A Novella
Written By Jonathan Chandler
Art By Surya
Chapter Ten: Broken
“Behind you!” Trickclaw’s voice called down. Both Shadow and the man looked up to find the feathered source darting to the crevices in one of the looming rock walls. Meanwhile, Bright followed her friend’s warning and charged forward just in time to avoid the sudden jutting of a rock pillar behind her.
As the first rays of dawn light scratched their way over and into the enclosure, Bright saw the twitch of the man creature’s paws— and a subtle movement of his lips that told her he’d used a spell word. It had tried to summon the rock pillar without her noticing. Trickclaw had seen the motion of the earth that came before the attack. Bright snarled as she leapt for the man’s neck.
If I can just—
Bright’s thoughts; her hopes to simply subdue the man, fell away with the world as he summoned supernatural strength to hurl her over his head and into a rock wall. Her back slammed into the stone, just before the base of her skull. The double jolt of pain clouded her vision. When she hit the ground, she scrambled. Her ears were the first thing to tell her to roll left. The smell of sweat and blood hit her next, like a choking shroud.
Bright’s body couldn’t coordinate while blind and disoriented. She felt herself scratch and scrabble on her side before the man’s bleeding arm caught under her jaw. She barked out a gout of flame that seared her mouth and expanded her sight. She heard the man yell, maybe in pain, then she saw Shadow running painfully toward her, his jaws snapping to get her strangler’s attention.
Bright tried again to spray flame to her left, then right, trying to get the man to loosen his arm’s grip on her throat. Instead, empowered strength intensified his grip, making her yelp. It was then that she saw up into the man’s crazed eyes. They looked back at her from over gritted teeth and through layers of sweat and grime.
How long has he been alone in this place?
Shadow’s body struck them both. It was a weak attack. Bright only got a scratch at the belly, but the other wolf was probably trying not to hurt her— only trying to knock the man off balance.
Probably.
Whatever the case, the man stumbled only a step, then swatted Shadow several feet away with an angry backswing of his free arm. Bright winced at hearing the other wolf’s whine. Shadow’s cry of pain echoed the sound of crunching bone from wherever he landed. Bright felt her airway constrict while her paws waved uselessly off the ground. Her eyes closed against her will and only after a straining effort was she able to open them again. As soon as she did, she saw a mess of feathers.
Trickclaw had gone on the attack. He tore into the man’s face with beak and claw, throwing down crimson droplets onto Bright, wetting her nose and face. She was let go and pushed away in the midst of the raven’s attack. She found her feet with a staggering landing, then made sure to spot Trickclaw in the air and bark her thanks. The raven heard her and broke away from the man, dodging spears of thorny vines.
The man roared in frustration. The ground, like with Shadow’s calls, shook in response. Bright nearly lost her feet again. Nearly. Instead, she called out to Shadow for help. She urged him in wolfish to acknowledge that this was a fight they all had to survive.
We are a pack. Here. Now! Bright’s heart thundered with the thought.
In response to her call, the ground directly beneath her stilled. A glance to her right saw a barking Shadow, struggling to stand, but focusing on the dirt beneath her. Bright shook her head to clear it, then smiled a wolf’s grin in thanks to her ally.
“Move!” Shadow yelled, aggravated.
Bright’s smile widened. She looked to the god-man as she charged, the ground beneath her becoming still in odd contradiction with the earth everywhere else in the enclosure. Cracks in the earth, where that surging motion stopped, broke open like jagged maws to her left and right. Seeing that she wouldn’t be stopped, the man slapped his hands before him on the ground, sending up a sheet of rock and clay.
Again, Bright heard the man say a spell word. But it was like her mind couldn’t give the noise of the spell words any shape. It was as if silence took her memory as the man gave whatever the spell was his voice.
She stopped her charge before the new wall of clay and dirt the man raised. She had only a few seconds to be struck by confusion, before the earth around her stopped trembling all together and she saw vines begin to crawl over the wall in front of her. Like veins of mold.
