into forever.

  The One Who Lives is always another from before time first cast a shadow to be measured and on to the future past humanity’s conclusion. Mother, our Mother, dear sweet Mother, only You will live forever in a thousand different skins that are always the same heart born from the Womb of the World carrying all the memories of spacetime from past to future and their collision that becomes now. Where do circles begin?

  Who is it? Who is it? I hear you but I cannot see you. I can feel you. The air’s different, the texture thick and tacky, sticking to me. My chest full of bricks, who is it?

  Speak. I hear you and feel you, can almost taste you. Cold and wet and dark, sour.

  It’s you, aye? It’s come to this.

  Where am I?

  Where are my men? Has it come to this? Locked in my body, sightless with the Crows. Come, come, take me away. I’ve heard your song before. Many times. But I have never seen the Goddess child, never felt the cold hands of Death upon my face, but now the time has come, aye? Aye. Death be not proud, She comes for us all.

  She comes for us all, but what happens to me? To live. To live forever and so I left nothing to die for.

  Nothing and no one. Everyone I once knew has been taken and drowned under the tides of war and I have not seen home since seven Twilights ago.

  All is dead or dying. I am nothing but another man dying to meet Her, aye.

  Hold me, please. Don’t let me go. You’re a man, no, a boy. A child. Are all you Crows children? Please, don’t let me go. I’m drowning, I think, on my own blood. I can’t feel anything, not even your hands on my face. Please, I don’t want to die.

  Within fills and without withers. Color rots and slips from the world that humans destroy day after day and season after season. The forest murdered more and more by their caustic and callous hands. The many lives inside swirl and slosh around in the honeycombs within where all the memories recorded wait to be copied down a day or a year or a century from now. All the pain, the suffering of civilisation, the Death of a generation of a species. The pull calls and tugs at the center and the Grey expands to Life’s antithesis. All is black and blood and Death and hate. The Dream distorted and perverted by the million hands of humanity.

  Where do circles end?

  Nothing changes but the faces that disintegrate and drift away in the final breath of the song when they see Mother, dear Mother, and Her song carries them home.

  War all of the time.

  His skin melts to the bone and fuses with the armor he wears though the rifleshots bore through as if the steel were paper. His eyelids gone and he stares into the bright bluesun sky seeing the moment he became a man through the Deathfog surrounding him and the memory cascades and his lipless face bares rotten teeth.

  She came to him in the grove where wild roses sometimes grew and her hair was black as her skin and her eyes were velvet and she spoke in rhymes begging him to follow her through the maze where he lost himself inside of her until her father appeared and chased him through the bushes into the thicket but he escaped into the forest and returned home by way of the mountain stream.

  His boneclaw hand stretches weakly into the space where his memories project in the corner of the sky beginning to blush with the redsun. His memory dissolves with his feet in the Ocean and Mother holding him, Her song pure and carrying him away.

  The dirigibles fight overhead with men swinging back and forth between them while some fall the great distance to the world where their bodies liquefy against the ground. Fire rains and the forest screams ablaze with millennia of memories burning away while the scent of burning hair and flesh reeks across the battlefield.

  A roar, the hurricane of beating wings sonicbooms through the air and the dirigibles erupt in dualpulses. The dragon swoops through the air neither silent nor fearful but with the rage and wisdom of eternity. The very air quakes and the suns eclipse behind his wings beating against the world and everything becomes stagnant and frozen but the dragon who rips through spacetime and covers the distances between points without travelling them. The gods of the sky and the sun, older than wolves, the first children. Volcano heart, the fire inside that burns the very sky away.

  Havoc on the battlefield, the dragon swallowing and killing and maiming soldiers by the hundreds, changing the shape of the battle and burning humanity to scorched meat and ash. Nothing is left behind from the blaze. Not bone or skin or even echoes.

  Dragons eradicate existence.

  Circles end with dragons.

  It lands and roars fracturing the sky and blotting the suns crippling the humans who hear.

  In the Grey the dragon sees us and we hide in this reality of suffering less the dragon rip through the boundaries and enter the Grey to find Mother, sweet Mother. The One Who Lives, and the hands squeeze with the dragon holding all the rage from within pouring out.

  The shell is weak and there is no escape from dragons. This one shall not fear Death but carry these incinerated corpses and the handfuls of ashes to Mother, dear Mother.

  The water is cool and the skin accepts the moisture while all the deadskin scrubs away and leaves the shell clean and pure. 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. In the blackness behind the eyes the dragons grow and punch through the sky and through eternity. Large and furious and made only for Death, the terrifying gods of the skies born from the suns’ communion. Forever they last, they reign, consume, destroy, but rebuild. The stories are of their capacity for more. Their eternal minds create and expand all human endeavors and so the dragons are their sisters and mothers and gods and inventors. Within the Grey dragons are not light or shadow but whole. Dragons. Scales and fire and stone and fiery blood and wind and a body that never ends. A circle of power that breaks the cycles of humanity. Dear Mother, our Mother, protect us forever. Protect us in this neverness of shadow and stars. This one will die forever for you, Mother, sweet Mother.

