Twilight of the Wolves Read online

  The Twilight Days, my birthday, and they rise together to sit and breathe in silence in their new-god nakedness. His face placid but sad as if he prays for sunlight and receives only rain. His is the face of a man who dreams of the end but always wakes. Again. Alone. There is a sadness as deep as his power or maybe deeper and older. The sorrow of a man who has lost all that was his Life. His pointed wolf ears droop and his sickle moons’ obsidian incandescence, two blackstars ripping the suns from the sky but washed in twilight. He hears my heartbeat and sees my every thought but I fear him and his dark eminence. A reluctant god trudging after dreams and the promise of better days: the past. He longs for the humanity he lost so many years ago and his heart no longer beats but his blood still lives if only for her, Aya.

  She is the fulcrum of this universe we have found ourselves in. Without her there is no us. She is the pillar of our lives and we chase after her to make us human again.

  Shifting uncomfortably, she watches him so still and far away and it hurts her to see him so sad. Every day her heart breaks for him but he cannot see it. Selfabsorbed yet selfless, he gives all to her but cannot even see the one thing she wants. The one thing she dreams of and prays for every night.

  The suns circle the horizon and all the world is a forest is the world is Twilight.

  The wolves howl and she smiles but it cracks and he takes her hand in his and she opens her eyes and turns to his stillness. She squeezes and I feel it within me: elation.

  Night never descends but they lie to rest and he kisses her forehead and enters the trees to run with the wolves or speak to the moon or escape from his cursed godhood.

  She speaks knowing I’m already here and have been and will always be, All I want is for him to smile and mean it. Only once, to be happy.

  I move into the firelight and sit across from her.

  You still dress like a dead thing but you’re alive now and soon it’ll be warm again. Summer. Will you still wear that dark heavy robe?

  I drop the hood covering me.

  Your hair’s growing, she smiles and lies back to the myriad stars and holds the stone to her face, Do you remember when you said you’d help me? She rolls onto her side and her eyes shift between me and the stone.

  I will do anything for you.

  Sitting up and then crawling to me, she puts her arms around me and my body melts into her skin to be carried away and she breathes into my ear, Thank you.

  PART II

  I am the moon and the voice of a thousand thousand wolves running through the twilit sky with only trees to guide me. The wind on my fur, the grass on my paws, and all our voices united, no longer in mourning, but calling for the night, for the time of eternal twilight where the seven moons and the two suns reign and all the world is a forest and the forest is all the world. The scent of the moon and we race after the lunar bloom and revel in their white petals. Nothing will ever feel like this and our hearts swell and burst in ecstasy and the wolves multiply and we all stitch together to the great black wolf of eternity whose blood beats through all of us and whose voice speaks for all of us. The Wolf who swallowed the Moon and begot our people. The Wolf who conquers the night and the Light. And He rolls through the petals and drinks in their scent, expands beyond his skin and fur to connect beyond only wolfhood and becomes all things, from woman to tree and even to the rivers and oceans. But then the field is on fire and we scream and growl within the great Wolf who embodies us all and the doublemen with redskin and metal voices clang and attack and they take Him but He does not scream, only stares at me with those sad wolfeyes and I wake gasping, the tears streaming as Alexi opens the door of the dormitory, the light following him in.

  He tells us to wake in accented Limpa though it’s his mother’s tongue, stolen from him by these yellowhaired barbarians and their guttural bellows. His smile wide and dirty, Today is the day, he says, rubbing his dark hands through his redhair. He peers back to the closed door and claps once, dances a few kicks, Today is the day!

  We rise and the stench of sweat and old sex is thick in the air but the decrepit odors locked within me halt my breath. Something or everything rots within me after nearly thirty years of waking and living and sleeping. All that is within begins to decay and I’ve not long left to live. Every bone aches, from my knuckles to my toes, the knees and hips especially, the bones chipped and cracked and wearing away more with each passing day. The nights get harder to sleep through and my chest is full of phlegm and withered blood vessels making every breath shallow. My sagging breasts and broken heart, signs and metaphors.

