Twilight of the Wolves

by Edward J. Rathke

  The shadow spoke with its wobbling and crushed voice, It is not safe there. The Yi are not like normal humans. The metal has driven them insane.

  Over the soft carpet and hard marble, I shake the touch of Lord Alexander away and wipe myself free of his scent that clings to me, drifts inside me. Were the Yi discovered by the Invaders all those years ago, before this was ever imagined? If they saw the Yi, fighting for immortality, constructing new life and grafting it to the organic. If these white men saw the halfmetal red men and became them. The Yi are as much a myth and enigma now as they were twenty or one hundred years ago. Meat men with metal hearts.

  Alexi opens the door soberly and closes it quietly, then does a rotating dance of fast steps while he revolves once in a tight circle, smiling hard, eyes clenched shut.

  What is it? Alyosha says, an adolescent mixed boy with blue eyes and redhair and redbrown skin, another of the bastards of Lord Alexander.

  They all tell him to spit it out, to tell, already smiling, waiting for the answer. Misha, the Alexandras, Dacia, Akira and Akio—twins, Garasun, but Akio has soft feminine features and Akira has the face of a hawk—Octa, and Alina crowd around. Most of them are still children and they have different names when speaking with the Invaders but we all do.

  Alexi stops dancing, covers his mouth with his hands as if containing it a moment longer is torture more for him than for us, then, slowly, his fingers fluttering, he parts his hands, There is news from Glass and Valencia! A shouted whisper, accented Limpa, he dances again, tapping his feet noiselessly and spinning, pumping his fists.

  We beg for him to speak, to say more, to tell us everything. Even me, my heart racing, feeling the touch of Lord Alexander’s fingers upon my knees and remembering the pungent reek of his sex, of the purple bulb and the thick coarse hair covering his awful body. The way he once touched me and stared at me, not with desire but with lust, and then the way he attacked me and plunged himself inside me, silencing my screams with fists and soft padded palms. I learnt to disappear, to collapse inward and cling to all that remained of my wolfheart, of my wolfgod, the glittering black demon who gave me life. Breaking down the walls of spacetime and returning to the past which happens now if one only bothers to cut through the layers of reality and fabric of time and the bones of existence to see the folds in dimensions and walk hand in hand with past selves. His hands on me became different hands, burning like fire, wrapping me in starlight, bathing in moonlight, and all my disassembled selves were washed and cleaned and brought back together in his arms, the shore to my ocean or the ocean to my shore, a metaphor I’ve lost the distinction to.

  The train in from Glass, Alexi’s smile bouncing in and out, fighting for dominance of his face while his mouth tries to speak through the elation, Tonight’s the night! All’s arranged. At demon’s hour, we rise as one. One voice across all of this land, through all of the great forest, our words will echo across spacetime to the mouths of our children and grandfathers.

  Smiles and mouths agape, the youth running towards ruin but my heart beats with theirs, this polyphonic syncopated symphony stretching from Luca to Vulpe to Glass to Drache.

  A Dragonlord came, too, dressed in rags but I could tell and he came right to me and told me of the fire he brought. He said the dragons may fly with us but it won’t be here. Near the mountains, far in the south, he said some word that might’ve been a dragon name or just some Spreche but we’re all sisters here.

  What about Vulpe?

  No word from Valencia but the train’s not due for another two hours. The streets are alive with whispers. It’s basically being talked about openly before their faces but the white bastards can’t even tell. They don’t listen to us. The only benefit of being a slave, aye? He laughs, the holes in his mouth where teeth once grew cause his face to glow and this glow makes him attractive. Tall and lithe with spindly arms and legs, Alexi’s the perfect head of the house even as he’s Lord Alexander’s greatest enemy. Deceptive and cruel, Lord Alexander trusts him like a son but Alexi only dreams of slitting his throat.

  As a boy he wrapped a cord around his throat and jumped from the table. If he hadn’t kicked over his father’s chair, it would’ve been his father who found his lifeless blue body instead of me finding his thrashing red one. I cut him down and held him to me for an hour and then a day and then three a thousand and a thousand more until his pain became hate and his hate became deceit.

  Never was a boy so unhappy. Never had a boy tried so hard to make a father love him or at least respect him. Every word of Limpa he spoke was beaten out of him until he only barked the Invader’s tongue. Half son, half slave, bouncing between worlds, accepted by neither. Many nights I held him in my arms as he cried just as Polina did for me. I told him who his mother was, what his history was. I told him everything I had learnt from Polina and the others who died but spent their last days comforting us, making sure we remained human through slavery. Made sure we remembered. And I taught him all the words of Limpa and all the words of my own life’s stories. I gave him Sao and my shadow and taught him what love was. Or tried to.

  I fear there’s no love in Alexi, only pain and vengeance.

  Alexi drank it in and his anger turned to hate and his hate turned to violence and deceit. Small animals and smaller boys, first. He tortured the purebred children, which made him forever a slave and no longer even a bastard son. Just a man without home or country or nationality or race. Displaced, he built his own world and now it’s him who we depend on. How far his fingers stretch across the country, I can’t say and will never likely understand.

