The pack stirs to life at dusk, and I awaken from dreams of fire.
It is a slow and confusing awakening. The scent of my fellow wolves is distant and muted, even though they are so close I can feel the press of their bodies, and there is heat and light on my face. Then Father lopes out of our cave with the impatient whuff of an early riser, and his shadow passes over me, and I realize that I opened my eyes into the twilight sun.
I turn my head and blink the light away, but the world won't come fully into focus. It takes my sleep-addled brain a moment to realize why. Then I fumble around on the cave floor for the thin circlet of silver metal I set aside when I went to sleep — dragging it out from underneath one of Thick-Pelt's sprawling forepaws — and manage to wrestle it atop my head. It would rest comfortably over my ears were I Father's size, but the circlet slips easily past my forehead and my nose, and slides down my neck until the embedded shard of bloodstone nestles against my throat.
Sudden heat warms my chest, and then it is as if flame is burning away the fog over my senses — there's the thick musk of Howls-Off-Key, and the subtler scent of Patient-Leap just behind him, and Sharp-Eye and Harries-The-Herds and Thick-Pelt and Wide-Paws, and the commanding scent of Father drifting in on the breeze from outside. The bright, alarming hues of the forest recede back into their usual comforting muted greys, and the shadows in the cave sharpen and fill in with detail.
As I am reorienting to the waking world, Father throws his head back and looses a mighty howl. The stone against my throat pulses. Even though I need no translation, it provides one, whispering words into my core that buzz up my spine into my skull and outward to my ears:
Shake off your sleep. We hunt.
Howls-Off-Key, as usual, is the first to lope outside and join in — a simple affirmation, adding his voice in a grating duet. (If only he put half as much work into helping the pack as he does into sucking up to Father.) Sharp-Eye and Wide-Paws, as usual, fall in line with him, turning the duet into a ragged chorus, and despite my rough start I scramble out on their tails and add my thin voice to the mix. Thick-Pelt and Harries-The-Herds reluctantly join in with their usual waking sluggishness. Patient-Leap, who was first to follow her older brother outside, waits until last, assessing the harmony — then adds her own howl in at a pitch that joins our sounds together into something greater. It is a role I often take, but the lingering visions of fire have stirred something hot and dangerous up inside me, and tonight I am bristling with ambition.
Were my throat as strong as those of my packmates, I could express that with a few choice yaps in my breathing-moments between howls. But I have different strengths. Even though the bloodstone at my neck is not mine, it still listens when I turn my focus inward and push words into it, the way it pushes its translation-whispers into me.
Father, I think, let me lead tonight.
The bloodstone's call echoes around the pack. I feel the shadowy brush of their minds lurking at the edge of my perception. I can feel my thought penetrate into them with the clench of razor fangs, and feel my desire embed in their hearts and take root, pulsing through their bodies and shifting the timbre of their howls in support —
Then a short yap from Father, so sharp I flinch. No!
The bloodstone's spell snaps, and feedback blots out my senses for a moment. By the time I recover, the howl has disintegrated into a confused, discordant mess, and Father has wheeled upon me, cuffing me with a forepaw the size of my head. I yelp in shock, rolling over and showing him my belly. He bares his teeth, and my necklace vibrates as his thoughts slam in. You are weak! Leading the hunt is the duty of the biggest and strongest.
In moments like this, it does not matter that I am attuned to the bloodstone in a way no other wolf could hope to match. It does not matter that I know the mysteries of its whispers, nor that I can channel its power to turn my spindly, stunted form into a killing machine surpassing any of my packmates. It does not matter, because the bloodstone is Father's, and it responds to his daughter only to the extent that he tolerates it.
Yes, father, I desperately think, whining to emphasize the point.
He stares down at me, teeth gleaming, a quiet growl filling his throat. The others pace around uncertainly — shaking off the lingering instincts my brief touch awakened inside — then do their duty and gather behind Father in silent support. Still his growling continues, and I begin to wonder if I have crossed a line which deserves harsher punishment than his reprimand. Then he wheels abruptly, loping toward the woods with the pack in tow.