  I roll from my low bed, Genevieve’s thick lips in a puckered smile pungent with the foul scent of youthful human dreams and grotesque on her breath when she laughs and calls me Auntie. Still a child but she believes she’ll live forever, as we all do, at one time and then several more. Tonight is the beginning of something great. Or so the silent whispers would have us believe but I’ve grown too old for belief in the silent words that burrow deepest inside.

  Genevieve. An Invader’s name, but she’s slaveborn, her father Vulpen and mother Garasun, giving her the features of both but the memory of neither. She screamed when she was born and then her father screamed as he watched the blood drain from his lover. The echoes fill this house, all the dead screaming over lovers, mothers, children, and sisters. When her father died, she became just another orphan to this city without memories.

  We rise and begin the day though the suns have yet to dawn but today is different. A jolt of energy through the air and the young men and women around me smiling, squeezing hands, a song building inside of them.

  Alexi touches my hand and shoulder smiling with broken teeth, all ten years of his life bursting through his blue eyes, The revolution begins tonight, Mother Wolf.

  The revolution begins tonight and thousands more will die. Another generation lost to violence and blood and mud. No one left remembers the old days of fire and I wasn’t a part of them but when I emerged the halfmetal men with white skin and bluesun eyes ruled everything, burning down the forest to make their cruel monuments to a sphere covered with faces.

  Twenty years and all is forgot. Almost 20,000 days since the day I lost everything that mattered. Since I became human. Since I became a slave.

  But tonight the revolution begins yet it is only sadness that creases my face. I am old and all the wolves have left me.

  All the wolves died and the nights and days crash and echo cruelly in the howling absence.

  Twenty years of bondage and tonight they rise and I will watch, a crippled and lame and cataracted old wolf.

  I will not last long.

  They talked and she watched but listened to her heart beating in double, one for humanity and one for the wolf inside. The man, her shining midnight star, and the eunuch, her shadow. The journey to Yi—the nameless eunuch spoke sparingly as if it hurt him, his face contorting and his voice raw—will be treacherous.

  You can take us there. You know the way. I will rip down spacetime if it will take us there.

  You may have to, Darkstar.

  The eunuch never spoke his name and trembled beneath his glare. Sao was not tall but he towered over the shadow who cowered and crept, never standing straight or walking unbent. The wraith and the demon, the wolfgirl’s only family.

  Her double heartbeat connected to the veins and arteries of the forest which are the veins of the entire world. Her shadow stretched directly to the heart of the world. She felt every palpitation as if the very center of her was connected by the strings of an immense harp binding every tree to the world to the wolves to her and even to Sao though Sao, as far as the girl knew or could tell, was unaware of the true power within him: the same power that courses through all existence and energises the planet. He carried the weight of the world within him because he didn’t understand that he was everything and it was all him, if only he opened his heart to the nature of the wolf. Speaking with their wolftongues and beating with their wolfhearts but he came late t
o this wolflife and so it was unnatural to him and he fought endlessly against his godhood and tried to remain human. The humans he hated and loved in equal measure. The humans he spent his entire life trying to be a member only to be rejected and so he ran from them even as he sought them.

  His heart had only been broken and shattered but never put together. His shadow and darkness so thick and opaque they coruscated with and without him.

  When the wolfgirl held him in her arms she smelt the scent of an ancient memory and heard an echo deep in his heart when she kept her ear pressed tight. A name in a language she didn’t know. Laska. A name from before her birth but deep in the forest and she traced the name and the song of the trees down the many veins away from the heart and center of the world to a small enclosed village stained by the blood of gods. Wolfeaters, murderers, and her face: dark and red and so much like the wolfgirl but so incomparably different that she did not blame her shining wolfdemon for his youthful love and the way he relived all those ancient tender touches when the night fell upon him.

  The Yi will bring only pain, the shadow said and Sao snorted, raging within, but he contained it, his neck muscles pulsing violently, grinding his teeth and telling the shadow that the Yi are their only hope, that the Yi hold the secret to solving all of this, to turning him back, to bringing the future, possibly revitalising the forest, saving the world and the shadow only shook his head staring at the ground muttering his noes and begging Sao not to go, not to take the wolfgirl.

