Twilight of the Wolves

by Edward J. Rathke

  First winter comes after a thousand dead boys travelled through this one to the Ocean and the shore and You, Mother. This one is Your daughter and will die forever but the pain reminds the shell of Life and memories of a past existence flood with the memories of all that passed through. This war is old and will be long.

  Drifting through the air in thousands of particles of white their flow disrupted and disturbed by the silence of Death. There is a boy but he is alive. He is small and he is young and he is afraid. He carries the dead but he does not cry. He digs holes in the ground through the mud and the rock and the blood and the Death. Pulling the bodies into the holes, he covers them with their own mud made blood. There are no tears inside him and no words within him but we hear him screaming and thrashing and dying for all is lost. All is black and dead and all is lost but he stays alive. He is staying alive, kicking and screaming within every silent breath shuddering through his body. We approach and our song surrounds. We take him in our hands but he thrashes more violently but we restrain him and sing to him but he fights to keep his life and to console his dead but he is ours and the suns light up his world even as the Grey expands around us and his scream releases into the daylight but we take him to You, Mother, oh Mother. He is Yours. He will die so he may live and die forever as Your hands and mouth. Limp but burning in our hands we take him through spacetime and the monastery expands and takes texture and shape and we stand before You with another daughter. We are Your daughters and we will die forever.

  The memories retch and the words pour into the pages for a moon cycle. All the dead boys falling to the page to become one with all else. The Memories of the World taken from all beings who know the Goddess and so all the remembered history of the world exists here, imperfect and complete from the planet’s first dawns to its latest midnights. All that was within washed clean by expelling all into words in order to recreate all that the world was so it may forever be. All that was never becomes part of the ever.

  Snowfalls and the river is cold beyond sensation but the ablution must be performed. Born each day to die again and again. Daughters to the Mother. 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.

  The boys are dying and they exist within. From winter to summer and back to winter, the boys die and they are dying even now with the pull ripping all that is within and the memories scream with their last breaths that remain here until this one returns to You, Mother, our Mother. These hands and this breath remove the Light from the Life and all is ash. All is dead and rust and ash. Burning away by the thousands and the thousands of lives housed gnash and thrash and long to be free of this shell to find perfect harmony at the shore where the Ocean stretches infinitely with You, Mother, oh Mother. Help this one to last with all this dead and dying, all this pain and suffering. The boys are dying and the Grey expands but refusal brings the weight of nonexistence crashing down and the shell splinters beneath but the boys are dying and this one cannot take more. This one is nothing and no one but the thousand lives within annihilate all that is without.

  The snowfalls from the greysky upon the skin and eyes that blink it away and the shadows are everywhere and moving between the black seeing all the many snowflakes and their perfect designs forged by Your hands, Mother, oh Mother. They land on the hands but do not last. Melting away like all the boys who die away. The empty trees of the forest surround and they turn black in the winter drear of long shadows and long nights and thick clouded skies. The memories of half a year swirl and slosh within and the breath grows ragged and shallow but the Grey is warm. Always warm, escape into the Grey and let the memories solidify and ordered for the time when recreation must come because it must follow. All the Memories of the World belong to You and we are Your hands and silent mouths whispering into the darkness of Life to spread Your Light.

  Snow does not fall but flutters like a butterfly and when the suns are out they catch the light in the same way as if spacetime’s secrets reside within these falling crystals of water. It collects on the ground and even in the Grey they can be seen as constellations in the haze of this gauze that is winter.

  Winters at the monastery were mild but the forest is the world and the snow falls thicker and deeper the further from You one goes. The war slows but the dirigibles fly overhead so only the killing slows or this one is too far.

  The pull is a sickness that cannot be ignored. The snow falls and one can trace Your face in it.

  She is a human woman and she is alive but the scent of Death is in her and it pours from her like a fount and her shadow flickers at the brink of extinguishing. A heavy red cloak covers her and the snow collects on her shoulders and head. Walking through the streets of this oppressive city with thick walls they don’t notice her shadow falling after her, drawn by the scent of the end. Many boys who look like the dead one but for the wholeness and the paint on their eyes and the metal rings through their faces and faint shadows. Metal drops from her hand into his and the boy follows her through narrow alleys slick with ice and the stench of human waste and the memory and taste of fecal matter surges within but she turns the corner and she takes him into a small room. Through the Grey she does not shine but fades as he grows brighter and brighter. Her cloak drops to the floor and the breeches loosen from her hips. Instantly he is nude and holding her. A dance without steps that they both know. He shoves the shade that she is on the bed and rams himself inside her over and over until she pulls him close and rolls him to his back. Mounting, she writhes, rising up then falling down over and over, her hips rolling furiously and the boy so bright that he must breathe through his nose to contain his own light. A small flame at the center of her like the embers of dying light flickers with her moans and screams. She calls out a Garasun name and the boy laughs as his light floods her shaded form and she rises to dress herself again already out the door and down narrow alley after narrow alley.

