Twilight of the Wolves

by Edward J. Rathke

  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 brea
the 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.

  Take me far away, I say or think or breathe and her words are in me but none of them stick inside but they echo through and fill all that is left of me. She is liquid. She is the ocean and I fall within her and lose the mes that are left. All the shattered fragments falling away into her to be one with her essence and to flow through her veins in her blood where I will reach her lungs and her lips.

  My skin crawls electric and I gasp and tears fall from my deserteyes and her arms cling to my oncehollow chest now full of her. Her. She creates me in her dizzy fever dreams and I become one with her memories and her sleep and all that is human within her infects me and teaches my body what it is to live and how to breathe, how my heart is to beat.

  Let me stay here forever alone together with her brilliant dualsun pulsing into and through and creating me for the first time alive and whole and I will rise a man but, please, let me stay here to lie forever for all these thousands of Deaths have been worth it if only to lead me here to her where I will live for the first time in this Light and her Life.

  Curled around me, I am the fetal child and she is the mother.

  He watches me and strokes her cheek damp with fevered sweat and he scowls at me, Dead thing, she has given you Life. Now go and leave us.

  The fear surrounds but doesn’t penetrate for nothing reaches me here within her constructed womb.

  The vibrations of her chest course through and send tingles up and down my spine and to the edge of every part of me and I know her words before they form in her mouth, Don’t hurt him, Sao. He died. A thousand times. He was stolen from the world by the Goddess before he ever had a chance to live. I hear him all here. It all beats within his hollow body starved of Life and Light. All his world was taken by the wars and the humans and to save him was to kill him. Touched by a Goddess, he lost all that made him human. He loves, though. Like you he yet loves humans though no man has seen all that I see within him—her tears run down my back warm and then searing and then healing as her voice wrecks and withers—He has spent his halfdead existence herding the poor humans. All these humans, Sao. They die for no one and for nothing. They’re scared and alone and they scream and cry within him. They’re just like the forest but cacophonous instead of a harmonious. They don’t know how to be one but they will be at the Ocean where the eternal child dreams all of existence. I can see it all, feel it all, hear it all. The Mother cries for them and succours them. She weeps for us and her tears are all the stars and all the gods. Hreao and Faoi and all the others burnt from their trees. The humans cry and they all die. They’re dying, Sao. They’re dying and they’re afraid of one another. Is this what humanity is?

  All my life I’ve searched for humanity, his dualvoice soft and echoing sonorously, but found it nowhere.

  Then why do you want to be them, she presses her face into my back to hide the tears from him but I feel the words she doesn’t say or can’t say and I feel his hand, the soft and warm sensation of what shared love means, wiping the pain away as her breath steadies.

  I’m sorry, Aya.

  Sunbursts in my eyes and I’m filled by her name even as all that’s within her wrecks against the cliffs on a stark shoreline.

  I am sorry. For everything.

  Her tears are rain and there is no sun here.

  She saved me and gave me Life and I no longer feel the pull of Death or Mother as if She was amputated from me leaving a hollow deep within me and a scar a lifetime thick but every day in the radiance of her Light I am brought new and glorious beginnings. The wolfgirl, the spring god, Aya.

  Aya.

  Ai-ya.

  Within she grows and her name is the seed for all the world.

  Winter melts away and my hair grows for the first time and I walk in the light of the suns no longer drifting through the shadows and I avoid the Grey though it exists still at the periphery haunting or stalking me but I fear nothing with her near me and I follow her through the seasons even still. The world blooms because of her and all the past eradicates from my memory as the lives inside me fade and drift away to wander the world as echoes until another will house them and record their histories.

  This is how ghosts are born.

  Where do circles end? Where do they begin?

  With her. Only she can make them and only she can take them away, shatter them and redraw them.

