Smolder

 

 

The birds were screeching.  I knew my life was over the moment I heard those damn birds screeching.  The canopy grew so close together at the base of the mountain that I could barely see the sky from the lair’s threshold. The fog from the river cast a haze over the thicket that never lifted.   But I knew morning when I felt the lightening of the gloom, and the softening  wind. Then came the screeching those fucking birds.  

Soon the sun would rise but Mother had not yet come home.  It was not in her nature to be out in sunlight.  I had never, in my fifteen summers, seen her step out into the sun.  I’d waited here, in the nest, like a milk suckling pup, because she’d told me to.   I hadn’t slept, only waited.  She’d gone out there to fix my mistake . . . but was she coming back?  Doubt dawned in the screeching of the birds.  

Our hunting trail loops from our nest at the base of the Great Gray Mountains, through the swamp, to The Holy Shack and back again.   The day before, Mother had found a young boy near the Holy Shack.  She had brought him home to show off.  She said that he looked just as I did at his age.  She sat the thing in my lap.  She wrapped my arms around it, so gently, as if it were a newborn pup.   Then she disappeared into the lair to escape the rising sun.  

It took me nearly an hour to kill it.  My claws were as thin as fish scales.  I had the blunt ugly face of a human, with the same flat useless teeth.  The little beast tried to fight back.  In the end I had to use these broad stupid hands to twist its windpipe closed.  Nearly an hour, just to end up killing him in a human way.

She was trying to raise the rage in me.  

“One day you will be stronger than me, my dear.”  She said this often.  When I was young she’d say it to inspire me to fight.  As I grew older she’d say it to sooth the agony I felt at my own reflection.    “One day you will find your fire.   Then the Guia will bless you too.  You will stand on twos as our prey does.  You will look them in their eyes.  When you speak, your words will drive them to madness!”  

Her little pet disgusted me, but I knew her tricks.  So it hadn’t worked.  I caught a reflection of myself in the dark waters of a puddle.  I sneered with broad blunt teeth and smashed it’s surface.  I didn’t share her allergy to sunlight.  So I went out to hunt on my own, to loose myself in the haze of the forest.  

   For a more skilled hunter the fog of the Smoldering Forest is an advantage.  The mists from the swamp mixed with the smoke from the Holy Shack to create smog that curtained the already gray, and crumbling forest.   But for me, with my weak watery eyes, the haze hinders my sight.  I must lean on my nose as Mother taught me.   

I killed a deer by Whisper Creek.  It had been a young buck with his first pair of antlers.   He’d fought well, but I had to kill him with my meaty human hands again.  Even when it was dead I couldn’t sink my flat teeth into its carcass without pain in my jaws.  I braced my head against the whispers in the fog.  The Guia were laughing at me.  Jeering at my uselessness.  Even this meat was better than I could be.  Why had they blessed Mother with such beauty, only to curse her with me.   I howled in frustration and regretted every note of it.  If Mother were awake she would have heard it.  She would have listened from the safety of the shadows and pitied me.   The thought of it made me ill.  I determined then to not go home until I was something she could be proud of.  

I didn’t even hear the trespassers until they were nearly upon me.  A male was leading a female through the brush.  They came up my walking path and paused. 

‘Kill them all.’ I could hear Mother’s command as clear as the trickling water.  It was as though she was right there beside me, breathing heavy with bloodlust.  It was her number one rule for finding humans in her territory.  “Kill them all.  Let none live!  Fore humans are a gossiping breed!” 

The male had lifted a dry branch of one of the old twisted trees and showed the girl the path before them.  “See this should be the way.”  He said.  

“Are you sure he went this way?”  the girl had asked.  The male smiled  

“Positive. I showed it to him.” A hot acrid odor emitted from the female then. “What’s the matter?” The male’s voice became shrill.  “I thought you wanted to find your brother”.  

“You brought him here?   What is wrong with you!”   She nearly shouted. 

“I’ve been out here plenty of times.”  The boy gestured to my trees and to my path.  “I know this place like the back of my hand.  There is no danger here.  Come on.  It’s not that far.”  I followed them through the trees.  Without them noticing I cut off their path back towards their own territory as they journeyed deeper into mine.  