Bright’s eyes tracked four different growths, all dark green and covered in thorns longer than her own claws. Backing up, Bright saw no way over the man’s new wall. If she tried to go around it, she was sure the man would notice, or had something ready for her. And those vines are dangerous…
“Leave,” the man’s empowered voice pleaded. “Leave me…” Exhaustion gnawed deeply at his words. Heavy breaths punctuated the pauses between them. “I can’t help you. No one can.”
“I can’t allow myself to believe that,” Bright said. “I have a pack to protect.”
“You said they chased you away.”
“But I found another pack. Even if I didn’t feel like I’d deserved what my old pack did to me, even if I didn’t feel like I needed to help them, I would have to help my new pack. My mother is after me either way. I can’t run anymore.”
There was silence in response. Panting.
“Besides,” Bright went on. “Look at where you are.”
“Yes. Look at where I am! Beset by beasts in a cruel wood. Attacked. Bloodied. And look at you. You want my help? As far as I can see… you are just like the mother your memories show me.”
“My mother is full of gods and power. She doesn’t know the pain she causes others.”
“And you do?”
“Now.”
“Now?! Now you pit your pack against a broken man. I am lost, you said. Yet you hunt me and a mother wolf probably as broken as me.” Bright flinched at that, but the man didn’t give her time to recover. “You can’t help anyone. Why should I help you?” Bright looked to Shadow, who limped closer to her, blood dripping from his mouth. She frowned. She looked up and around for Trickclaw, but he was probably hiding.
I hope. Then she snapped her teeth to curse herself. She hoped? What would hope do if Trickclaw was hurt? How would it help Shadow?
And he only fought with me because I made him. Because my mother, my hunter, would hunt him because of me.
“I am right,” the god-man said. There was a whimpering that came next. Bright flattened her ears hearing it. “I know I am. The gods tell me so…”
“What else do they tell you?” Shadow asked. Bright looked at him. He only glanced to her, the look full of exasperation.
“I’m—” Bright started to whisper to the other wolf. Shadow snapped at her nose to cut her off.
“Listen,” Shadow grumbled at her. He looked back to the vine covered wall before the two wolves. He looked like he could see through it, or that he was trying to. Bright squinted, trying to understand what she’d done wrong, beyond leading her pack here.
“The gods talk of too many things. Or they show me too much. Or there are too many of them. But, they don’t give you strength.”
“What about magic? What could you call that, other than strength?” Shadow paused between questions, patiently, despite his exhausted look. His ears were up and forward. He wasn’t questioning himself, to Bright’s mind. He wasn’t wallowing in his many hurts either.
He’s still hunting, she thought. He’s still looking for what we came for. She didn’t know why, but realizing that made the heat in her rise. Anger grew, but not toward Shadow.
“Magic? Spells aren’t strength,” the man said. A crack in his voice was unsettling. Like a laugh.
But what does he have to laugh at?
“Easy to say,” Shadow said, sending a gentle rumble through the earth with his voice. He panted afterward. He must have said his spell word, but, again, Bright didn’t hear it. Her mind couldn’t grasp it. It was becoming beyond frustrating.
“The power of the gods is not moving earth, beast. Nor is it throwing fire. It’s… rightness.”
Shadow looked down at that. Bright scrunched her snout. She didn’t understand.
“What is that supposed to mean?” She asked. “And why would it scare you?” I would love to know that I’m on the right path now, she thought, growling with no small amount of bitterness. It was like she felt owed that much. Then the man spoke again.
“Because… it doesn’t mean you are right. It means you feel like you are. Bending to the voices of the world, you feel right. You feel in the right place and time. Even when you are not. Even when all you’re doing is causing pain, bringing hurt to those around you, and losing yourself to everything you thought you chose for yourself.”
“I still don’t understand!” Bright barked. “I have this fire in me, but I have yet to feel like I belong in a place, or that I know without doubt that what I’m doing is right.”
Shadow looked at her incredulously, before the man behind the wall said what Bright suspected was on Shadow’s mind.