  The wolfgirl asked the shadow if he would help her and reminded him of a promise and the shadow fell to his knees, face in his hands, quivering like an autumn leaf, muttering, Please don’t go there, over and over. This one begs you not to go to them.

  The house is alive with us, the servants, the nameless and faceless, the shadows forced to build, to clean, to cook, to die, but never to live. Most are young, born to this life, exchanging knowing nods and meaningful hand squeezes, calling one another Sister, the old way, from before they were born, calling me and the few other survivors from before the Invasion Auntie.

  Limpa, the language of insurrection, even amongst the Garasun and Drache here in Luca, the language spoken when the Invaders aren’t in earshot or when the youth are feeling exceptionally petulant. They don’t remember and I wasn’t there but I’ve seen the mutilated bodies of the children who died in the Generational War that tore through the three peoples of this land. Vulpe was once a symbol of freedom, a loose federation of states and peoples all united under the same banner and a single council governed by women. I’ve heard the stories just as these children have, all the aunties feeding it to them in the dark dormitories, telling them of freedom, of the choices available, of the things to be seen. No one mentions the destruction wrought upon the world by these same wondrous times of the past. No one talks of wolves and trees. No one talks of the boys and young men sent to burn alive on the battlefields spread everywhere.

  I wasn’t there but I’ve seen them dying. The boys are dying, a sentence, an echo that lunged within me and will never leave me.

  I once had a shadow who showed me a Goddess and the Deaths of thousands. Children with smoldering faces and melted limbs or missing limbs. I saw a shore and an ocean and the child Goddess dreaming everything. A cycle, endless and in constant repetition.

  The spacious halls, purple Soarean rugs and arched ceilings lit by ornate chandeliers, covered in tapestries and opulent finery: statues and paintings of their sphere and their kings and nobles and so on, ostentatious, all given to dramatic flourishes and dark colors and religiosity. The sphere. Large and gold with a thousand faces covering its surface.

  Seeing them conjures him and the heavy metal hand he forced onto my shoulder, instructing me:

  Now, my dear, the sphere of faces represent all the dead who watch over us from beyond the Gates of Life and who we will become after we die. There are only so many of us that exist. A fixed number of lives for this world and we are in a constant and continual cycle of living and dying, of being and nonexistence. Each face is a soul and a soul is in each of us, here—his human hand pressing against my chest—It is the soul that animates us. Do you understand?

  I nodded and he laughed, Some day you will. We are all of us in there—he pointed to the sphere of faces—Every life that has ever lived and will ever live exists there. All pasts and futures are written there and our actions in this life determine our next life. Your continent is a sad and sorry one populated by the degraded, but your next life may be your salvation. You may be Rocan or even my bride. Or maybe a goddess.

  His laughter, a thousand needles in my spine.

  At first they fought the Deathwalkers, our shadows, the Crows, who they considered a stupid primitivism. His deep voice, and his stench covering me. Naked in the corner of his bed, cowering but not crying, his every word was a knife.

  Your land is an ancient and confused one. The people here have no sense of value or pride or honor. Still basking in the superstitions and myths, binding your own hands and will by the false gods and ancient lies that cover this land as your forest swallows the continent. Your land is soft and beautiful and it mystifies you causing you to believe some force beyond you is at work, this child goddess or the wolves. The trees that you worship, it would be funny if it wasn’t so sad. Beasts and plants and dreams. This land is a dream, a miracle, but it demands to be used. To be formed. There is only wildness here, wild thoughts and wild hearts. Roca is a land of fire and rock and iron and smoke. Over centuries, we created the world from nothing. The suns burn life away and the winter freezes it away and the rocks choke it away, but we bled it into existence. All is in our hands. All things are possible. As we created life from the dead and inert islands of Roca, so too did we create the sphere and the cycle after shedding the blood of the old gods. Those gods never existed and neither do yours. The wolves and deer are not gods but beasts who learnt to talk.