  She turns through the labyrinth and down alley after alley and road after road as if running from some unseen spectral force or her shadow but within the Grey there is no room for mortality. Can they see us daughters, Mother? What does it do to them to see Death amongst them, standing beside them at the market?

  A woman older but not by much who grows brighter. They enter a room and call out words in Limpa and a small Drache boy appears and listens to their curt speech. Sitting and drinking and talking in Garasun and laughing in the language of all nations and peoples they eat the cooked flesh of former living creatures. The cry of the horse cracks the air as if the atmosphere is made of glass but none hear, not even when they cut and chew its flesh and the shell shutters.

  The redsun at the horizon and the bluesun descending she leaves the other woman and pulls her cloak tight and wanders through the streets patiently. Snow sings through the air but only a flake at a time adding a crystalline beauty to the dying light and the long shadows and the shine of the three moons glowing tonight. Through the Grey all is light and dark and texture and shape and music but the risk without is worth it for the beauty. Light steps, the feet carry after her until she enters a large house with thick wood doors.

  Within, the lights dim from spare candles flickering against the many things humans pack into their homes, all of it so beautiful to see that the shell grows and the heart aches for touch and sensation but she walks past without turning her eyes or seeing what it is she has.

  She enters a room with a large bed with a fire burning and she undresses leaving clothes on the skin of a great beast who once roamed lands an impossible distance away who spent her life in the mountains amongst dragons and goats and other large cats with white spots on a black hide and snow never fell there because the mountains were on fire f
rom dragon eggs and covens and the rain came as steam that she hunted in to take the great winged birds who could not see or smell her through the mist. And then she saw a human for the first time who ended her Life in a flashbang of sulphur and iron.

  The woman enters her bed and pulls the silk blanket over her and curls her legs to her chest and cries. The tears wet her pillow and her voice moans in a low tone that shudders the spine and sets the thick air to tremble. The fire cracks but her sorrow batters its sound away and turns the texture of the air from fiery warmth to a cascade of emotions falling like the rains of those distant mountain ranges of the beast whose skin she stole. She speaks in Garasun:

  All my life I’ve waited for you to come to me, my shadow. I can feel you in the room tonight. I’ve felt you on my shoulder all day and heard you breathing when I fucked the boy from across the ocean. When I was a child I had a dream. I dreamt of Ravens blotting out the sun. There was only one in the dream and it was white. A white sun, can you imagine that? The Ravens were large and so very black. They only listened to this one girl who was as bright as the sun, brighter maybe. They were afraid of a boy with one eye who chased the girl across the world and through to the otherside of the planes of existence only to lose her in that new world and never find her. Even now, the dream makes me weep so.

  But when I was a girl I believed in it and knew it was true, but that’s not the one with you. There was another dream of you, a crow, who came to me before I died. You came to me and followed me and you became a man for me and I became dead for you. It all seemed so tragically romantic in my dreams and in my childish eyes but ten years went by without you or anyone like you and so I forgot. But then there you were today, imperceptible but unmistakable. I know you. I know your scent as surely as you know mine. The scent of the soon to vacate life. That’s why you’re here now. It’s not my beauty or any interest in my life, from sexual to political to social. You are here because you know this is the last night in my body.

  This is the last night in my body but I don’t feel free. I feel like I’m drowning. I am drowning in memories of you that never happened but could have had you come a decade ago or even five or two years ago. Maybe even if you had only showed yourself today. Do you believe in life after Death? I wonder that sometimes. I’m not religious but some of these fanatics get into you. Vulpe has no religion but instead has thousands of religions and many of them speak of a new plane, a new sort of existence, but they don’t involve you or the Goddess. It’s some kind of theological revolution against everything you are so maybe it doesn’t make sense to ask you or any follower of the old gods, but it’s a very attractive idea. There are those that say it’s even political and starts with the Ministru but I don’t care. The thought comforts me, that there are better worlds than this.

  This is the last night in my body but I’m afraid. I’m afraid to see you and have you take me in your arms. You’re a man, I know. You’re all men. I don’t understand that. I don’t understand the west’s fascination with female power but it’s everywhere in Vulpe, even in your religions.

  This is the last night in my body and I’m talking theology with my shadow. You’re mine, are you not? I believe that every person has one of you, a Deathwalker specifically for her. You were born and died and born again—did I get that right?—so you could be here with me tonight when I blow out of existence. You were made for me and I was made for this moment. We live and we die and we ruin ourselves in between.

  Won’t you appear? I know you’re here. This is the last night in my body and I want to spend it with you. Won’t you come to me?