“Lies?” The man asked. “Why lie to me and to yourself? You have known this feeling, you just haven’t been broken trying to fight it yet.”
Bright whined at the sudden conviction.
“You hear it whispering to you, don’t you?” the man pressed. “It’s the same for your mother. Same for me. For her, it sounds like it drives her; pushes her to be more. For me, it showed me things I didn’t—things I shouldn’t have refused to witness. For you… you know what you will have to do to your hunter— your mother— whether I can help you or not.”
“No. I have Shadow beside me now because I didn’t kill him. I can face my mother the same way. But I need to meet her on her terms. I need power to match her. I need to earn—”
“Stop wishing for the impossible!” The man screamed. “I have seen the end.” Bright blinked.
The ground shook and the vines on the wall quivered like worms in a carcass. There were a dozen of them now, thick and full of thorns. A surge of them had grown in darkness nearest the ground, furthest from the encroaching light of day. Shadow and Bright looked at each other and backed away involuntarily.
“There is no saving me. There is no saving your mother. I have seen it! And until you see that, your fire will always burn you.”
Vines burst from the wall’s face. They speared through the air toward Shadow and Bright with high, wind splitting whistles. Bright shoved Shadow out of the way and let out a spray of flame that turned the leading tendrils to brittle ashes, too weak to pierce her flesh.
She blinked, the pain in her mouth distracting her just enough to let three other tendrils, that had crawled over the ground, to snag her forepaws and sweep them from under her. Thorns pierced her skin as the vines wrenched her forelegs right, then pulled to force her to her side.
She barked to warn Shadow. It turned into a howl of pain. More vines came from the crumbling wall the man had hidden behind. They latched on and around both wolves. Bright was too burned to summon more flame. Shadow was too wounded and tired to resist.
The man emerged from behind his wall, letting it crumble completely with a thunderous cracking sound. A sound that may have been that illusive spell word Bright’s mind couldn’t get but the edges of. The man looked down to his left and right, at the wolves held down by creeping vines, which cut the pair as they moved.
Bright looked up to catch the man’s gaze. He looked back coldly. Then he walked out of her sight, returning with his deadly stick weapon in hand. Once before her again, he pointed that weapon at Bright’s face.
“You cannot have everything your way wolf,” he said flatly. His face twitched beneath his mask of disgust, however. Bright glimpsed… pity, she thought. “You have to choose what burden you bear. There is no running from that.” He readied to finish Bright off, lifting his stick high.
“But you ran,” Bright said feebly, a vine starting to wrap around her throat. The man flinched. “You hoped there was another way, no matter what the gods showed you.” The man looked away. Bright forced herself to stare until the man returned her gaze again; to be like Shadow was; to hunt for what she came for.
“What did you see?” She asked. The man looked back at her, haunted. “Let me help you.” The man’s mouth opened and Bright cut him off. “Let me try, at least,” she whimpered as vines tightened around her. “Try… it’s all we can do.”
“That’s not enough…The fire. The ice. The gods. Life doesn’t care about you trying.” A hardness returned to the man’s face and he moved to spear Bright. Bright looked about for Shadow, or Trickclaw. She tried to summon the painful heat within her.
She had no breath for it.
The man’s weapon thrust downward. Bright closed her eyes. But instead of the bite of the weapon, she felt a sudden cold and heard the keening of a terrible wind from above. This wind howled and whirled and brought with it an undeniable Great Cold.
________
The stone ridge, which rose many wolf lengths high behind the god-man, broke. It snapped open. A crack the width of an oak tree splintered down from its highest point. The two halves sank into the ground almost half their heights, as shattered fragments near the center tumbled down in an avalanche of stone and dust.
Bright, Shadow, and the god-man shivered, even as the breath of Great Cold hit them.
Bright, still tied to the ground by the crawling vines, saw movement in the dust of the break. As that movement resolved, her heart trembled and she heard the man suck in a sharp breath beside her.
“The ice,” he said, with a hoarse whisper. He glanced at Bright next and she saw his eyes gain a spark of recognition. Like he was only just seeing her now. “The fire,” he said. “Here… They’re both here.” His face froze in a strained expression that Bright couldn’t help but imagine as one that came with a nightmare.
