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When we first meet Lord Darcia the Third, he stands immobile, gazing down upon his wife's face as she lies comatose in her nest of wires and tubes, beneath a stained-glass window as tall as a church. His servant, Neige, enters and informs him that for the first time in two hundred years, there has been a confirmed wolf sighting in the north.
This is where he knows he must go, for where the wolves are, the flower maiden is. Cheza, the girl made of luna flowers, was created by his grandfather, and holds the key to awakening his wife from her endless sleep. Where the flower maiden lies, therein lies his one hope for a future.
She had been stolen from him by a rival lord, an old man called Orkum. Cheza was no more necessary to Orkum than the thousand hedonistic entertainments he provided at his castle, but she was beautiful, and she was unique, and thus Darcia had been robbed.
He whispers one last tender promise to Hamona in her coma, touches her flowing hair, and dons his ceremonial Noble's mask and feathered headpiece to find her cure again.
Freeze city is one of the older domed cities, crumbling around the edges and full of ruin. It is still more intact than his own keep, though, so he cannot feel superior in that. But it is almost too easy to disable all the power to the secuirity grid and walk right into the lab where Cheza is keep in her sparkling green sphere, full of the suspension so necessary to keep her healthy.
A blonde woman, a scientist, tries to stop him from taking her back, but a single flash of his wolf's eye is all that it takes for send her careening into unconciousness. And then Cheza's eyes open, and for the first time in a very long time, he feels the first stirrings of hope.
For the first time since he has known her, Cheza is awake. And more than that, she is aware of the world around her, seeking the one whose blood awakened her. Only wolf's blood will awaken the flower maiden, thus it was written in his grandfather's book. He must move swiftly.
Even then, with Cheza in his arms and not a step away from activating the teleport to his ship, when a grate clatters below him and not one, but two wolves run down the narrow alley below the walkway on which he stands.
His wolf's eye is covered, so he cannot see them clearly for what they are, but it throbs so painfully that it is an effort not to raise his burdened hand and clutch at it. But they are helpless in their confusion and indecision, and he owes them at least gratitude.
The one closest to him snarls like a engine. What he does next is cruel, but will not harm her – he lifts Cheza by the scruff of her neck, letting her dangle like a puppy. Her albino's eyes open, and she screams, high as a dog whistle and louder, as the white light of the transporter engulfs them both and they are carried away.
The flight back to his keep is long, and with the route so familiar he allows his mind to drift in rememberance.
A pair of centuries have passed, but the flowers nod in the sunlight of his mind's eye and he pursues her though his family's lakeside gardens, joyful with youth and love. Hamona flings herself backwards into the long grass and smiles up at him, violet eyes warm. Star-like white flowers ring her flowing green locks, and she is his goddess.
She was never afraid of his curse, never sought to humanise him like her sister or punish the beast in him for existing. She loved him, all of him, and to her his gold wolf's eye was a thing of wonder.
Paradise is something all Nobles talk about, and something the wolf in him can't help but crave. But Hamona never desired it so instinctively, and tells him in that warm sunlit memory that paradise was already hers if they could remain together always.
In the dream, she rises and he contents himself with watching the shining wavesof her hair in the wind. But then the scene changes, the colours bleach from the landscape and all goes to wreck and ruin and death and cold-
Behind him, in the dark, he hears Neige's voice.”My lord, the Lady Hamona has fallen ill.”
“Paradise Sickness?” in his heart he had known the light-filled days were not for one such as him, that he was soiling her silvian purity even by being near her. But oh, how it rends his heart so to see her fall into unwaking dreams.
Every day is pain, but he loves her so, still, and devotes himself to his grandfather's work. In the Book of The Moon is the clue to her revival, to his peace.
He jerks back to himself as the compass twitters and the ship's computer targets the ragged spire of his now-ruined mountain villa. After Hamona... went away, such things as asthetics and standing ceased to matter quite so much, and the House of Darcia crumbled with his neglect.