  The seasons turn and all the world burns from this neverending violence where all the children of this lost land die and scream and fall apart and all are taken to Mother, dear Mother. For You we take the lost and lonely and dying over and over in this circle of pain and fear and hate and violence. Always violence. The boys with lost limbs, without the Light in their eyes, without a heartbeat. All their last heartbeats and breaths and all their memories exist within and the honeycombs fill to bursting but all ordered and arranged until they can be written and copied to become a part of the Memories of the World and make all these millions dead and within into an everlasting aspect of unity. To live is to die but first we must die and die forever.

  But they never get to live. A generation raised within this war from all the nations already burnt away by the hands of kings and nobles and those who order their youth to die so that they may keep their opulent homes and corpulent bodies.

  The world is starving. The world is burning.

  The forest is dying.

  Wolf howls through the nights and the days crack through the Grey and the circles that chain Life into this everfeeding loop of pain and Death and the loss of Light so they may commune with You, Mother, sweet Mother. The wolves howl but run away and hide from the violence
of men and their destruction of the past and all the history and memories of the forest. The deepest memories on the planet whose roots touch the very center of everything and even the dragons will not harm them.

  Only humans are so cruel and shortsighted.

  The dragons and the wolves haunt the world and humans rule it. Viciously. This modern world is a new one without room for the old gods but with no new gods to replace that which they lose. The balance all shifted and only Mother, our Mother, can restore the world and keep the heart of humanity beating even as they cut off their legs to feed their mouths. All is violence. All is lost.

  The Grey thickens and the constellations die in fitful gasps and then the pull returns for it never ceases for boys are always dying and the pull cripples weak and the pull drags from within through the Grey and the boy is a shallow light amongst the millions of others and the hands take his gasping bleeding skull and the boy is dying and the song rises and pours into the forever night of Death.

  The long line of humans in chains, the threat and stench of violence fills the air and two wolves burst from the treeline to rip the whitemen apart with their enormous jaws and animal fury. The wolves take ironball after ironball and the men keep dying with limbs ripped from their bodies and a man glows. His body like a new star bursting into impossible Life. Within the Grey he is a supernova with a nebula heart and it is all rising and growing and he expands to the limit of humanity, his Light too strong, too much, and he runs his hands against the bounds and constraints of humanity, then pushes through, his Light disintegrating the chains that keep him human. The wolves are dying, their bodies whole in the Grey, white and brilliant and bleeding from everywhere. The man who is no longer a man extinguishes all other lights and lives leaving all the whitemen dead and he consumes their flesh and he is now whole in the Grey and he turns his eyes to see and the space within collapses and the shell quakes at his furious gaze but we daughters begin our song and sing it till all the bodies can be taken to You, Mother, oh Mother.

  What creatures are these expanding beyond Life and Light?

  The whitemen, their hearts gone and their bodies broken and twisted and shattered and pulsing metal and dead. Their iceblue eyes stare vacant and there is nothing inside them but steam. No memories and no Light and only the complete absence of Life. Through the Grey, digging deeper in search of the fading existence they once held inside, there is nothing. No Life and no Light and nothing to unite them with You, Mother, sweet Mother.

  The man lies with the wolves and touches their Death and there is a girl who is more than a girl. Radiant and shimmering with blackness and the surging energy of a wolf. A shade and a Light in the Grey impossibly both yet neither. Outside the Grey and she is crying and her body shrivels and she is the last heaving breaths of those great celestial wolves before they become one with the moon again and one with this world of a forest. Her face to the sky and she is beautiful and the pull from within but different. Not pulling away and dragging through spacetime and the Grey to take the newdead to infinity but pulling towards her as if she is a planet or the moons or the suns with her fiery hair and thick lips, her redbrown skin and small rounded nose. She is a child but she is beautiful. The softness of her and the scent of wolf and human in equal measure and in sync and holding itself together by a bond thicker than all human ties and wolfing cries. The man who is more than a man takes her in his arm and their darkLight shames the suns disappearing into the sky and spacetime.

  The song continues but these dead have lost all. There is nothing within their shells and the girl consumes all vision and night falls as they lie with the wolves and hold the deadgods in their arms and caress them with their hands. The man is a burning star shooting through spacetime with his unfathomable white hair and his wolf scent and his golden eyes seeing us daughters even within the Grey. He hears and sees and smells all that we are and his anger does not rise or flash but floods through the aspects composing his human form. No more a human, he has ended their circles and turned them into only husks.