“What are you—” Bright choked. Then there was true thunder. There was a darkening of the sky that made her blink, confused.
“Yes,” came Blud’s voice from the crevice in the broken ridge, as her power sent shivers through the stone around her, with every step of her bear-sized paws. “What are you?” A fork of lightning flashed. The thunder punctuated her mother’s proud appearance. She was larger than Bright recalled.
She’s eaten since I last saw her, Bright thought.
Blud growled at the tableau laid out before her. Two wolves shackled by foliage. A strange creature, with what could only be an extension of his feeble looking claws, aimed at Blud’s daughter.
“Never mind,” Blud said, fog leaking from her jaws and frost spreading from her feet. “Whatever you were, you are prey now.”
The man seemed to realize what had changed Blud’s tone instantly. He dropped the pointed stick in his hands and backed away from Bright with those same hands raised. It was a gesture neither Blud nor Bright understood, but it was one that Bright felt was a manifestation of the brokenness in him. The lack of resistance to Blud’s threat made Blud sneer with satisfaction and made Bright whimper with sympathy. Blud turned at the whimper’s escape, huffing with a restrained exasperation Bright knew all too well.
“Get my daughter free, bird,” Blud said over her shoulder. “While I deal with the North Wood’s last pest.”
Bright felt a bittersweet pang in her chest to see Trickclaw fly out from behind her mother. Questions crowded her already constrained throat.
“Why?” That was all Bright got out when the sound of ruffling feathers told her that Trickclaw had landed behind her head.
“The obvious ‘why’, Bright,” Trickclaw said. He had had to say it twice to be heard over the gathering wind and storm. Blud was calling her favorite god to rage before truly stepping up to the man.
She had always been smart in a hunt. Careful, considering her power and size.
But all this…
Bright couldn’t help but feel her mother was doing too much. The crimson wolf’s hair began to crackle and glint in the overcast light, as frost started to coat her fur, clumps forming spikes that stood on end.
“You were in trouble Bright,” Trickclaw said. Bright heard and vaguely felt the tugging of the vines around her neck. She held back a whine as her companion tried to tear her loose with his beak and talons. “I couldn’t help you. Not by myself.”
“So you brought my mother here?” Thorns tore into Bright’s neck when she yelled. Part of her was angry at herself for ignoring her companion’s sincerity, but she couldn’t help it. She looked at the whimpering man, who was on his knees, with his head in his hands, before the brooding malevolence of Blud.
“I wouldn’t have preached to you about the malleability of the ‘pack’, if I had been afraid to search anywhere for the help you needed!” A pause. “But I hadn’t been looking for her. I found her, while looking for your old pack. She had apparently started searching for you on her own, with only the gods for help.” Thunder clapped and interrupted him. He busied himself tearing at the vines some more, sawing them with his beak and sporadically leaning his full but meagre weight back against them.
“I don’t understand then,” Bright said. A blast of wind nearly hurled her raven friend away. “She keeps waiting… She hunted alone and found her prey, but she’s gathering a storm?”
“She’s afraid, Bright,” Trickclaw said, finally clipping the tightest bind about her neck. She raised her head to look at him. His bird mannerisms were twitchy. Seeing his reticence before the words was a comfort, even if his words were not. “She is afraid,” he said again. “The god filled man’s broken powers, the angry remnants in him, had apparently been confounding your mother’s search. She had been walking in circles, when I found her.”
“But she is here now—” Another thunderclap and flash of sky fire. “All this…”
“She wasn’t scared of the god-man, Bright. She was scared of losing you.”
Bright’s head turned back to see her mother. The crimson wolf, the leader of the greatest pack of the Wood…
Bright caught the look in Blud’s eye when she saw that Bright was no longer in danger of being strangled to death. And Bright felt nothing like what she searched for there.
“No,” Bright said, not meaning to be heard. “She’s not here as my mother.”