But he has Cheza, and she is now awakened. She will bring back his wife's soul from paradise. He is utterly sure of it. Soon. Soon he will look upon her gentle smile once more, and all will be right again.
Pink warning lights blaze upon his screen, and the ship's proximity alarm blares as the shadow of Lord Orkum's battleship, five times the size of his small personal flyer. They fire upon him, and he is forced to dodge. All of his concentration is taken up by avoiding the dancing red lines of attack.
He notices Cheza's sudden awareness, her widened eyes and parted lips, all too late. She rises from her jar of nutritional fluid and his entire world is taken up by her dreamlike walk to the opening hatch, her serene smile as she falls.
He lunges for her, too slow, and his hand misses hers by a fraction of an inch. All he can do is watch helplessly from his winged and spiralling craft. The flower maiden floats, light as a sycamore seed, down into the gardens where he had run with Hamona so long ago.
His wolf's eye throbs, once, before he crashes, and he knows the flower maiden will be found by wolves.
One such as he is not so easily damaged by falling from a height, and although this craft is not beyond repair, it will take time before it recovers. He tries hard not to be impatient. Wolves can run for miles in a day, but they cannot run if they have Cheza in tow.
The Flower Maiden is a delicate creature, sensetive and fragile. She can no more run like a wolf than fly like a bird, and the Forest of Death will hamper progress even for their kind.
While his craft heals from the damage, he goes down into the gardens of the place that was once Hamona's favourite, especially in the summer. He finds a pavillion still fully intact, unsullied, not too far from the cemetary, and even if his heart resents his grandfather's foolishness, the dead cannot complain if he rests here a spell.
He brings flowers from the town, nonetheless, and among the obelisk grave-markers he surprises the blond woman from Orkum's laboratory. She is comely enough, if human, and her fancination of Cheza is just the diversion he desires. She does not remember the glow of his wolf's eye, nor can she withstand it anymore than the first time.
When she awakens on the settee of the pavillion, they have a long conversation. Her intial fear is amusing, not entirely without reason. Humans have been servants to Nobles for as long as either race can recall, and it is simply the natural order of this world.
Her fear dissolves into wonder when he shows her all of his work on the Flower Maiden and paradise, however. If nothing else, it is a pleasant distraction to speak to a fellow enthusiast, even one who cannot be entirely trusted. Even if that was how Cheza was robbed of him in the first place.
Her news confirms what he already suspects – Cheza is in the company of her chosen wolves, and they are those who challenged him when he left Orkum's laboratory. And as much as she now believes in wolves, he can see that the blonde woman's confusion still remains about paradise.
They watch the moon rise together, and know the flower's time is brief.
In the morning, his small airship has healed, and the woman stays in the pavillion while he checks and rechecks it's systems to confirm that is it flightworthy. His heart aches, torn in two directions – one for paradise and the other for Hamona. He curses Cheza for her very nature.
Once a year on the night of a full moon, the flowers will hear the moon's call and return to paradise.
If the instincts of the fell beast within him are correct, then it will be all too easy to track them. He returns to the pavillion to find that the blonde has, in his absence, wandered too far into the underground rooms that connect the pavillion with the laboratory underneath the mountain.
He finds her at the psychic communications device, and even though his irritation is tempered with amusement at her childish wonder, she has gone too far. If she ever managed to return to his enemies, what little remained his would be gone forever.
He straps her roughly to the comms chair, unable to justify her death yet unable to let her go, either. It eases his soul a little to explain his curse, his reasons, and once again the wolf's eyes sends her falling into slumber. She can stay imprisoned here until Hamona's gentle mercy releases her.
Before he leaves, Neige contacts him to inform of Lord Orkum's demise at the hands of his sister-in-law. Jagura is a fierce warrior with a deep love of battle, and hopefully crushing Orkum's remaing troops will distract her long enough not to interfer with his retrieval.