  He talked on and the images and lives given to me by the eunuch gave me hope. One cannot fight a war against Death no matter the effort. Death will always win, singing everyone to their end, to the ocean and the shore. And I disappeared within myself to those trees I was born to.

  The insects flying, the fecundity of grass and roots and leaves swirling like a vortex within me, in the hollow recesses left by all that I lost.

  The Goddess is everywhere and forever. She’s not a matter of belief or trust, just the inevitability of our mortality.

  Hello, Auntie, Dacia’s voice thick with smoke from years ago, from the Invasion. Old enough to remember, her Limpa lacks the awkward constructions of those born into slavery, those who learn in secret and hide in plain sight.

  Morning, Dacia. What today?

  She sighs and wipes her hands on her dress, Bastards want elk.

  Give them deer. They couldn’t tell fish from pig.

  We don’t have any deer.

  Give them cat.

  Dacia laughs, a thick smoky bellow. When she can speak she tells Alexandra to catch one of the house cats and I dice the carrots and potatoes to fry in the catfat.

  The war ended but not in peace. Two generations of men lost and all the land scarred from the constant fighting and all the people starving, raising arms in revolution against their own rulers, the humans here were weak and dying, already dead, when the Invaders came, the halfmetal monsters, these white barbarians.

  To listen to them at the square or when they speak to us or over the noisemachines they brought with them, one would think they saved us. Maybe they did. Maybe without them the humans of this land would’ve continued to die and die and die and burn. They came by the thousand and marched right into Vulpe and Glass and Drache and ordered surrender. In a matter of weeks the war was over and the land fell under their rule. The Federation, the Kingdom, and the Dragonlords all fell beneath their steel heel. They saved us from ourselves. They call us savages and animals, forestdwelling creatures and so they have bent their nature that way, debasing us while they civilise
us. To be a wolf again, I would trade all the long years I lived since that day. That day when your eyes closed and I felt it all, but the tears come again already, so easy, even to think, to remember is to die again the way I’ve died every day since that one. Thousands and thousands and thousands and nothing will put me back together.

  With breakfast cooked, little Alexandra and smart Alexandra serve Lord Alexander, the master of this home since Luca was rebuilt upon its own ashes and blood. Built by him. Built for him.

  The many years here, every night so cold and spent in fear. Fear of being taken, of finding relief in the screams that were not mine, and hating myself for all of it, and praying for Lord Alexander’s Death. Praying to the Goddess. Every night, the older slaves would comfort us girls. The gentle hand of Polina, from Drache, her big black eyes and lips filling the moonlit space and teaching us our history. Reminding us who we were. Who we are. Giving us life to hold onto, memories to lean on, and a culture impossibly old.

  Why is he here, Auntie?

  Child, Lord Alexander came before the war and began constructing Luca while the war yet raged. He had been here long before, when Luca was the greatest landport the suns had ever seen. They say master fell in love with the city and the people. Master’s friends mock him about this, how he loved the savages so much he tries to recreate them. Oh, if you could only see the look on master’s face when he’s embarrassed! He fell in love with Luca and so he set out to recreate it, but to make it in his image, and in doing so he destroys it anew every day. Bastard and his men stole the many orphan girls wandering the area. Taking them, he forced them into sex and his soldiers and many others paid the monster to rape our children. He is a man, and, worse than that, he is a white man made of metal. Heartless and inhumane, he has made himself a monster, as all the westerners across the seas have. Possess and control and destroy. These are all they know and all they will ever know. Be strong children and listen to me. These are your sisters and aunts. They have been ravaged and tortured but we will have vengeance. Remember that. The fat bastard took the old capitol of the world and filled it with riches and traded with all sides of the Generational War, giving weapons and lodging and children to the many soldiers and generals and merchants. He was the only merchant in town and he took advantage of the poor and defeated men of our lands, so war weary they were barely even human. He took over a grave and made it a mockery of the oncemighty Luca. It will never be what he fell in love with. Never again. A human cannot build Luca, nor can one rule it. We understood that, all three of the kingdoms, and so Luca bloomed without guidance or governance to be the pinnacle of art and culture and commerce.