“I never said she was,” Trickclaw said. “But, after what I’ve learned traveling with you, I’m still sorry for her.” Bright grumbled, then looked at Trickclaw sidelong, as if afraid of what he’d say next.
________
Blud looked up into the eye of the storm her mastery had made. She took a deep breath. She savored the very taste of the frost-tinged air. The smell of the last other threatening host in the Wood; his fear, was delicious.
“Mother,” Bright said.
Blud shook herself and looked at her prey.
“Mother,.”
Blud moved forward, with a prowler’s steps, almost lazily toward the god-man that so meekly waited for her.
“Mother!”
Blud stopped. A deep rumble in the hollowed clouds echoed her dissatisfied growling. “What?” Blud asked. Bright said nothing for the space of a few beats of Blud’s heart. The crimson wolf’s eyes never left the god-man. Eventually, she shook herself again, sending glittering ice from her glistening fur. Then, she took another step toward her foe, with a widening smile.
“Mother… I won’t be ignored anymore.”
Blud’s head turned slowly, until her hardened eyes found those of her daughter. When the smaller wolf did not turn her head down or show her neck, Blud’s own head twisted in the canine way of curiosity. Then she raised her head and stood at her full height. Her shadow, cast from the light leaking through the broken wall of stone, partially consumed Bright.
But Bright still did not flinch.
Blud made a sound through her nose that was between a sigh and a tired laugh. Bright did twitch at that, startled by her mother’s suddenly casual demeanor. The crimson wolf closed her eyes and sat down. Her tail softly wagged behind her.
“You won’t be ignored,” Blud said, her voice interested. She made a point of looking Bright over appraisingly, her eyes lingering on where her daughter’s cuts still trickled blood. She noted the slight shake of muscle weakness in Bright’s limbs. Before she could laugh at the sheer, stupid irony of it all, Blud saw Bright’s eyes take on a familiar expression.
Those eyes, like her fathers, she thought. They looked straight on. They were hunting for something. They are a wolf’s eyes. Finally. She let the tempest of her gathering storm simmer, a little, to be better heard.
“Hm. Maybe the gods had one last use,” Blud said, sparing a look to confirm the man hadn’t moved. She looked back at Bright, satisfied. “Yes. One last test was left for them to give.”
“Mother….”
“Is that all you have to say? Are you really still a pup, after everything?” Bright looked at Blud sternly but said nothing. Blud shook her head. “So, in the end, the gods fail here too.”
“I’m not here because of the gods, mother.”
“Oh?” Blud opened her eyes. She was in a good mood. In spite of all the time she’d lost, searching by herself, and all the days of waiting before that, she felt good. The gods had been playing games with her. They’d made her walk in circles, after phantom scents in the earth, which was not wholly hers yet. They’d done that for her whole life, she felt. Yet, she had proved herself the gods’ better.
Blud licked her jowls. How the gods had fragmented, to be born in this strange creature that walked on two legs and whimpered like a pup, Blud would never know. Nor did she care. Prey was always finding new ways to run. The gods were always testing.
But now, after so many years— after so many nights spent alone… I will….
“The gods don’t have anything to do with me,” Bright said. Blud chuckled at that. It was a low sound; close to a snarl. The raven that had found her in the Wood fluttered nervously. Bright only squinted, suspicious. Blud calmed herself.
Is my happiness so frightening?
“I suppose it makes sense,” Blud said aloud, “that you don’t understand.”
“I understand plen—”
“You understand nothing!” Blud barked. “You’ve spent your whole life under my shadow. You’ve been under my protection. And not just from other beasts, starvation, and whatever else waits to snuff out indulgent pups in the North Wood.”
Bright started to open her mouth, but closed it when Blud made a curious expression again.
“Oh, I know how you feel about my protection,” Blud said. “Your constant running made it clear to the whole pack, in fact. You’ve made my place as pack master even more difficult.”
“I’m sure a wolf… like you, made do,” Trickclaw said. Blud smiled at the quavering in his voice.