“The Witch’s Shack is right past here.  We’ll find your brother and get back before dark!”   The girl froze in her tracks.  She withdrew her hand.  He looked back at her.  Her scent thickened from sweet anxiety to biter anger.  It made my mouth water.    

“Wait.   The Witch’s Shack?  You took John-John to the Smoldering Forest!?”  She looked about herself, recognizing for the first time, the mist building among the trees.  She stumbled backwards, yanking her hands away from the reach of her guide.  “Nicolie!  What have you . . . done?  You left my little brother in the Witch’s Shack?  Overnight?!  He’s only ten years old!  How could you!?” 

“The male, Nicolie, added hastily.  “My buddy Freddy is there with him!”  

“This isn’t a game Nicolie!  Quit acting like a fucking child! I’m going back to the village!”   The girl turned, and might have seen me if the boy had not grabbed her arm.  

“Why?  Margaret!  We’re almost there!”  Nicolie grabbed the female, Margaret. “We can bring Johnny home ourselves!  We’ll be heroes!” 

“Get off of me!  I’m going to get The Huntsman!”

“And tell him what!?  That fat sorry sod won’t get off his ass without proof the demons are real!  Johnny will be our proof!  We’ll be heroes!  Not him!”  

“Get off my Nicolie!  Your father-”

“That pig is NOT my father!”  Anger burned bright in Nicolie.  It mixed with his arousal, forming something crude and sour odor.  His pulse raised pumping the forest with his scent so it almost overpowered the girl’s angry cocktail.  The pair of them were making my mouth water.

  “We’ve come so close!  We need proof to make the Huntsman do his job.  John was the bait, ok!  But if he stayed hidden like I told him to, he should be fine!  We’ll take him back and he can tell everyone if the demons are real!” 

“Bait!?!  You are mad”  She broke free of him.  “You’re sick!” 

“He wanted to do it!” Margaret broke away, charging back towards the village.  

He caught her by her shoulder and slung her into a tree.  She cried out as she hit the blackened trunk.  They both fell.  Before she could recover Nicolie slithered across her body, straddling her and holding her under his weight.   She whimpered and kicked.  Nicolie’s ill disguised lust for her body blossomed in full in this dominating position.   

“Shut up!”  he barked.  He punched her. Her head snapped back and she  fell silent but not because she’d been ordered too, nor from the shock of the blow.  It was because she’d seen me.  The smell of her anxiety doubled into horror..  It was an intoxicating cocktail.

  Nicolie did not notice.  He was too engrossed in taking his chance to feel her body, than to pay attention to what she was trying to tell him.  “Do I look like a fucking child now?  Huh?  Do I?”

She screamed!  A sound I had never heard uttered from any other animal.  The shrillness of it stunned me.   Nicolie must have been expecting it.  He punched her again.  She reeled from the shock of it, but her eyes kept groping towards me.

   Nicolie was my target.  He was sitting atop her distracted by his own needs.  Suddenly, in an attempt to save her-self, she shoved with all her strength and pushed Nicolie away.   Just as launched for his throat.

I caught her instead before she could regain her balance.  My teeth sank into her flesh with remarkable ease.  I relished the moment, the blood flowing freely into my mouth.  The gasps of her attempts at a scream; the quiver of her lungs struggling to draw in enough air to stay alive.  She reached towards the male for help, but I met his eyes, daring him to come closer to my prey.   He stood there, frozen, and staring as I drank the life out of the same woman he’d moment’s earlier restrained.  I almost choked from the mirth of stupid face.

I withdrew, I boring my burgundy smile in his direction.  But he was already running.  He lacked the speed or the agility of the deer.  But he had a head start.  I’d lingered too long in my bloodlust.  By the time I reached him he’d scrambled up the ditch that separated the human territory from the Smoldering Forest.  

“Let none live!”  Mother’s voice hissed like lightning between my ears. 

