I rolled over and stared at the ceiling. I was bored again. I tried falling asleep and failed. I stood up and began to pace, then stopped myself. I told myself that I didn’t always have to be doing something and forced myself to sit down.
I managed to stay sitting down for what was probably a full five minutes. I gave up on forcing myself to be still and padded out of my den, into the cavern filled with its dim blue light and up out the exit tunnel. I wound my way back to the main tunnel and headed down it to the main cavern of this sub-pack.
The main cavern was huge. In the center of it roared a huge bonfire. It’s walls were dotted with exits leading to various parts of the sub-pack. Although out the room Tyr wolves were socializing , making deals, and waiting to go before the council, or consulting one of the two prophets on duty on either side of the fire. Near the exit to the nursery an old he-wolf was telling a story to some cubs. I sighed happily. This was home.
I headed for one of the exits on the eastern side of the cavern. No one stopped me or even looked at me twice. To them I was just Dusk, a teacher of six and seven year old cubs. Nothing remarkable. I loved that anonymity, through all these years it had hidden me far better than any dark cave in the middle of nowhere.
I padded down the short tunnel and into one that ran perpendicular to the first tunnel. This new tunnel was lined with the entrances to the rooms reserved for teaching the different ages.
I wandered into the room for the six and seven year olds. The teacher-in-training I was paired with, Fox, a white furred wolf like most Tyr, was teaching the class. She was giving them some of the more major prophesies to begin memorizing. She chanted the last line of one in front of the class and they parroted it back excellently. I grinned, they were a good bunch of cubs.
I stood at the back of the room as Fox cleared her throat and began to chant the next prophesy. As she rambled off the first line she scanned the cubs with here eyes to make certain they were all behaving. As her eyes traveled along the back row she noticed me and stopped dead in the middle of a line. Her face broke into a grin and she couldn’t suppress an excited yip.
The pups, almost in perfect unison all swung their heads around curiously to see what Fox was so excited about. When they saw me most of them broke into grins and started at me making happy noises. Several of the rest smiled but stayed quietly there they were. Two pups looked guilty for some reason. I started towards them to find out what was wrong but was stopped by the excited crowd of pups. They swarmed around me and were all over me in an instant.
“Dusk! You woke up!”
“ Fox said you’d be okay. ‘nd I knew she was right. Even if that nasty old healer-lady said Fox was wrong.”
“You’re back! That’s good ‘cause when you’re not here Fox gets all boring and makes us chant and chant and chant and that’s all we do.”
“ Lilly and Demitri didn’t kill you! Yay!”
I blinked feeling really confused. I looked over at the two guilty looking cubs. They were indeed Lilly and Demitri. I realized I needed to talk with them and thought quickly for a way to get rid of all the others.
“ You know, there is a story teller out there. Why don’t all of you go listen to him, take a break from chanting.” I said to the pups. They were gone in a cloud of yips before I could tell what had happened. I laughed to myself and looked around the room hoping Lilly and Demitri were still there. They were. They looked like they wanted to leave but couldn’t get up enough nerve to walk past me. I walked up to them and sat down and went for direct confrontation.
“Did you all um…try to kill me?” I asked, a little awkwardly.
“We…We…We wished you’d go away. ‘cause we hate classes. And then Demitri said ‘I wish he’d just die!’ and then you …you fell asleep. And didn’t wake up. And now you look all sick,” Lilly mumbled “ And I think it’s our fault.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“You wished that? Well, you shouldn’t wish things like that. Either of you two. But, sometimes I know how hard things can get and how you can wish things like that. Just fight saying it, or even thinking it. Just so you know you all didn’t make me get sick. Nobody did.” I said.
The two pups looked up at me sadly, as if they didn’t half believe what I had just told them. Demitri murmured an apology and Lilly followed suit. Then the two of them slunk out of the room. Heads low with shame.
I sighed and turned to Fox. I had questions to ask her. She smiled weakly at me.
“Dusk, those two have been in torment ever since you fell into one of your…sleeps. I hope you aren’t planning to punish them later. They’ve put themselves through ten times whatever you could dream up,” she said.
“Ah, Fox, Fox, Fox. I know better than to punish them. If I punished them it might do away with all the guilt they’ve built up over this, and you’re right. They’re own guilt is far worse than anything I could do,” I said walking over to her and dipping my head politely, “ Now, to change the subject I need to ask you something. Have you taught the cubs anything of The Song of Change yet?”