“You’d be surprised, tiny bird. I’m sure the might of the wolf pack is famous, even where your kind fly. I’ve made sure to leave survivors whenever I take new land in the Wood. Some must have run your way. After all, I needed my true prey to come looking for me. But, whatever you’ve heard, I’ve learned through trial that there is no pack— maybe no beast— that is immune to the weakness the gods have given us.”
Blud paused. This was a teaching moment. Unlike the gods, she had time to spare for an impatient child. Even if she was a naive pup with a wolf’s eyes. I, now, at the last, can be kind. Kinder than the gods were with me.
She saw a look in her daughter’s expression that seemed suddenly sad and out of place.
And I thought the bird said she had found her name. Maybe she isn’t as sure of herself as he thinks.
The thought should have made the crimson wolf feel more sure herself. Instead, it made Blud feel awkward for a moment, thinking she may have let her own expression shift with her thoughts. But Bright—or whatever she was calling herself—was looking at the cowering creature behind her mother.
Blud followed her daughter’s gaze to find the frightened man had shifted to hold his knees in the dirt.
“This,” Blud said, standing to circle and sniff the creature’s fear. “This is what I mean.” Blud looked from the whimpering god-man to her daughter. Then, while keeping an eye on the leering Bright, Blud brought her snout to the back of her prey’s neck, making him shiver and sob. “This…” She breathed in deeply. She opened her mouth to breath out a faint cloud of frost. It made the man hold his knees closer, which made Blud smile and think that maybe the untethered gods in him were doing the same. “They are finally afraid,” she whispered.
“Stop it! He’s not after you,” Bright said. Blud huffed. Then she looked at her daughter.
“What does that matter, child?” Bright’s head tilted, confused, so Blud went on. “You don’t honestly think that it matters what this shell of furless flesh wants, do you?” Bright flinched under the full weight of Blud’s stare. The crimson wolf stepped away from her prey and toward her daughter. Suddenly, her good mood was fading. “You really have learned nothing. Are you even a wolf? Since when does a wolf need to care if it is being hunted, to bring down its quarry?”
“Since I learned the kind of emptiness that your kind of hunting can leave behind,” Bright replied, some strength in her voice and a glimmer of memory in her eyes. “I’ve seen the Bear Spine. I’ve lived in your scared pack.”
Blud laughed. The sound was between a yip and a bark.
“A pup that ran away from everything given to her— from a full belly every winter and a den full of warmth— is talking to me about emptiness?!” Blud shook her head and laughed again. “My daughter’s head is empty, if she thinks that what I’ve done is anything less than what the law of the world calls for.”
“Endless killing is not a law,” Trickclaw said. Blud looked down at the morsel of a bird. Bright stepped in front of him to get her mother’s attention back on her.
“He’s right,” Bright said. “There are other ways to live.” Blud lowered her head down to find the raven all but hiding behind Bright’s legs. No, she realized. Not hiding. He’s just small. Strange, that…
He restrains his fear.
“I’m sure there are all kinds of lies other beasts believe, while they’re flitting around, afraid of every shadow.” Blud kept her eyes on the raven, something itching the back of her mind while she did.
“But the raven’s ‘lies’ don’t involve leaving the bones of defenseless bear cubs in broken pits. You took their mother from them. And you left them. Uneaten. Unmourned. You killed so many. For what? What kind of hunt is that?”
Blud’s head snapped up to her daughter. My foolish, stupid, heavy hearted daughter.
Bright’s eyes were searching again; squinted and more intense than any smaller wolf had any right to be, in Blud’s mind. Blud looked back at the raven a moment, then turned her back on her daughter. An insult to any other wolf. A sign of a mother’s tiredness now. While Blud sat like that, her head low with thought, the eye of peace in the storm above slowly shrank with the sound of rustling branches and shaking pine trees.
What could she say to her daughter? What could she do? What else would it take to get her to understand that life is… relentless? That you can’t be a pup forever protected. Weak. Blud had already had her daughter chased by the teeth of a hundred wolves. But Bright was still stubbornly soft.