I took the ditch easily. Within seconds I closed the gap between us.  I fell on fours in order to swipe his legs from underneath him.  When he fell it was like setting him on fire.  He squirmed and screamed.  His fear delighted me.  

“What are you?”  Nicolie gasped.  “You’re not . . . human!”  

 I paused, his words echoed in my mind.    I examined my hands.  My fingers were longer, my nail curled and sharpened.  My arms were covered in a thick chestnut fur.  In fact my whole body, was blanketed in fur where this morning I’d been a pale naked human shaped thing.  I could hear the moan of the tree spirits through large angling ears, I could see the rabbits that quivered in the bushes nearby waiting to see who’s bones they’d been eating next.  When I smiled at Nicolie, I knew he could see his own reflection in my newly sharpened teeth.  I dug my cat like claws into the socket joints of Nicolie’s shoulder.  Mother had a voice that could drive men to madness.  I tested my own voice now.  I leaned into his ear and and growled the only word I could think of

“Moooottthherrr”.  His eyes shrank into pinpoints.  The terror ripped his face apart.  I gave out a howl that was pure excitement.  

Nicolie punched me in the throat.  The shock of it sent me gasping in pain. . I staggered even as I tried to hold him.   He ripped himself apart to escape my grasp.  By the time I regained control of myself the bastard was gone. 

 The sun set before I reached the village.  I left Nicolie’s arm where it would be found.  Mother was howling for me.  I collected his female and returned home.

Mother had been waiting for me at the entrance of the lair when I made my way around the last leg of the path.  The wind was against me as I approached her.   Her ebony form melted into the shadows all around her.  Her golden eyes were like fireflies in the gloom.  For a moment I saw pride in those eyes.  I saw her jaws relax at the sight of her son, larger and more muscular than the morning before.   She rose to her hindquarters to get a better look at the carcass of the deer I drug behind me.  She marveled still at the bobbing body of the female I held over my left shoulder.  She circled me, her tail wagging in pupish excitement.  But then the wind told her the story I’d hoped to relay myself, the story of a third body.

“Where is the male?”  Was the first thing she said. “I smell three bodies, but I only see two.  This female was with another.”  She sniffed me.  “And you fought him.  Where is he?”

I thought in an instant to lie, to say that I left him because he was too much for me to carry.  But then she would ask to be taken to him.   

“One got away.”  I admitted.  Her golden eyes became sharped.  She fell back to all fours, a lethal pose with her hackles up and her white dagger fangs bared.  

“Away?”  she growled.  “Back to his village?”  Her tongue was too thick to form a complete sentence.    I nodded, dropping my spoils at her feet.  She dodged them as though they were shit.  

“None may live!” She barked, her fangs snapped so near my neck I thought I would bleed.  “HUMANS GOSSIP!”  She shouted.  She circled me as though I were her enemy.  “Do you know what you’ve done?   You have invited the human pack here!  That boy, even now, is telling them of the monster that attacked him!  He is telling them of the girl he lost and do you know what they will do?   They will see it as weakness!  They believe us to be vulnerable.  They will now hunt us and they will not stop hunting us until they kill us!”

“But Mother,” I still remember the way my voice quivered as I spoke.  “We are not vulnerable!  We will-”

“Hush!”  She hissed.  “You know nothing of their determination.  Now that they have hope they will not stop coming for us.”  

“Let me go to the village Mother!  I’ll kill him for you!”

“No.”  Her anger cooled.  The haze drew her gaze away from me and into the distance “It’s too late for that now.”  She sat with her back to me and began speaking softly, so softly my ears could not detect her tones.  I knew she was speaking with the Guia then.   

After a time, she stood and started towards the path.   I rose to follow her.  “No.” Still she did not look at me.  “You stay here.”  She left me then.  And like a simpering pup I obeyed.  The mist fell between us.  She stepped through it, like a veil.  And I just watched her go.  

*   *   *

I sat at the threshold of the lair all that night waiting for a call, listening for any cry for help or the roar of battle.  But the wind was against me that night.  I heard nothing.  Not even the river.  Not until the sky began to lighten, and then only the screeching of birds.  