  He used to draw. A boisterous boy and proud, he left the images of his father’s imagined Death where Lord Alexander would find them, would see them.

  Even still, he became the center of the household, which makes him the center of Luca, which makes him the center of the continent. Though Lord Alexander may hate him, he trusts him and knows his worth. Alexi’s shrewd and maybe there is some love from father to son, but it’s more one-sided than he might imagine. He is grooming him, perhaps, for lack of a proper heir. A real son. Only a mountain of bastards who bear his name, mostly in shame.

  Alexi continues, There’s a real undercurrent in Glass, too. The Dragonlords have never taken to servitude as they simply cannot understand it and are constantly rising up screaming that they are the blood of the dragons only to be killed and pillaged again in the name of peace and order. Their pride is a hindrance, but in Glass it’s the Arcanes.

  Akira whistles and Akio beams. They believe that their father was an Arcane who died at the last stand, despite the temporal impossibility of such a claim, but being the only Garasun in our slave family fills them with a national pride, though they cannot speak Garasun. I tried to teach them once, only to find I no longer knew it well enough to speak.

  Aye, Arcanes, sisters. They never left but only went underground, amassing their power, experimenting, creating new words and new ways. They say they’ve even reconnected to Angels. I doubt the Angels will be helping us, but you never know. They take humans as lovers, why not as allies? And only Arcanes know the Angels and for them to be inventing new ways to do things, they must be talking to someone, be it Angel or dragon or wolf or elk or any of the old gods. Anycase, aye, it begins tonight, and I’m sure news will reach us from Valencia of much the same. It’s different there, though. There are no gods native to Vulpe except for the Goddess and I doubt She takes sides in Her Dream.

  It begins tonight, Alexi takes all of our hands in his, Sisters, it begins at the hour of the demon. Don’t forget. He meets all of our eyes individually and winks at me, then does one final hop and spin, a double dance tap, and straightens up and exits the dormitory where we compose ourselves and hide the smiles.

  Slaves don’t smile.

  They came for the land and the trees and the humans. They came for the food and the mines. They came for the promise of magic, of gods, of demons. They came because they saw a cracked veneer, a way to control. T
hey came with their weapons, with fire, with their metal poison. They came to control and to kill. They came to rule. They came and shut our boys in mines, our girls in brothels, our men in the ground, our old in the past. They came to take and they took it all.

  The days scream with suffering. In the mines they harvest shiny rocks and dark stones and everything metal. Our fertile lands are consumed and controlled only by them, though it is we who die from overexposure and starvation. We work from the dark of morning to the dark of night and then they steal us from our beds and use us again, torment our brains even after they’ve ruined our bodies.

  They’ve made women into dogs, into whores, into cattle.

  They cut up the bought boys and the natives found with them.

  They forced their foul language of shit and vomit upon us where the word for human is masculine and the pejorative for a woman is the same as that of a dog. They’ve more expressions for degrading our sex than they do for the suns and their lights. They’re a race of possession, demeaning all they touch. Even the soft silk they found here festers like excrement upon them.

  They have rewritten our lives and our countries. They’ve attempted to stamp out our people by murder and rape but tonight we will fight back.

  The children starve in the gutters and through the market. Every time I’m allowed to leave the mansion to fetch something from the market, there are different dying babies in the mud or coughing out their lungs in the cold winter air.

  Polina told us of old Luca, of the songs and dances, of the art and commerce, of the gods and Angels and even the demons who wandered these streets. She told us how it rose and how it burnt away. It is how we know this Luca, Lord Alexander’s Luca, is a clumsy and haphazard recreation. A body without a heart.

  The battle is everywhere.

  But I am old and the fight is all out of me. The anger rises and the blood drains from my face only to be sucked up in this ephemeral nebula, swallowing all of me. My memories, my very life, leaving only the phantoms of futures.

  They don’t remember what it meant to die over and over again. They don’t know that tonight is not only the beginning of a revolution but of a genocide.

  They will fight back. Harder. Ruthlessly. For those with power, there is no greater threat than the multitude without it. If the masses demand the power taken from them through the threat of violence, they will swell and crash violently.

  And yet all the gods do is watch, even as they rip the forest apart, the very heart of the world. The wolves disappear, the dragons supernova away, Ariel gave up long ago, the Dreamers weave the Dream, and the Calibanians have maybe been extinct for centuries. It’s said that the Yi are the sisters of the Calibanians, so maybe they’re lost between planes as well, neither here nor there but caught between, biding their time till reality suits them better. And what of the Angels? The winged giants, amorphous and amorous, sisters of the wolves and the humans who were once wolves.

  Indifferent, another word for callous.

  There is no howling here. Only silent full moons but for the screams. The screams of young girls being broken as I was. Over and over.