The sound of movement, subtle movement, touched Blud’s awareness. She had so many gods within her, chained to Great Cold, that sometimes she wasn’t sure what sense brought her knowledge. What she knew for sure was that no one else shifted to notice the movement. Blud smiled at what she sensed amidst the rebellious around her
Glad I am not the only one whose having pack troubles, Blud thought. Then she quickly returned her attention to her daughter.
“Mother,” Bright said, oblivious that Blud’s attention had been elsewhere. “I have learned things. Things I don’t think you could have taught me. I’ve seen how… small everything down here can be.” Blud’s ear twitched at that, not sure of her daughter’s meaning. “I’ve seen magic and fought another wolf that tried to tell me the same things you are now. But I was stronger, mother. I was stronger. Not because I had the gods with me, or because I was the bigger beast.”
Blud looked slowly toward her daughter, from over her shoulder.
“I was stronger because I was willing to try and be something different than what you call a wolf.” Bright paused. She looked down at the raven by her legs. Blud actually felt a chill seeing this.
“Other than a wolf….” Blud muttered to herself. Bright’s ears twitched. “What else would you be? Would you be a bird without any wings? Would you survive on carcasses hunted by someone else— live on the charity of gods and better beasts? You would die before the next winter freeze.”
“I would survive by working together with my pack, taking only what I need. Protecting them.” Blud looked away and stood up with a growl. “I won’t be a monster. I won’t kill everything like I’m scared of—” Bright cut herself off. Blud turned to face her daughter. She moved forward to make their snouts a breath’s distance away from each other, so that Bright had to look up slightly to meet her mother’s eyes.
“I am a monster, daughter,” Blud said slowly.
“If that is what you want to be, then I am not your—”
“You are what I make you! What I have made you!”
“I am Bright. I am my own wolf now! I will not be scared of you, or be like you, scared of—”
“What am I scared of? Hm? Look at me! What could I be scared of? Surely not my death!”
“Yes, surely. Not yours. But then, what else is there for you to fear, I wonder.” Trickclaw said. And the bird’s words dragged the itching thought at the back of Blud’s mind to the surface. It was dredged from below and let bleed a wound the crimson wolf would have rather left buried beneath the corpses of a thousand gods.
________
He was my greatest hunt. I had sniffed out his potential when we were both young, when his fur was dark, and his bark was barely more than a squirrel’s squeak. Unlike the half dozen other females that began sniffing his tail after Great Cold was passed to him, I knew my place was at his side, before I cared to carry his pups.
Rune was everything that a wolf should be. He was as clever as any other in the pack. He played whatever part in the hunt that he knew he would do best, even if he had appointed another to lead. He was able to turn the strength of others into his tool, with a compliment and a wolfish smile. He even managed to laugh off the grumbling of rivals who tried to track the limits of his patience; tried to challenge him; tried to earn my attention.
He wasn’t afraid. Not of anything. He let the pack run and hunt and live as I imagine wolves of the furthest north always had. He probably believed that we always would live that way. With him as strong and brave as he was, I believed him.
I should have seen the end coming. That’s what I still think, though I went through a time where I blamed him for not seeing it himself.
That winter had been particularly hard. Even Great Cold seemed at a loss, trying to keep off the worst of the storms. But it helped us find food by bringing scents to Rune for him to follow. Or he used his own skills to find what deer, rodents, and boar that he could.
We were at the tail end of it; the end of the worst blizzards, when he decided to go for a hunt, alone. Many of the females had become pregnant. I had given birth in the worst weeks. He had told me he had feared the pup would have my life as its first kill. I remember feeling like he was a liar. His grin had had no fear in it, when he’d licked my labor weary face.
Maybe it was a prophesy….
The starving cats, with their weaker god, they had seen him as easy prey when he was out alone. They’d made their home at the edge of Great Cold’s influence, to survive the blizzards it was striving to protect us from. By hunting alone, Rune had put himself in harm’s way, hoping Great Cold and the mountain cats’ caution would keep him safe.