  Within the Grey and I know this is the last time as all fades away and turns desolate when I reach for it and I am rejected from all that will come after this. I have been made whole but have lost myself. Weeks and months within searching through the thickening fog of all this is and is not and finding only trace reminiscences and halfhearted echoes, the trail of Light flashes like lightning but in impossible blues and indigos and violets coruscating into the depths of a bottomless void where Grey turns black and I fall within plunging further and further and my heart of glass chips apart and I hold my breath to keep it together and my skin slivers away and my eyes dry to deserted worlds of ash and desecrated forests and desiccated mountains. Here in the dark the twilight pulses and glows and all the Grey that turned black now alight with twin burning suns blasting out the shadows and revealing me to a city beneath everything, across a barrier, through a crack in the planes: Yiyuyan.

  Viscous and murky, the air full of blight and Death and fear and pain. The blood of wolves pours like waterfalls into rivers and I hear them howling and growling and dying and always dying and the world is a forest and the forest is the world but the wolves do not come here but I smell them and their pain and the reasons they left and will never come back.

  All their history swirls before me and the hearts of a thousand dualmen breathing and beating as one walk these desolate streets moaning with moonlight and a thousand years cascades and washes against the surface of this hidden civilisation caught between worlds and planes and even spacetimes beyond the Grey’s comprehension.

  I see it all from the grand edifices to the rise of the dualgods, the men and women who live as one and unite as wolves do for eternity. The humans who learnt from the wolves in order to become them but were burnt apart and lost to spacetime by their own greed and desires. The elevation to godhood and the desecration of the old gods and Mother and Death.

  Together we will live Forever branded upon every heart and mind and deep into the alloy essence that informs all else and their language is one of forging. They built the new gods within themselves and adorned them with twilight and moonlight.

  The lunar flowers saved from humanity yet stolen from the wolves all the same bloom here in this multiplanar city of collected and conflicting Light and Life but free of Death.

  Death shall have no Dominion here forged into the anatomy of their hearts and scarred upon their flesh in intricate designs to ward off the gods of order and Light and Life in order to bring forth their chaos of infinites and neverending lives.

  They do not mate but build new Yi and they are constructed one syllable at a time in a language both incomprehensible and fundamental. A disease that converts and contaminates the flesh of the living and dead to push them onwards away from Death’s kingdom and dominion to a Life of eternal moments and shared existence bound by this clanging language ringing through the hollow all around.

  But there is a pain here. Deep and frightening. A moaning cry of mourning as the chains that lock them into Life rust and the lunar petals begin to wilt. They wilt and they cry and all the Yi kneel around them and wail their metallic songs into the meniscus of their constructed sky containing their contaminated civilisation. The song blu
sters through and a thousand sets of eyes find me in the eradicated shadows and the wavering Grey and the song of the petals and their percussive words strike and assault all that is me and seep through the cracks and pores of my skin to reassemble me and they listen to me, each note hearing the notes of my body and the pulse of my heartbeat and the words hear and see my thoughts to wrap round and take hold and understand and it is inside of me changing and everything wilts and I expand beyond my shallow skin which slides away and falls away and their metal hands stretch towards me but I feel them all within me already and their skin crawls with ink that swirls beneath and over their exteriors and their voices rise as one in twinlife polyphonic susurrations bent and echoing through their metal lungs.

  The wilting and my heart pours through my veins and drains into them and it hears me and takes me more and more and further and further but I open my eyes and open my eyes and open my eyes and scream my own words in the language deepest within me in syllables and consonants and vowels if only to fight and show that I can and I dive back through the collapsing Grey and away from the twilight nightmare chasing me through the viscosity of eternity and the Grey is a shipwreck in a raging storm on the Ocean but I don’t look to the shore but to the sky and swim through the apex where the constellations die away by the hundreds and then more and then I see her, Aya, my Aya, the dualsun blaze and he stretches his hands towards me through the Grey with his wolfheart shattering limits and boundaries and the Grey expels me and I am cold but in his burning arms and Aya, Aya, oh Aya, touches a hand to my back which soothes away the fear and trembling and I collapse again to watch the night fall into day and all the twilight of these sister suns washes through me and waters the garden of my withered heart.