  I am old and bitter and I am dying as those thousands of boys died twenty years ago, as the thousands who continue to die every day even now. They’re running through our population, taking more than only our lives, but the very land we walk on, the very air we breathe, and the skies we see. If they could, they’d claim the moons and stand their foul flag atop it as if a piece of fabric meant ownership.

  Another sign. Useless but for what we attribute to it. And what is to be attributed to the Phoenix on blue?

  Usurpation.

  And even still, what is this sensation coursing through me, giving me new life, expanding the width of my veins? It’s as if I’m young again, walking amongst the gods and their sisters and all the world is green. Hope, or something like it.

  Hope, for the first time in years.

  Even if it only ends in Death, at least I’ll be with you, my darkstar. My demon wolf.

  Lunch, more vegetables and potatoes and cat for the fat tasteless bastard. A lethargy hangs in the air, the anticipation, the anxiety of waiting for an eruption that’s always tomorrow. So close to satisfaction that it seems it will never come. We ghost through and Dacia babbles on because it’s all she’s ever been able to do. All the many variations of Alexes wander back and forth, cleaning, dusting, serving. Little Alexandra scrubs the same tile of floor over and over laughing quietly to herself, her chest convulsing but her face wearing an expression of intense concentration though she likely can’t even see the ground. Like me, like all of us, she’s lost in herself, perhaps sorting through the hoarded memories that brought her to this life, to scrubbing this single tile in this ostentatiously opulent kitchen adorned for nobles but meant for slaves.

  And then Dacia’s crying but can’t blubber out the reason, just words and words piling and she crumbles into dialect from the village she was raised in and its incomprehensible syllables and intonations. As foreign to me as wolftongue is to her.

  There is no word for wolf in the wolves’ language and Angel is a term of endearment but human is a curse.

  And now I know why.

  I once wanted to be human.

  And now I long not to be. I pray it every night that the wolfdreams will take me and never return me to this human world of hate and uncomfortable clothes.

  The sound pierces through the walls, a child crying and a door slamming. Lord Alexander’s heavy lurching steps pound through the walls and his voice beats against the space beyond the wall and up the stairs. A wall or two to separate the slaves from the masters. We wait, barely breathing, staring at the door and following the steps up the stairs and they disappear along with his groaning, washed away by the quiet tears of a child somehow too loud and deep within us, though it’s far away, broken and distorted by space and walls, and then there are only the tears, high and soft.

  Opening the door slow, peering through, listening close but there are only the tears and we run to them, my body’s protests piercing but secondary, as if they’re only whispers rather than shouts, my swollen knees and fragile hips.

  Alyc huddles in the corner, knees against his chest, face against his knees, the brown little star that he is, so dim. He lifts his head, his cheeks puffy, nose bleeding, left eye swollen and taking on color already, Auntie, he says, his body quivering, a leaf caught in the throes of winter.

  Oh, heart, I say and sweep him into my arms, his tiny shorts spotted by his blood, the blue puffy shirt wet with his tears and slobber, Be still, tiny heart, Auntie’s here. Auntie’s here, the words in Limpa then wolf, mewing the pain away from him, my hand in his shirt, grazing his back lightly with my nails.

  He hates me, Momma, his voice muffled but the vibrations live inside me. They burn inside me.

  Choking and misty, I hold him close, swaying, Dear heart, I’m not your mother but she’s here. She’s here.

  His body clings to me, legs, arms, hands, and neck, like a cub, lonely, afraid, disintegrating, pushing all of himself into me, to be a part of something, to feel whole.

  I miss her, Momma.

  My cheeks wet and my memories clawing all that’s inside me, We all do, little heart, but she watches over you. She always has and always will. Your hurt is her hurt and your tears are her tears. With every day and in every way, she is with you, here, deep inside your chest. Your every breath keeps her alive. Your every thought keeps her real.

  Waving the Alexandras away with one hand, clinging to his tiny head with the other, I feel all that’s inside of him. His displacement, the loneliness he feels every day, how his skin excludes him from one life and his eyes from another, and it’s his tongue that betrays him, forgetting at times to speak his father’s language and speaking his mother’s instead. For that, he is hurt, called a beast by the man he fears and loves and walks in awe of in this house where he is sometimes a child and sometimes a slave, wearing the mask of both, but the cl
othes of a noble.

  Dear heart, my brownstar, your Auntie will keep you safe.

  All I did was call him father, he says the last word in Limpa, his voice high, the tight reverberations waving through me, cracking what’s left of my human heart.

  My lost and murdered wolfheart.

  Luminous and jet, the light erupted from him, not in a violent shout, but through sustained concentration and breathing. For hours he sat in silence, breathing, in through his nose then out through his mouth, slow, methodical, eyes closed, his lips parted slightly, silent, the forest condensing and expanding around him, then the flare and they were consumed by his darklight, a barrier surrounding them, and the wolfgirl felt it tacky, as if mucous covered her skin and all the air was elastic and gelatinous but the world separated from them, a hole cut in spacetime. The boundaries wavered and oscillating waves pushed from him, the source, his hollow center proliferating, creating a hollowness all around them, constructing a place between worlds.