It still makes me sick to think of  the time I wasted.  I set my nose to the trail and followed the still fresh scent of her along the path.  I closed my eyes so I could focus.  I could damn near see her sleek black form moving through the mist like a serpent in water.

I came upon all the same markers that I’d left the day before: the tree I’d pissed on after missing the rabbit; the rock where I’d killed the deer.  Mother had circled here no doubt studying the scent of my battle with it.  She’d pissed near the same rock but her judgment of performance was impossible to read.  

At last she came to the place by the Whispering Creek were I’d first witnessed the humans in their skirmish.   The sun touched the flattened Earth where Nicolie had wrestled with the girl.  Mother had sat where I once sat. Where I was sitting.  Had she replayed the day?  I had expected her to follow the steps of this attack.  I had expected to detect her following the prints to the girl’s blood, and then beyond into the woods where I’d lost Nicolie.  I’d hoped to find her here still sitting with her back to me, her eyes on the brightening horizon counting the time it would take before I was smart enough to find her. I’d braced myself for her punishment.  The worst I could imagine was to be exiled.  

“You are human, Khon.  That is all you will ever be.  So go now and live with the humans.  If I ever see you again . . . I will kill you.”

But her tracks stopped here.  She had not followed me as I gave chase after Nicolie.  It seems, that she was distracted.     I studied the ground where she crouched close to the Earth, her body emitting the faintest excitement.  She gave off the sweet heat of a clever mind, calculating the next move, controlling quick and eager muscles.  Her claws dug into the Earth preparing for a pounce.  Saliva stained the sand where she kneeled.  

And just off to the right, not far from where she’d lain crouched in the shadows, I detected the unmistakable odor of humans, lots of them.   Men accompanied by lifeless fires, hot metal, and a trail of fear.  They marched towards the Holy Shack.   Mother had followed them, parallel with them, into the ashen wastes. 

The air was colder here.  Not the wet cold of winter, but a cold that chills the heart without touching the skin.  Their naked branches wave boney knuckles at the heavens.  The trees there were scorched by fire that still smolders beneath the ashes fifteen winters after the fire. The smoke, and fog filter the lights of the sky and seemed to take shape against the darkness.  This is the dwelling place of the Guia, our holy place.     

I imagined Mother’s advantage here.   Here of all places, among the very thickest of the smog she would be invisible to their weak senses.  The movement of the smoke should have distracted them.  The ever-present shadows would have hidden her easily.  It should have been a game for her.  

But something had given her pause, something she’d seen, or smelt had stalled her in her tracks and  . . . I could barely believe my nose.  She’d pissed, just a little, out of anxiety.  Her sweat turned foul and she gripped the ground quaking.  Mother had been trembling!  What had done this?  If she had not been so close to them, might she have retreated?  Might she have called for me? I huffed, blasting the ash away to reveal some clue as to what had frightened her.  But all I could smell was her anxiety.  I leapt onto the trail to study the traces of the men but all I smelt were humans.  There was nothing special about any of them.  I followed the trail blind making up the picture in my mind of what each man looked like.    The only remarkable figure was perhaps the Alpha.  He was the only one who walked with sure steps.  He wasn’t the tallest amongst them, nor the strongest.  But he was the only one who walked without fear.  In fact, he seemed to be enjoying the hunt.  I growled a little as I studied this man.  There must have been something about him that upset Mother.  

I was so focused on my tracking that I had not realized where I was until its shadow cooled my soul.   The sudden presence of the still burning cabin cast a shiver down my spine.  

This structure had once been Mother’s home.  She’d lived as a villager, as a human, but apart from them.  She’d been their healer.  Once she traded with them, food in exchange for healthy babies, healing herbs, and access to the miracles of the Guia.  

Her secret was that she’d been here before them.  None of them were old enough to remember that she had not settled the village with their families.  Then came the Huntsmen and his men.  They’d brought teachings of a new God, from a foreign religion.  They’d cast fear and doubt into the hearts of the very families she’d helped countless times.  They came to bring her into their order, into their way of being.  But she refused.  So they attacked her.