Night falls, and he flies towards the moon. It is not long at all before he sees the glowing white carpet of flowers from the air, a pretty dream that makes the wolf in him howl with longing. But the airship's landing dispells the illusion, and he smiles to face his true opponents for the first time.
A moon-white wolf for the flower maiden makes too much sense, of course, but he has no time to fight fairly today. He stands behind the shield and lets the ship's motion sensory fire tear at the four wolves' hides. One white, one iron grey, one terracotta and the last tawny, all battered all too soon by the dancing rays.
Cheza screams and weeps, but he cannot bring himself to care. He has waited too long for the flower maiden to heal Hamona, and will not wait longer. He lets her say her last goodbyes to her chosen wolf, and beckons her onto the ship, into a new solution thick with sedative.
As he flies away with Cheza once more, the fat moon turns a diseased harvest red.
The journey is hours long, but eventually he sees his home once more. The bloodied moon tells him that the world is dying, but as long as he can see her loving smile once more before it all ends, it matters not.
Aerial city is a ruin without populace or dome, drowned in a lake some time long ago. But the keep there is home and its high walls and cold, echoing corridors have kept Hamona safe in her slumber for decades.
He docks and carries Cheza's limp unconcious form up winding stairs and empty halls, all blue traced with gold and brass, windowless and dark.
Some sense of wrongness prickles his neck and glows in his eye, but he ignores it until he turns the corner to face the great double doors which guard Hamona's shrine. It takes a long moment for him to make sense of what he sees, but when it registers, Cheza crashes from his nerveless hands.
Neige has been crucified, nailed to the doors, and for an instant he thinks her dead. But then her head rises feebly, voice contorted in agony and dazed relief. “Lord Darcia, you're here...”
He nearly tramples the Flower Maiden in his rush to reach his loyal servant, the remaining soul of a household that vanished when the House of Darcia fell to neglect and ruin. The stakes driven into her palms are deep to support her weight, but pull out swiftly for one of his strength. She cries out in pain, and tries to grip his coat with ruined hands. “I beg of you... please forgive me, my lord...”
Unknowable terror grips his heart.
The doors clang like the gates of the underworld, flung wide open. He barely hears Neige's terrified, babbled explaination, but understands one word.
Jagura. Jagura had come in his absence, with her troops, and... her own sister...
Like one in a dream, he touches her flowing hair, her throat. Hamona's skin is cold, cold, colder than even the pall of cursed sleep can bring. He cannot breathe.
The Flower Maiden's song fills the room, and Cheza stands beside him, too late to call his beloved back from cursed paradise. The tone is sweet, but it cannot revive the dead.
“Don't do that.” he hears his own voice from very far away, like a stranger's.
Cheza hums her nonsense-words lullaby, lays her hands on Hamona's arm. For anyone else to touch her... her... it seems profane, even by one so pure. “Don't do that.”
The sadness in her pink-red eyes seems complete, and her lover's hymn sounds like a dirge. Before he has even thought the action through, he has gripped a slender arm and flung the flower maiden away from his wife. “Don't do that!”
Jagura did this to further her goal to remove the wolves from the world, says Neige. She never did approve of their marridge.
Hamona's eyes are slightly open, a slice of perfect violet. He closes them with one hand, and speaks her name, just to hear it again, lost and loving. It feels as though the ground has opened underneath his feet, a split a mile long. His world crumbles around him like it never did before.
As though from memory, he hears her voice. My love, I wish to see you. Just once more.
The eye of the wolf lets him follow her vanishing figure down the paths of the dead, even as he lifts her still form from her bed, ripping cables and tubes from their moorings, and dances with her body in his arms.
Her eyes sparkle in the sunlight, beautiful and warm, and she falls backwards into the grass, body limp. I know I will see you again.
Yes, my love. Some day soon.
I love you, Darcia..
The vision passes, the dance ends, and he sets her back down on her cold bed so carefully, so as not to wake her. Then grief wells up like lava and he shakes, strives and fails to keep it contained. He throws his head back and a howl rips from his throat, the cry neither human nor bestial but pure emotion.