I scramble upright, slinking after them. And though there is mockery in Howls' eyes when he glances at me, none comment on my return to the pack.
It is a warm evening, and the air tastes dry. Prey will be driven by thirst to the watering-hole — it is the only logical place to hunt. This does not seem to occur to the others, who seem uncertain as to our destination; they are merely content to follow Father's unerring route there. I ache to point out the obvious to them, to prove my skills, but I will not risk a second reprimand so quickly.
Father crouches into the underbrush as we get close, his huge silver-blue form barely concealed by the bushes which grow over most of our heads. We all go silent, creeping up toward the rise over the watering-hole, and survey the animals below for targets. The usual profusion of rabbits; some round raccoons, putting on fat for their overwintering; a small cluster of deer. No fawns at this time of year, but there's an old buck who looks like he was on the losing end of a mating fight. Walks with a limp. One antler cracked, one reduced to a jagged nub. I don't need the bloodstone to know that we have all selected our target.
Animals freeze and sniff the air as we stealthily descend the slope toward the watering-hole. Then the first rabbit bolts, and the first deer startles, and soon prey are scattering and we have abandoned our concealment to charge into the maelstrom of motion. The old buck leaps, stumbles, springs away; with every landing his lame leg folds and unbalances him, and though he initially outpaces us it is clear he has not much fight left.
We spread out, crashing through shadowed brush in pursuit. We loose howls as we sprint, and the sounds keep us coordinated like a single beast even as my packmates vanish into the forest. I let the song of the bloodstone flow into me as the forest blurs by, and savor its rush of power. Everything begins singing to its pounding rhythm. My heart throbs, my muscles pump, my breathing quickens. I can smell the panic of our prey in the eddies of air kicked up by the hunt's passage, and anticipation stokes the fire already burning inside me.
Then there is a series of mighty crashes ahead and to the left, as our prey's leg finally gives out and he tumbles across the ground and straight through some brambles. Sharp-Eye is closest; he charges around the thorns and lunges for our prey, darting in with teeth bared. I gather the bloodstone's power and focus it in my legs, springing over the bushes as Sharp-Eye targets the buck's flank. The buck shrieks and lashes out with a hoof. Sharp-Eye has to abort his charge to avoid it, and the buck is bracing to leap again just as I land on his back.
The extra weight staggers him, and as his lame leg gives out, I hear a sickening snap. He falls to his belly, a second leg useless, and thrashes the remaining two madly as I wrap my legs around his barrel and arms around his neck. Sharp-Eye circles, looking for an opening, but his teeth are no longer necessary. The bloodstone's power roars and surges in my veins, and I laugh as I dig my knees into his ribs and squeeze my arm tighter, closing the buck's throat. Unable to dislodge me, unable to breathe, his struggles weaken quickly, and all he can do is roll over onto his back to try to crush me with his greater weight. But with the fire of the bloodstone burning inside me, all that accomplishes is to cost him his remaining leverage.
The rest of the pack circles in, teeth bared, staying clear of the buck's still-dangerous hooves as they look for an opening. But this is my kill now. Before the others can intervene, I shift my grip and sharply jerk the buck's head sideways. There is a loud crack, and his body spasms and goes limp.
I let the buck roll off me as Father lopes up. He surveys the kill — an animal nearly his size, taken down without a single tooth-mark — and turns his muzzle to stare at me. I rise to a crouch, flicking some leaves and dirt off of my skin, saying nothing. I have made my point; there is nothing more to say.
Finally, he lets loose a grudging, wordless whuff. Then he clamps his jaws around the buck's shoulder, jerking his head back and tearing loose a huge strip of glistening muscle. The metallic scent of blood fills the air, and the pack descends. Soon teeth are tearing at pelt as my fellow wolves satiate their hunger, and I, too, am digging my fingers into the gouge Father made, clenching my fists around wet bits of meat and ripping them free, stuffing them into my mouth, feeling the stone at my throat exult as blood runs down my chin and drips to spot my flesh.