“ You wake up from a coma, you’re half starved and all you think about is what I’m teaching the cubs? Dusk, you’re a workaholic. Look at yourself. You look like death, and I’m sure you’re not even halfway strong enough to beat one of these cubs if they decided to wrestle with you. You need to be sleeping right now, not up here pestering me about lessons. But to answer your question, no, I haven’t taught them about it yet.” She answered.
“ Oh, well. Then you wouldn’t mind if I gave a lesson on it later today. I don’t mean to just kick usurp you in being teacher for today but I’ve been thinking- ”
“ Dusk! I just told you. You look like hell. If you don’t let yourself rest you’re going to pass out…again. Go have a lie down. Or better yet take a nap. Let your body rest.”
“I don’t need to take a nap, I’ve been asleep for two weeks. The cubs need to learn the Song of Change and I really want to review-”
“ Dusk, go lay down now or I’ll go tell Sarah that you’re up and wandering around.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“ I would.”
I sighed and twitched my ears in irritation. Sarah was the chief healer and was infamous for being over zealous about keeping patients under a watchful eye until they were completely healed. If she learned I was up and about in the state I was in it would be strait back to the sick den and on rabbit food for weeks.
I knew I was beaten, and Fox knew it to. She smiled in a victorious way and nudged me in the direction of the exit with her muzzle. I sighed and rolled my eyes and started towards the exit.
When I had reached it I paused for a moment and looked over my shoulder.
“ I really do feel good enough to teach, this is silly, chasing me off like this,” I said.
“ I do wonder what type of grasses Sarah has decided to feed her patients this month…” was all she said in reply.
I snorted in disgust at the thought of having to eat any more grass and hurried out to the main cavern. The storyteller had the cubs enraptured, none of them even noticed me as I walked by.
I wandered to the opposite side of the cavern unconsciously. And laid down near a wall, I hated to admit it to myself but I was tired. And I probably needed to eat again, and see the healer Aldhi.
The thought of visiting the healer Aldhi bothered me a little. She always cooed and acted stupid ever I got around her and commented on how attractive the gold in my coat was. It was enough to make me gag. But her magic would probably be the best thing if I wanted to put on weight quickly, and, if my memory didn’t fail me, she had recently started courting one of the hunters. If her mind was on this hunter of hers then maybe she would act normally when I came to see her.
Then again she might report me to Sarah if I came to her in the condition I was in now. Infact, I realized, anyone here might decide to talk to Sarah about me if I remained here. Someone was bound to notice a half-dead looking wolf sooner or later. I decided I needed to leave, stood up, and headed back to my den.
After following my usual route I ended up back at my home. For once the solitude bugged me. I didn’t want to be cooped up down here, but I wanted to be cooped up in a sick bed less. So I stayed down in my strange home.
I lay down and rolled onto my back and started at the ceiling, thinking absently how easy it was to hide in pain sight. Most everyone thought I was a yarlen, and those who remembered me arriving at the pack thought of me as a foreign wolf. No one had any idea who I really was.
At times it was almost amusing to me. A few months before I had gotten trapped in the dream plane two Fenris wolves had shown up here on their way to look for “The terrible scourge of wolfkind, Lightfall ”. I had been sitting nearby them at the meal time and had heard them trying to woo some female by telling them that they would be the ones to slay “The Lightkiller”.
I ended up telling them , with a strait face, that Lightfall had last been seen in the Howling Moon Pass and that at the time he had been ten feet tall and belching balefire.
They believed every word I said and set out the very Next Day for the Howling Moon Pass, one of the more dangerous places in the White Mountains.
This just proved to me how much more effective hiding in plain sight was compared to having to run from the wolves that wanted me dead. If I ran and hid and ostracized myself I would attract allot more attention to myself than I did in my current state of life. If I told some one that the dreaded Lightfall spent his days teaching pups in a secluded Tyr sub pack they would laugh so hard they would fall over. I currently was as safe as I could ever hope to be.
I was beginning to feel sleepy. I couldn’t believe I would be this tired this soon after wakeing up, but evidently it was possible. I began to doze off and was soon happily napping without a dream in my head.
“Why do you live down here Dusk? It’s so lonely, and you have to find your way through a maze of tunnels in the pitch dark.”
The voice echoed around the little cavern and woke me up. My head shot up and I looked around blinking and trying to find the source of the voice. I sighed with relief when I saw it was just White.
I sniffed and smelled meat and saw a saw a small dead rabbit next to white’s feet. I stared at it, practically drooling. White saw me and grinned and nudged it toward me.