He screams and screams and screams like a child, and drives himself against a pillar until his forehead bleeds to make it stop, make it go away make it right again... but nothing ever at all can ever be right.
Screams give out to heaving sobs and madness rips his soul asunder, and fury, and it hurts so much, it hurts and hurts and hurts make it go away please...
Exhaustion eventually takes him, but he knows not if he sleeps, or even how long he lies there in the grey shreds of his shattered world. His ears are full of static, and he thinks of nothing at all.
Hours pass, or days.
His wolf's eye throbs, and the world outside yawns with the jaws of a blizzard. He doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know what to do. There is a gaping chasm, aching hollow in his chest. It hurts to be alive without her. It hurts to think that she is never coming back.
His wolf's eye throbs with piercing pain, and across the floor, Cheza opens her eyes. Neige stirs. There is a wolf in the castle.
If he cannot be content, then let no other in this world find their happiness in his presence.
Cheza rises shakily to her feet, and turns to face the door, as the young man, the bone-white wolf from before bursts in and calls her name.
“Kiba,” she replies, and the joy and relief in her voice lashes him like a blade. “Kiba!”
Something in him snarls, and he rises from his slump by Hamona's bed to grab Cheza by the neck once more, toss her away like a ragdoll. Her back strikes a pillar. She screams, the white wolf snarls and leaps at him. His sword is in his hand before he knows it, and his blade cuts the wolf's cheek as the wolf's fangs cuts his own. They speak together, then, wolf to man, and Kiba's unwavering loyalty to the flower maiden is as deep and clear as a mountain lake.
Cheza is all that matters.
Hamona is all that matters. The mirroring of his own views fills him with uncontrolled rage. It was Kiba's fault – all the fault of the wolves. If they had never existed, his line would have remained uncursed and- and- she would not be lying there in such a way if it were not for their wretched Fate.
They leapt at each other once more, fangs clashing with sword. The next pass finds him next to the flower maiden, and a sharp tip strays to her throat. He should kill her now, and rob the white wolf of all that he held dear, just so another could feel the pain he now knew so intimately. But he wants to know.
“Have you found it? Have you found paradise?”
“ We will, no matter what!” the wolf lowers his head, fangs bared but no longer snarling.
“And what do you expect to find there?”
“A future.” the answer is so unexpected that he takes his eyes from the flower maiden and stares at the wolf. “Not hope, or despair. Just a future. Nothing more.”
He thinks about Hamona's hair, shining in the sunlight. His throat is raw from screaming. His head hurts. “I no longer have any need... for a... future.”
A white muzzle wrinkles back on black lips and ivory teeth, and muscles under blood-pinkened fur brace to leap, but a gunshot interrupts, changing the leap into a startled dodge. An old human who must have snuck upon then while they spoke aims at the white wolf. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters any more.
He drops his sword with a resounding clang. He ignores the sudden appearance of the blonde woman and a stranger, four more wolves who seem to be Kiba's pack. He ignores the whine of airships far above them, and is only distantly aware of the light-missile that rents his keep in two, splitting the floor and forcing his unwelcome visitors away.
It doesn't matter. He finds his way to the shrine and lifts Hamona into his arms one last time, remembering her warm body, the scent of her, her laughter. The stained-glass window shatters into a million shards, and the grey light catching on their corners makes him think of sunlight on the lake.
He walks out onto the wide ledge and presses his cheek to her hair, watching the massive black ships above him glow with red glyphs, charging up to fire. He sees a small white shape dart along a broken causeway and leap at the underbelly of one, and realises that he does not hate Kiba himself, despite everything.
Then all the ships fire upon the keep at once. Darcia, Hamona, and everything that was their's vanish in white-hot light.
But it is too hard to kill a Noble the height of physical health and the unwilling prime of his life, and as cursed as he is, he does not die. He lives on without his love, and he feels nothing at all.