We are walking back to the cave with full bellies, and something on the wind is wrong.
My packmates keep scenting the air, then keep glancing around, puzzled. I cannot smell anything. Rather, I can, but whenever I try to focus on it, the bloodstone at my neck goes silent rather than enhancing my senses with its whispers. Even Father seems wary of something beyond our perception, giving us a low rumble deep in his throat. "Stay alert," the necklace would tell me if it were translating, and its silence makes me itchier than anything out in the night.
I slow next to some spindly pine trees and gather my focus, pushing deep into the heart of the bloodstone. It wriggles away from my mind's grasp like a river-eel through teeth. It is as if it is already under the thrall of someone else — but Father's will is quiescent, and my packmates wouldn't have the skill to speak to the stone even if I felt them reaching out for it. So I try something different. I reach up to the necklace with a hand, curling fingers around the stone, and relax my arm muscles, feeling the stone gently tug at the surface of my palm. Whatever it's reacting to is downhill somewhere, in the valley toward the rising moon.
I let the stone resettle against my throat, holding onto the sensation of that tugging, and suddenly break away from the pack, loping down the slope from the moonlit ridge we're cresting. Father turns his head to watch me go, but says nothing as I leave. The hunt is over. The others plan to rest for the night, I know where home is, and if I injure myself chasing phantoms, it is my own fault.
I creep through shadowy woods, meandering around snags and leaping over creeks, letting the restless stone at my throat pull me into the unknown. I soon find myself farther into the valley than I have ever gone. The forest gradually thins out, with endless fields of severed tree stumps telling a story that the land was not always this open. Everywhere is the faint scent of human — the tall, fleshy things which resemble me, but cover themselves in musty second skins and rip the land apart which they claim with their scent.
The world around me begins to show signs of their spoor. There are trails which have been trampled so repeatedly that the dirt underfoot is a hard-packed scar across the earth. There are strange, straight, denuded trees smelling of pitch, whose few branches support lines stretching off into the distance that softly squeal at the far edge of my hearing. There are discarded cylinders of rounded, transparent material, inscribed with odd runes, smelling faintly of something sickly-sweet within their depths.
Then I reach a wide, river-flat trail of tar and dark stone, yawning like an abyss in the cold moonlight. Two four-legged forms are on the far side, walking along an unnaturally straight white line covering the stone, and the bloodstone at my throat begins tugging wildly.
The taller of the two forms — a lithe, small wolf; with fur an ice-blue not dissimilar to my skin, and ears flattened back so far they almost seem to have a downward curl — stops midstride and looks in my direction. I freeze, crouching in the shadow at the edge of the trees, suddenly thankful I had the sense to approach from downwind.
It takes the shorter figure a few steps to halt himself. He has the scent of wolf about him, but his fur has an unnatural hue the color of grapes, and puffs of leaf-colored fluff ring his head. His legs are stubby, his nose blunt, his eyes large, and some sort of necklace dangles around his neck, wide and dark with gleams of smooth shiny metal throughout. Everything about him is out of proportion, as if someone had taken a wolf made out of mud and pushed and pulled and prodded it into harmlessness.
"Ember?" he says to the wolf at his side. "Are you okay?"
(Says. Speaks. He opens his mouth, and a series of impossibly varied tones come out, alternately rough and melodic, clipped and slurred — in a way I have only ever heard from the few humans I've seen in the far distance. And yet when the tones hit my ears, there is meaning in them, the same way that there is meaning in the whispers of the bloodstone. I find that I can understand his mouth-noises as readily as if he were yapping and howling the speech of my kind.)
The ice-blue wolf softly growls, deep in her throat, eyes boring into my cloak of shadow. Then she, too, speaks. "There's something out there," she says, the corners of her muzzle peeling back into a scowl.
In the thin cover of the bushes alongside the rock-river, I still the trembling in my muscles and hold my breath. These strange wolves and their speech; the unnaturalness of my surroundings; the bizarre behavior of the bloodstone at my neck — it all combines to make me feel very much the prey. But if I flee, they will sense me, so I imitate the terror-halt of the rabbit, waiting to bolt until there is no other choice.