“Go on, take it. Fox brought it to me. She said you needed it. It’s not skinned so I have to guess she caught it herself,” White said as I reached out with one paw and pawed the rabbit close enough for me to eat. White paused, almost nervously, then quickly spat out his next few words.
“Are you two... um…er…I mean to say are you-”
I shook my head and gulped down the piece of rabbit that was in my mouth.
“No, If anything she looks at me as … an uncle I guess. Her heart is set on that young prophet. The black one with the white tip on his tail. What was his name?”
“ With a white tail tip? That would have to be Tim if I remember right”
“ Ah, yes. Now to change the subject, you didn’t come down here just to deliver a rabbit did you?”
“ No. It’s time for the eclipse. You told me to come wake you earlier. Don’t you remember?”
“I do, but...isn’t it a little early?”
“Dusk, the sun set over three hours ago.”
“What!? I’ve been asleep that long?”
“Apparently so.”
I shook my head in almost disbelief. It had felt like I had been asleep for minutes, not hours. I must have been more tired than I thought I was. I finished up the rabbit, it was a small one so it hadn’t taken long to eat, and pushed the bones out of my den. I hated to be that messy but at the present I couldn’t think of how to get rid of them. I’d have to think of a way later. I needed to see the eclipse now.
White saw I was done eating and started to leave. I got up to my feet, stretched, and followed him. We wound our way through the dark passages that led from where I lived to the higher up and more populated world. We eventually made it to the main tunnel and followed it to another smaller tunnel, which was lit by small fires in nooks bored out from the walls. We then proceeded to follow to the end which seemed to be a dead end.
“Um…White, are you lost? This looks-”
“- like a dead end,” White said finishing my sentence, “ I know. It’s actually a big rock. See the shadow next to it? If you go up to it you can see it’s a way around.”
I walked up to the ‘end’ of the tunnel and peered at it. Sure enough there was a ‘shadow’. And sure enough that shadow turned out to be a detour. It was a little small but in my current state I padded through it easily. The other side of the rock was far different from the well traveled tunnel we had been in before.
This side was old, and seldom used. It had cobwebs decorating parts of it, and the warm firelight which had lit the other side of the rock was gone, and the tunnel was now lit with a cold pale silver light coming from the end of the tunnel. I sniffed and smelled fresh air, it seemed that this tunnel ran to the outside world.
I heard a crumbling of old dirt and turned my head to see White finish squirming through the detour around the rock. He got through and padded past me jerking his head to indicate for me to follow.
I followed cautiously. Even thought I knew that White wouldn’t lead me into danger I remembered the lessons drilled into my head when I was younger. The lessons about the dangers of abandoned tunnels and how they could collapse.
Soon we reached the true end of the tunnel, and I saw that my earlier guess was right. The tunnel did lead outside. Around the mouth of the tunnel there was a little bit of snow that had been blown in. I paused to lick up a mouthful of it and smiled. It felt good to be out in the fresh air, and the snow on the ground somehow managed to give the air a wonderful cold and crisp feeling.
I stepped into the snow and looked up. The moon was hanging high in the sky. It was not a perfect circle now. A small sliver seemed to be cut out of it. I sat down and stared at it, transfixed. Something about the eclipse seemed to hold me.
A memory flickered awake. I couldn’t tell where the memory was from, or even if it was mine. I my minds eye flickered the image of a wolf like creature, standing on two legs. It was standing on a rock snarling out something. Words in the old tongue echoed in my mind. The wolf thing was chanting the same words over and over again. Its voice was raspy as if it couldn’t quite breathe.
“ Cyah Raiwah…Vildein…Kathstani…Lairah…Nani…Silven…” It half growled. Then as the flickering memory died the thing threw back its head and howled. And as suddenly as the memory had come it was gone.
Cyah raiwah vildein Kathstani, Lairah nani silven. The words continued to echo throughout my mind. They wouldn’t let go. I grasped for a meaning that wasn’t there… and then suddenly it was. Cyah raiwah vildein kathstani . Lairah nani silven … She will rise. The Change comes with her.
When I realized that I nearly choked. Those words were the last two lines of the Song of Change. I felt a shudder go through me. I quickly shoved the thought to the very back of my mind and forced myself to pay close attention to the moon.
It was nearly half eclipsed. I wondered vaguely where the time had gone before I was transfixed again. Time seemed to speed up and I saw the eclipse happen my faster than it would normally go. I saw it reach halfway, then a quarter of a way. And then it was nearly all the way.
The moon was now a ruddy color, as if bleeding. I saw the read then I understood what was happening, or at least happening in a spiritual sense.
The moon was dying.