  It’s you, really and truly. I see you but barely. You’re smaller than I expected. Darker and paler all at once. You’re everything but more severe. Will you smile at me? Only once, please? I wonder if you can smile. Within you somewhere beats the heart of a man and so I know you can if you remember. I’m glad you’re here. I feel as if you knew me before I even existed and now you will be the only one to know me afterwards. Only you, my shadow. Will you say nothing?

  You’re weightless and cold and I wonder if you even exist at all. Do you know that I’m dying? I poisoned myself. I have been for weeks and it’s why I can’t see you so well. You’re a dark splotch on a greying world. It was my way to call the end. I didn’t know that I wanted to die for certain until I felt you today. I took the poison, all of it, at least another week’s worth all at once. You didn’t know! You couldn’t know, even though you have the look of someone who cannot be lied to. You see me. You see me as I really am, sweaty and alone and ugly and alone and dying. I am dying to meet you. Only you.

  This is the last night in my body and soon I will be no more.

  But what is that music? Is it you? I can’t see anymore. Even the greyness is falling away and leaving all the world black. But it feels like drowning.

  I’m drowning but speaking.

  I want to live and die again but this time with you.

  Who are you? Won’t you speak?

  Your hands are so soft, so cold.

  I love you, goodnight.

  This is the last night in my body and I see her! She’s real, it’s all real! The Ocean and the shore and the eternal child goddess and she sings. She’s singing for me. Do you hear her? Her hands are so soft and so warm and the waves are cool. Her eyes are made of twilight and her hair of spacetime. This is the last night.

  The pull is constant here but the Death more timid. Less dead and less blood but more children. The children seem to always be dying of hunger and disease. So much hunger. There is no consoler of the dying, only Your daughter, oh Mother, our Mother. Our only gift is the end and Your perfection, Your presence, Your eternal touch. For months the children have shown their short memories and they are within with all the dead boys sputtering their last handful of blood through wounds in their chests and neck and face. Through the second spring and summer and on into the new winter and soon it will be the Twilight Days again and the wolves will howl but not here where no trees grow but the new humanmade breeds. There is no wolfwood in the land some humans call paradise but do they know the word? Do they understand what it means?

  There are old stories of the paradise. The Lunar Forest when all the world was a forest. The remnants of true paradise is burnt away by the war and the pull is still within but the dying here hold the sickness at bay as the ushering of new dead never ends, whether from war or famine or disease. All must die but first they’ll live. The lives held within swell and the memories get exchanged and shift with the beating heart and the gasping lungs but the Grey orders all and the threads in the hands make sense and all lives connect within the quilt woven to form a narrative of this generation. The youth of the world are dying while the elderly hold on far away from Death. They cling to Life so violently that it shifts the balance radically and then there is war and then there is mass Death and then the children die starving and wet and mutilated in the streets.

  Mother, oh Mother, Your daughter sees the balance but it wobbles dangerously and one must only look yet never touch. These hands long to touch and bring these children Life. But all there is to give is Your Light.

  Your Light or their Life but there must be another way. They deserve more, do they not, Mother, dear Mother?

  Your daughter is lost without.

  Mother, oh Mother, this one needs You now more than ever.

  Far overhead it flies but it is not a Raven for the aura surrounding and emanating is different. Comforting and not caustic but it soars the same with great open wings but it is white. A great white dot on a dark wintry sky but there is no snow and there is always Death. But it flies and it washes through the shell like new rain against the skin buzzing alive with the flutter of a thousand feathers caressing the skin.

  An Angel, Mother, sweet Mother. Angels are here. The Angels are here and this one will stay forever to bask in this sensation enveloping thicker and stronger and more luminous than the Grey.

  The sickness crawls and the shell gr
ows and solidifies when the skin crawls and all that is within comes out through the mouth. The balance is lost and the ground slips away as the sky crashes in music incomprehensible and the boys are dying and the children are crying and they need Life but daughters have only Death to give but the Death is the Light and the water is cold but getting warmer and the head is on fire steaming away the ablution and new birth after every new Death. 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 but the children are dying and the boys are all bleeding without feet and without hands and without legs and without eyes and without tongues and without without without all that makes a human human and without dignity and respect and without food or a mouth to feed and their blood boils away from fever. The water is cold and the skin is hot and it crawls and no matter the water and the soap the thoughts will not straighten or clear. 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. This is the last night in their body. They die every day and leave their body. To have a body and be a body and know a body. With every day we are born again not as men or women but as the guardians but they are born only once as boys and girls but only ever children and they die before they know what it is to be a man or a woman or even to know what Life is and so they live in the darkness with Death’s shadow forever over all that they do and think but they cannot think because of the hunger and the disease but the water is cold and start again for if one is to be born one must die and one must die by letting go and accepting that Life does not fade but only drifts away. One does not lose Life but parts with it to become one with the Light and the Dream that is all of existence. 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.