She’d prayed to the Guia for the strength to face them should they come again.  And the Guia saw fit to hide her in the fog.  Women of the village came to seek her advice, long after the Huntsmen had left.  They discovered her pregnant with me.  They did not understand how such a thing could occur when she lived out in the wood alone.  So they called the Huntsmen back, now convinced that he was right about her. .  The humans came in the dead of night, but she was not in the shack.  She was deep in meditation, watching them through the eyes of darkness.  They set fire the shack where she lived, and the flames caught the leaves, the trees, and the forest around it, uncovering the very bones of the Guia for them to see.  The flames surrounded them, and filled Mother with power so that she could possess their every nightmares.    Between her and the flames none of the Huntsmen’s men survived the flames.  

Or so she’d thought.  This had been my suckling story when I was a babe. Her most important lesson: Kill them all when you find them.  Let none live fore humans are a gossiping breed.  She’d thought, all these years, that Huntman had been killed that night fifteen years ago.   But Nicolie and Margret had mentioned his return.  And Mother’s reaction to the Alpha concluded that he must be the same beast that had attacked her so long ago.  

The great blackened structure stood, ominous and seething from the flames of that night.  It seemed to breathe my name, every inhalation was a question of my worthiness; every exhalation a warning to the weakness in me.  Smoke still curled from its roof, from its floor.   I bowed to the holy place respectfully.  Its ego eased. I continued to follow the markings from the night before.

The humans had paused here before the Holy Shack for conversation, still unaware that Mother was in striking distance.  Their Alpha left the group to walk right up to the Holy Shack.  The odor of his urine radiated from the blistered wood.    

That must have been when Mother attacked.  She had done so senselessly.  There were too many of them for a head on attack.  Why had she not waited and picked them off one by one?  The depth of her tracks told her range, and her speed.  She’d launched herself into the circle full of men.   She’d attacked their Alpha while his cock was in his hand, the trail of urine shot across the wall and puddled in the ash near where he had landed.  She might have ended him if she hadn’t been interrupted.  One of the weaker males came up with something sharp.  Her blood left purple patterns in the gray ash.  The remains of the attacker decorated the walls of the Holy Shack.  

The intervention had given the Alpha a chance to recover.  Burning metal marked the end of coherence in the smells.  Now there was only chaos and blood.  Battle markings cleared ash to earth in one concentrated circle as the entire group assaulted one victim with crude weapons.  

The Guia watched from their crumbling tower as I read the markings.  Mother was full of the hatred that feeds the Guia, but the humans outnumbered her.  Their fear was also an excepted offering to its great darkness.  They’d overpowered her.  Her earthy aroma was drowned out by the sharp searing sting of hot iron.  

The Smoldering Shack purred as a well fed panther might.  The Guia had feasted well, and Mother’s foolishness had lost her their favor.   Her heart was still beating when they tied her up.  The remaining men had rested, and fed on some foul-smelling brew.  Then they carried her away.    

Why hadn’t she called for me?  Was I so useless?!   Maybe it wasn’t too late.  Maybe she was just unable to call for help.  I called to her.  I sang out her name in a cry that would echo from a distant moon and be heard by her wherever she lay.  

The sun heard my promise and hid its beams behind fat black clouds.  The air heard my song, and answered with a chilling wind thick with the scent of roasting meat on an open fire.  The human village was celebrating their victory.  I felt the energy of the Smoldering Shack watching me as I turned my back on it.  In its darkness there was mirth.  The fog of the forest grew thicker.  But it did not hinder me as I ran.  

  *   *   * 

The forest heralded my arrival into the village with the aid of a giddy wind.  It might have been a warning if the humans had ears to hear such voices.   I did not hide.  I entered walking on two legs uncovered and ready for battle.  But no one was near.  Their mounds of stone and thatch were empty; their pounded pathways were bare.  I might have thought I’d come here in error if not for the stench of them.  

It didn’t take long to find them.  The masses had gathered, like lowing cattle, in the center of their township around a holy building of their own.   I caught a glimpse of myself in a reflective bit of glass.  No tail, no claws, no more fur than that which covered my penis.  Hideous. I moved to the shadows and listened.  

