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When I looked at my hands, I could see the bones, the veins, the blood pulsing through them. I looked like I’d swallowed a nuclear explosion, and I felt like it too. Every single one of us, my pack or not, was the same. Our hair lifted, floating airily around our skulls as the power pulsed inside us.
Now it's time, the White Wolf said, and we all heard it. You will be my conduit in this world.
“This way,” I said, and gestured for everyone to follow me, not waiting to see if they did. I walked out through the servery then shoved the doors to the banquet hall open, every single red crystal pulsing with a dull light as we strode inside. I pulled out the green one I had in my pocket, a tiny little shard in my hand, so puny compared to the sullen masses here.
Be bigger, I said to it. Be sharp, able to cut through anything. And it was. I felt a throb of power, a drawing sensation, as if something was pulled out of me and into the stone as it lengthened, but it wasn’t a feeling of loss. This was the power of life, what the White Wolf represented, if not Branwen. It bubbled up, easily replenished. It didn’t require the pain and degradation of others to feed it, it just needed someone with the ability to open up to it.
I walked past the rape tables and the smaller crystal clusters, waving a hand as I had in my dream to send the furniture to dust, the crystals growing duller and duller red before fluttering out and becoming green. The guys were at my back as I crossed the floor, not making a sound, until we came to the great crystal of Lonan. We all stood around it in a loose ring, the stone wolf humming with power, making that same strange sound as the ones in the ruins as we drew closer. Sylvan began to sing again, that song from Wolflantis, the same verse over and over, until the sound grew bright and pure, filling every corner of the room.
This is it, love, Brandon said, and when we stepped forward, we did so together, his fingers wrapped around mine as we slammed my crystal into the chest of the wolf.
It shattered like it was made of ice rather than crystal, great chunks falling to the ground and becoming pure white again. It wasn’t power, but it was a way to augment, channel it. The guys bent down and plucked the pieces they wanted, tearing the stone apart like it was spun sugar. They shaped the stones into weapons of their choosing, or in Aaron’s case, augmented existing weapons. I picked my crystal back up—it was a sword now.
Morgan and his pack’s descent into the cavern was on our mind as we walked down the steps into the depths of Leifgart. Sylvan continued to sing as we went, until we reached the opening of Lonan’s den.
Our vision hadn’t exaggerated anything. The sheer scope of the space was hard to get your head around, which was odd because the hill the Volken had built was big, but not this big.
“So how do we tackle this?” Jack said. “Smashing a crystal wolf ain’t like taking out a wolf god.”
“My brothers.”
Our heads jerked up to see Lian standing just in front of the Great Wolf’s paws, his eyes scanning the crowd with barely contained glee.
“It has been a long time between Great Rites, but I promise you, it will have been worth the wait. We come together at each Rite, lay ourselves at the feet of our Lord, give ourselves unto him, submit to his judgement to see if we are worthy to be agents of his will.” Lian’s smile grew wider. “During each Rite, we give everything we have built and collected to our Lord. We destroy, debilitate, wreck, and ruin, spreading out as far as we can go throughout the land to assert the Great Wolf’s dominance.”
A roaring cheer went up through the cavern, the sound reverberating through the whole space, growing louder and louder. Lian waited for the sound to finally die away before continuing.
“Brothers, this Great Rite will be different than any other before it. The destruction that will take place will operate on the grandest of scales. We have been brought low by the machinations of women, bearing daughters where once there were only sons. Men who would join us in our worship of the Great Wolf himself. It is time to take that back. The Great Rite feeds our Lord, who provides for us. This time, we must generate untold levels of destruction to give him the power to get through the witches’ portal and to take back what was ours.”
Does any despotic regime manage to whip up this kind of hysteria without the uniforms and the fists pumping and the demonisation of one group of society who’s just going about their business, doing their thing? There’s a terrible power in the symbols and the rah-rah and the ‘us vs them’ dynamic. Power I was determined to see an end to.
“Watch the wolf. Lonan comes,” Sylvan said.
At the seer’s order, our focus switched to the Black Wolf, and as if on cue, the wolf seemed to… glitch or shiver, as if reality fragmented for a second, and it wasn’t entirely clear what stood there—a wolf, a man, or a wolf and a man in the same body. The earth groaned as the two fought for dominance, the Volken dropping to the ground, both because it was the safest place to be and to show respect to their god. They missed, therefore, the moment he stepped free of his god and stood before the Volken, paying them little mind. Rather, his eyes were on his hands, flexing them experimentally, then his arms, his chest.
“Lonan was trapped,” Sylvan said, watching his doppelgänger move through narrowed eyes. “Hurt mortally by the fall of Eomis. He retreated to this realm, hid out in this cave until the locals started bringing him sacrifices. For the Black Wolf, this would have been enough. That, and the natural cycle of birth and decay. Nothing could harm him, not really. But Lonan…” He watched him move to Lian, then say something only to him that had the man’s face paling.
“Lonan needed more power than what nature could provide. He’d been satisfied with that in the past, but… He and Branwen learned ways to squeeze yet more power, move beyond that which came naturally to the Great Wolves, and use them more as a receptacle to what they created. For Branwen, it was sex, abandon, ecstatic orgies, wild bouts of creation—all the things Eomis was known for. For Lonan, it was the opposite. Branwen’s rise made him weak.” He turned to look at the lot of us. “This is what he’s been doing the whole time, since the Volken came. He made us his agents, gave each one of us access to his powers. In every single one of us, he created a reward system for each act of degradation and pain and suffering.” His hand went to his own crystal that hung around his neck. “Made us all power sources for him to draw on.”
Our eyes scanned the crowd below us and caught the many glowing red points of light across the cavern. The men rose, and with them, they held up those knapped crystal spears, red light streaming from each one.
“We’ve got to take out the crystals,” Aaron said.
“We’ve got to starve Lonan. He can’t have the women and kids,” Finn said.
“He can’t have the men either. That’s what he wants, what all of this is about in the end. They are the final sacrifice, they just don’t know it yet,” Sylvan said, and then he was on his feet. “I know what I have to do now. She made it seem like…” He sighed, then flicked me that devilish smile of his, that promised equal parts pleasure and pain. “Rule well, little queen,” he said to me before sketching a bow, and then he jumped off the edge of the ledge we were crouching on.
31
Sylvan
I should have been a mass murdering butcher.
Everyone thinks their perspective is a unique one, and maybe that’s true in subtle ways, but I’d be willing to bet very few have had the consciousness of a violent, sadistic psychopath beating down on them from the moment they were born. One minute I was all crying, shitting, squalling need, and then I felt it, like a wire ligature curling around my neck—Lonan.
I grew up in the outer limits of Leifgart on my mother’s small property, so I was protected—at least during my childhood—from the worst of the Volken excesses. My mother was gentle, if distant, but the community that had sprung up on the outskirts was such that I had plenty of concerned adult attention and affection when I wanted them. I ran with a rag-tag group of boys, something I never understood the worth of at the time, but by roaming around the farms with them, growing up young and strong under the sun, tossing balls around and climbing trees, I had a family. But more importantly, I had a model for healthy human behaviour.
When the impulses came to dash a newborn kitten against the wall just to see its brains splatter, or to torment the younger members of the group to the point of tears, or much worse, I initially went with them, not really knowing any better. But when the others saw the blood dripping from my hands or the tears in the other boys’ eyes, the punches, the censure, the rough and ready playground justice that came into play soon made it clear. I could either turn my back on all human companionship, be relegated to complete isolation with only broken bodies for friends, or I could learn.<