The small one freezes too, his enormous eyes flicking around the forest alongside their path. "I can feel it, too," he says, subdued and hesitant. "Magic. Like … some sort of pull. Do you think it's the crown?"
"I don't know, Spike," Ember says. "There's something … wrong … about it. Something ..." The ice-blue wolf's eyes dart once more around the darkened woods; she licks her lips, then swallows, looking more and more uncertain. "...Hungry."
The two stand in uneasy silence. The bloodstone at my neck, too, remains silent, other than its insistent pull toward these strangers. But I do not need the bloodstone to see fear stiffen their limbs.
Spike's nose wrinkles, and he sniffs the air. "Do you smell anything weird?"
Ember does, too — a sharp, exaggerated inhalation, followed by a cough as scents overwhelm her. "Just, what's their name, humans. And dogs."
"Wolves." When he corrects her, Spike reaches up with a paw to fidget with his necklace. "We're ... definitely not the biggest things in this forest."
"I'm not afraid of beasts," Ember snaps, fur puffing out. But after a glance at Spike, she relents: "On the other claw, we're not here to pick fights."
"Yeah," Spike says. "I saw a ranch down the road. Let's find some shelter and get a fresh start at dawn."
The two begin shuffling forward, then walking, then simultaneously break into a hurried lope that's not quite a full run.
The tug of the bloodstone at my neck changes directions as they go, but despite the additional distance, only continues to increase in intensity. I stay frozen until they are dots in the distance, only then allowing myself to breathe out.
I creep forward toward the rock-river, doing an antsy little dance at its edge, and force myself to press a finger to its surface. It is smooth and cold. I hustle across it to the dirt on the far side, heart pounding in my chest, then lean back over it and inhale over the bright white line they were walking along, hoping for some greater understanding of why these visitors disturb me so. The thick, tarry scent of the rock-river assaults my nostrils, and the volatile, unnatural scent of the white line coating its surface; but above both of those is the cloying fake-wolf scent of the small one and a deeper musk that is indisputably familiar. It finally clicks:
Me. "Ember" smells like me.
The bloodstone is tugging me down the rock-river toward these bewildering visitors with such intensity that I have to square my legs off and lean against the pull. I turn my back on the strange canines, and begin loping in the other direction.
I don't know who they are. I don't know what they were speaking about. I don't want to meet them and find out why they are driving the bloodstone — my bloodstone — so crazy. But I want … no, need … to know more.
So I track their scent toward its source.
After some time, the path of the canines' approach veers from the rock-river onto a wide dirt trail. Then from that trail to a much smaller one, zig-zagging up a hillside. Then the trail forks, and the scent leads onto the lesser-used of the two, going back down the hill again. Always, unerringly, they stick to the path, and even though I am again surrounded by trees I am no less uncomfortable than their scent suggests they were. What kind of wolves would stay so consistently out of the shelter of the woods?
Finally, finally, their old and faint scent veers off into the wilderness. But I am barely out of sight of the pathway before I hit a dead end. The scent goes through a light smattering of bushes into a large clearing at the base of a cliff, and the scent-trail meanders around the clearing for a while before leaving it on the far end, headed right for the rock wall.
I lope over, wondering if my senses have led me astray. The cliff does not smell of the strange canines. The grass underneath it does. But as I get close enough to scent it, the cliff begins to shimmer in the ghostly moonlight. It wavers, distorts, and little sparks of light whirl around the area like short-lived fireflies.
And something inside of me sings. This cliff-light feels like the bloodstone when it's whispering to me … and yet not. It has no words, no will, no purpose; it simply is, in a way that none of my senses can pick up save for the part of me which controls the bloodstone. And to that sense, it is comforting, like slipping into the water of a hot spring on a cold day.
Fascinated, I reach for the wall of the cliff.
My outstretched finger makes contact.
And the world around me falls away.