“My friends! Come!  Gather around!” 

A man stood on a stage above the others.  By the smell of him, he was the Alpha.  I could see right away why Mother had become so enraged at the sight of him that she’d lost her senses during her hunt.  He looked like me.  He was a male of the same chestnut skin, and tight black curls, only his had grayed with age. The bones in his jaw and face, the furrow of his brow, his broad flat nose, even the way he smiled were reflected in me.  He was what I was doomed to become.  I growled at the idea of it.  The nearby humans might have heard me, but the Alpha chose that moment to speak.     His voice reached to the back of the crowd where I hid behind barrels of some foul smelling liquid.  

“My friends!  Come!  And see!  Long have we been plagued by fear of the forest!  We shy away from the mists of the wood!  We cower at the haunting howls of the night.  We do not risk hunting past the river.  We do not risk fishing in the pond.  We do not risk being outside our own huts past nightfall.”  The crowd fell silent in reverence. “Because we know that there was a danger in our forest!  We know as sure as the smoke that never cleared that there was a demon among the trees!  

The Witch of the Smoldering Forest once lived here.  Right here, in our village!  We cast her out when we discovered her evil nature.  But we failed to put an end to her.   And for fifteen years she has made us pay for our failure.  She has hunted us.  She has severed our contact with traders.  She has barred our way of leaving this valley.  She has slowly smothered us in the smoke of her very existence.”  The Alpha paused.  He raised his hands to someone in the distance.

“Bring the boy forward!”  The Alpha shouted.  His call was repeated by other male voices and soon the women were whispering his name.  Off from a corner of the crowd an elder woman guided the fragile figure to the stage.   The thin gaunt face stared at the ground.  I could just make out his unique cocktail of fear and loathing.  He was weak, and wrapped up like a butcher’s parcel to keep his guts from falling through the hole where his arm had been.  They’d dressed him in robes to appease the public.  But his skin was an oily dark husk turned sickly green from lack of blood.  

“Why did you go into the woods that night boy?”  The Alpha demanded of him.  The crowd leaned forward to hear his reply.  

He whispered “To see it for myself.”  His voice was too low for weak human ears.  I heard him.  I’m sure the Alpha did too.   But the Alpha raised his roar to the crowd and said.  “This brave boy went looking for our little Johnathan!  He knew the woods were dangerous but he went anyway!  We all know how headstrong and willful young Margaret was!  When she set out in search of her brother our brave son volunteered to escort her into the den of the devil!  They were attacked and before his very eyes sweet beautiful Margaret was slaughtered!”  Nicolie’s face pickled against the memory.  The Alpha continued.

“You saw the horrors with your own eyes.  You saw it kill dear little Margaret ... didn’t you!?”  Nicolie did not speak.  

“You saw the thing that took your arm, didn’t you?”  Still he did not speak.  

“What do you think I have here?”  Nicolie and the crowd looked for the first time at the bundle of blankets hanging on the rafters above the stage.  My heart leapt forward.  It knew what my mind would not dare imagine.  The crowd gasped.  

“There is no way.”  Nicolie’s voice crackled as the words fell out.  He, like the rest of us, stared transfixed at the blanket.  

“No way?”  The Alpha chuckled.  “When this boy returned to us, he was dying!  His arm was gone! He was bleeding nearly ripped apart!  But he didn’t even notice!  His soul task was to make it back here.  He had to come to us, to deliver a message!  That message was “I am alive!”

The crowd rumbled.  “I am alive!” the Alpha bellowed.  The crowd cheered.    “When Nicolie  . . . this young innocent boy returned to us . . . bleeding, dying, but still alive, we knew that the witch’s powers were weakening!  We knew that it was now or never!”

“We, the men of Leatherback, formed a party!  Our aim was to go into these dark lethal woods and finally bring the Wife of Satan to justice!”  The herd cheered raising their weapons above their heads.   

“Do you know what we found?!”