  He consumed their humanity and left nothing for the Light, for Life, for You, Mother, dear Mother. What is this creature who beats like a wolf but looks like a man? He burns from within like a god and his power transcends in the ways that only the gods know. Black and endless, spacetime growing thick around him, the blackness of his dualmoon ripping the night screaming from the sky. His shadow so thick it is an ocean of darkness beneath his feet.

  And what is this girl?

  What is this pull?

  The song continues but this one is lost, tangled in their incomprehensible web.

  Far away the wolves howl and the forest screams.

  He digs one hole and lays both of them inside and she cries and cries and cries but the moons do not glow and the suns shine as they do every day. Standing over the mound of turned-over dirt, he becomes a statue and she falls apart in his arms.

  They walk through the forest and do not stop and her gravity pulls. In silence with the weight of the forest grown heavy with all their thoughts that course from their bodies and enter the air pungent with their memories of wolves and howlings and the soft fur and kind words.

  There are no words between them and the Grey expands to reveal him whole with his eyes watching and so the Grey closes to escape his sight and follow in the trail of their starlit tears.

  She follows behind him with her eyes on the ground and her chest full of bees. His Light fills the space between leaves and trees and blades of grass making every step he takes a new dawn and she follows it from horizon to horizon of his aimless journey. Watching him. She watches him even with her eyes closed and through sleep in the fragments of dreams and memories that swirl within her as a torrent of emotions and sensations of the pasts and futures and all of spacetime condensed behind her closed shifting eyelids.

  At night he watches her sleep but he listens and sees everything. Crouched over her and breathing in all that she feels and dreams. His face ravenous and consoling and sorrowful and hopeless. His eyes bore through and within and there is no escape from his terrible golden eyes that glimmer through the shadows and explode within the Grey.

  Cower. The body disassembles before his gaze and pulls all things within apart and the skin is pins and needles and crawling and the breath becomes ragged and the heart beats dark with all Light vacant as a sludge through the veins screaming within amongst the Memories of the World housed here and all runs in opposite directions sifting away if only in the hopes of escaping his destructive oppression. Those immortal immolating eyes containing and exuding his godlike flame incinerating all that was human within him and leaving him past the threshold of mortality without the possible return. He broke through all that made him a man and now burns forever and will live far beyond the years of manhood into this demonic force in the shell of a man. His cheeks touched by sickle moons glittering in blackness ripping all Light from the world and the night shaming the stars and swallowing the moons.

  There is an old story possibly from worlds ago about a wolf. It may have been the first wolf who lived far before his kind was locked in eternal slumber within the moon. It was a great black wolf who lived alone in the world with only the dragons. Where the wolf came from or how it was born may never be known but it is recorded that this wolf bit through the moon we call fragmented. With a single bite it took the moon apart and there expelled its progeny and the entire future of the species became locked within the seventh moon. Possibly to escape the dragons’ fury or perhaps as a promise and gift to the future. The great black wolf saw across spacetime and left the vacant world of fire and rock to the gods of the sky and suns taking to the moons and binding its people to them forever.

  This man who is no longer a man but the embodiment of the wolf brings this story to mind. He is searching for that which he cannot name but his human heart longs for it and fights within him constantly beating against the organ that holds him all together and makes him more than man and less than wolf but a god or a de
mon all the same.

  He is a circle contained without beginning and without end. He was once a man but that chain is broken and he will never be a wolf so that chain never existed. He is locked in the stasis of synthesis. Living and breathing and shining like a nebula across the immense distances of spacetime glowing and breathing in the deepness of the sky. The great black expanse of night lit by the moons and the stars.

  There is a song inside him and his seismic words fall into the air as vibrations in the language of wolves.

  I am the moon tonight bathing in starlight.

  Words he speaks without a voice and he sees his words upon the mouth whispering his own thoughts soundlessly.

  What do you want?

  He speaks and the shell collapses and the heart corrodes and the Grey expands and his Light is too strong and his voice grumbles once more but the words come unclear and to escape is all but her pull roots the shell and the eyes watch. Frozen. No escape within the Grey or the shadows flooding the trees and all the world is shadow but for his terrible eyes crushing all things within.

  He turns away, watching the moons shine.

  Fingering a glowing rock round his neck he says, I promised to never hurt. To never kill but it’s all I’ve ever done. They called me a demon and I fought harder to keep myself human but now.

  Staring at his hands he speaks no more and the emotions pour into the sky as a tempest with his tears of blood. The scent and taste of human flesh caught all round and he drops his head into his hands and waits for the suns to rise once more.

  Two new naked gods with impossible shadows walk the world away from the war raging. Years have gone by yet the killing continues. The pull and the Grey envelopes and the boys are dying and within the bodies pile as mountains of ash drifting in the softest of winds blown from Your lips, Mother, dear Mother. The boys die but the suns rise and fall and the seasons change and Twilight returns and the commemoration of Death and Life for the Death given in order to die forever for You, Mother, oh Mother. This one is Your daughter and will die forever.