When the once waning storms got worse, and Rune still hadn’t returned, I knew something was wrong. Eventually, I refused to huddle, cowering in the caves with worry. I gathered the few males that hadn’t been weakened by starvation or fear. Then I hunted as I had only once hunted before— and for the same price… the life of my mate.
The North Wood cares only about your ability to survive. I survived. I was born a strong wolf. I found a strong mate that I thought feared nothing. When I tracked him down, in that biting cold though, he did look afraid. Not of his broken bones or of his bleeding flanks. Not of the carnage his power and teeth had left of the fools that had thought him just a lone wolf.
He had killed four mountain cats in a battle between chase and hunt. He had wounded several others, who were scared or killed at my arrival to the scene, before he collapsed from weariness.
The wolves that had come with me refused to approach him, where he lay. I thought them gutless until I saw his face, his snarling, slobbering mouth. It was like he was still fighting. He was still fighting something unseen— a greater, invisible beast that shrugged off his pack freezing stare.
I whimpered to him, then barked to get him to pause. Only then did his eyes find me amidst the snow and wind, crouched just out of his reach.
It hurt how long it took him to recognize me… but not as much as what he said.
“I’m sorry,” his weak voice whined. And I shook my head, either not accepting the plea or not wanting what it meant. I still don’t know which. “I wasn’t strong enough—”
I tried to interrupt him by closing his mouth with a nudge of my head. Some other feeling I have yet to name overcame me though, and kept me back from him.
But he pressed on. Like he always had before.
“I wasn’t strong enough…to keep you….”
He was afraid. Not of death, but of losing. And in that same moment, I lost him.
No matter that I ate him to take Great Cold for myself, whimpering and howling the whole time, or that I eventually made the cats pay.
I hadn’t been strong enough either. There were bigger hunters, other beasts, other powers, and other gods.
But I would change that. I wouldn’t lose anything else. Telling Rune that, I think, would have been the only thing that would have chased away that fear on his face.
________
“There is another way, Mother,” Bright was saying. “I’ve—”
“Daughter,” Blud said.
Bright’s words were stopped in her throat. What is that feeling in her mother’s voice? It sounded as if her mother was waking from a dream.
“… Bright. That’s what your bird told me you called yourself. I almost laughed when I heard.”
Bright did not like this tone, this soft tone that only a mother should use. Somehow, in spite of her having called Blud ‘mother’ this whole time, Bright’s heart felt pulled tight hearing Blud speak like one. It felt like she would need to run away at any second, and more than she did when the storm and Blud had been angry. Both were suddenly too calm now.
I feel hunted, she realized. Stalked, even.
“I thought that if I heard you say that stupid name, wherever you’d got it from, I’d laugh regardless. Or that I’d scare you away with the sheer rage it would call from me. That you, my daughter, had finally and truly run from me in a way that I could never—”
“But mother, I’m not running anymore. I’m right here, with my pack beside me.”
Blud grunted, closed her eyes, and sat down long enough to let a careless, soft breeze play with her fur. A strange thing, like a sigh from Great Cold itself.
“A pair isn’t a pack, Bright,” she said.
Bright looked at her mother with confusion for a stretched moment. Then she heard Trickclaw croak and take several steps to her other side, toward where Shadow was supposed to be trapped. She looked.
“Shadow?” She heard herself whisper. He was gone. “Where did you—”
The sound of Trickclaw being struck was quiet. Bright felt it should have been louder.
Or else I should have heard my mother move! I should have seen it coming! I should have gotten in the way! I should have—
But she could never hear the spell words of others when they were spoken. So, she never had a chance.
Trickclaw’s body had been knocked air born by a stream of ice. Before Bright’s eyes the raven spun as it froze solid; then, without pause or care for the watching wolf’s formerly bright eyes, it crashed to the ground. It broke and shattered. It looked as if Trickclaw had become like a piece of stone, slammed by the full weight of the earth god’s power. He was turned into little, crystalline fragments, that rang like the distant chorus of the smallest chirping birds there could have ever been.
Vault of Orendathos 