The crowd silenced, every last bull and cow holding its breath.  The Alpha stepped back to his bundle.  He waited a moment longer soaking in the suspense.   Then he gestured to his hunters to lift the blanket.

There was Mother.  She was hanging from the rafters by her legs.  Her black coat absorbed the light.  Over the din of gasping idiots there was one sound that very nearly drowned out even my own horror, the screams of Nicolie.

The attendance fought to restrain him but he was thrashing about in a lather of madness.  They wrestled him off the stage, and covered his face with a ragged sack.  An older woman, possibly his mother cooed to him that all was well.  “The monster is dead now.” 

“NO!”  He screamed “You idiots!”  He fought them, but large men held him.  “That’s not the one!”  But no one could hear him through the sack over his head.  “Mother!”  He shouted as they drug him off.  “Mother!”  

The crowd was not looking at him any more.   On the rafters of the barn Mother’s fur was smoking.  Her sleek black coat was pouring off her body, burned away by the evening sun.  Beneath it her bones were churning, her waist resetting, her mouth flattened.  She hung now as a honey skinned human, with black wool hiding her crown and privates.  Her cone shaped breasts sloped off her chest, dangled in the open air until the restraints loosened and she fell behind the heads of the on lookers.

I was moving forward out of my hiding spot before I could think.  I hadn’t even noticed the mist rising from the ankle level until it began to curtain the crowd.  It was as though the Guia wanted to shield her nakedness from the spectators, or perhaps, to shield the spectators from me. 

Even now it wasn’t hatred for them that drove me forward.  The first human face to clean my claws meant nothing to me.   The blood of the crowd that I bathed in as I swam forward towards the platform meant nothing to me.  I kept my eyes on the stage - on the melting form of Mother laying there in the filthy piss scented straw.  This was my fault!  I’d failed her.  

I reached her body where she lay in a heap beneath the stage.  

“What have I done?”  I whimpered cradling her in my arms.  I wanted to howl, to release the overwhelming despair, but I couldn’t.  The memory of Nicolie’s attack kept me silent.  Instead the pain curdled and became liquid fuel pouring over the white-hot furnace of my heart.  My body caught on fire.    

Something hard struck my head.  I barely felt it.  My fury rose and my body grew to fit it.  I stood over the men who fought me.  I swam through them to their Alpha, the one whose gun had destroyed my world.  A touch of my claw and the man’s skin cooked.  His flesh sizzled against my tongue, my teeth, and down my throat.  

  After that I remember nothing.

*   *   *  

When I returned to my senses the village was still smoldering.  I knew in my heart that the Guia had claimed their new home in my honor.  They danced in this space like gleeful children.  I understood Mother’s attitude towards them now; love and dismissal.   Annoyance laced with respect.  Perhaps they had not come to her aid last night because they knew what I was capable of.  They knew what I would do to avenge her.  They wanted me to.   

I sit now near the River Mists examining my claws.  Bronze fur bristles like flames across my strong muscular frame.  A thick heavy tail keeps me anchored even as I sit on my haunches by the water.  The moon glows gold like a firefly in the void, a single eye of sorrow and pride.  

I’d be human forever if it would bring her back.  

A warm breeze caressed my muzzle.  It rolled over my new long ears.  I breathed it in finding her sweet familiar aroma within it.   It was unmistakable.  “Kill them all.”  She whispered.  

Her scent became something different, a unique cocktail of fear and loathing heated by the steam of a still pumping heart.   Nicolie.  I hadn’t found him in the village.  His hut had been empty except for his mother.  I ware her skin now around my waist. 

“Let none live.”  His odor comes to me via messenger wind from the West.

He is running away, again.  But now he is racing back through the Smoldering Forest.  He is hiking up the Great Gray Mountains.  He will be seeking refuge somewhere beyond.  He has a day and a half head start on me.   His continued existence echoes my everlasting failure.  

“Let none live,” Mother’s voice commands.  

The birds are screeching.  The sun will rise soon.  For now I rest.  Tonight I will track him down.  Nicolie and anyone that helps or hides him.  Anyone he tries to warn will die.  

“ . . . fore humans are a gossiping breed.”  

End