Hamona's body finds ignoble rest at the bottom of the lake that drowns the keep, and Lord Darcia dons his headress and mask once more, and begins to walk.
He needs to talk to Jagura.
Sunset finds him stalking the boulevard of Jagura's too-clean and too-whole city, toward the high spire of the Moonlight Crucible. Her desire to take paradise for the Nobles, and to forever ruin destiny for Kiba and his ilk, is his fault as much as it is her sister's for falling for a cursed man.
Both of them sunk too deep in myth and alchemy, he in his experiments and her in her magecraft. He wonders if her vendetta against every wolf has base in a spurious legend. No wolf bit him or his grandfather, however. Murdering the beast that cursed his line will not cleanse them.
The curse within him stirs and bristles at the thickness of the air, the scent of magic and blood coating the walls like paint. Copper and ozone. Burnt almonds and hot metal.
He barely notices when the blonde woman joins him once more. Cheza charms the wolves from the mountains and the sick back to health, so it is little wonder at all she calls mortals to her path. He doesn't even try to listen to her prattle.
He needs to understand. He needs to learn why she would end Hamona's life, when he was so close to bringing her back. But the vivid pain flares in his chest once more, and he squashes any thought of his wife out of sheer necessity.
Darcia finds his sister-in-law in the midst of one of her great gatherings of nobles, celebrating the her iminent victory. He would leave them to their joy, but the desire for closure consumes him like sharpest fangs.
She spins like a top, dancing in perfect grace that is too much like her twin were it not concealed so in wolf-proof armour. Her courtiers only withstand a barest glance of the burning golden glow, and all fall like string-cut marionettes.
Jagura's long cloak swirls around her as she turns to look, and the smile that curves those familiar lips is nothing at all like her sister's. They are alike as clones, but different as a hunting hawk and a caged songbird.
I've been waiting for you.
Her voice is much the same, but the tone speaks of someone so much colder and crueler, a fierce warrior's heart like his own. He casts off his headress and mask in a single movement, desiring to look her in the eye when she admits her crime. Unlike all besides her twin, Jagura may look upon the mark of his curse and remain concious.
She casts off her helm in much the same move, and for an instant he cannot breathe.
It was easier thinking of her as only a sister of the same womb, but Hamona's hair ripples in a wave from that helmet and Hamona's face gazes upon him with unfamilar serenity, and her loss claws his heart for the hundreth time, no less painful than the first.
He has not spoken to Jagura since he married her twin. Nothing of his pain is bared to her, but she seems to sense it anyway, even if it is not acknowledged. Surely the death of her sibling at her own hands cannot have gone unfelt.
Her younger sister, by some hours, from memory. It hurts to speak to that face and know that the other owner of it is long gone. She always did believe Hamona unsavable, as did everyone. But belief does not make a fact. It was his fault, so he would bring her back.
And finally she explains the reason of her sin. “I wanted to release you from that terrible burden.”
Released from his burden... but it was a burden he would have – and did – walk over red hot knives and swallow deadliest poison to bear. He would have done anything at all for Hamona's good health, for her revival.
I did it all for you, beloved.
White-hot rage suffuses him, and while his face remains inert, for the first time in his life he actually longs to split his skin with fur and crunch this imposter of his beloved between his teeth. How dare she call him thus, having robbed him of all he lived for.
In that instant he hates her with everything that he is, and he knows that her declaration will never be returned, Hamona's face or not.
She calls him an unrivalled instigator, as though her supposed love is his fault as much as everything else he brought down upon the three of them. She invites him to dance while the world crumbles, and he realises only then that she has gone insane.
The air crackles and he feels the hair on the back of his neck lift. To his dismay, he recognises the scent of the spell she is calling forth – it is the very same incantation which obliterated his grandsire and blasted his line with wolfsblood taint, centuries ago.
Jagura's expression is blissful, and she approaches him with open arms as though he might abruptly change his mind about her hateful words and replusive attitude. She embraces him, and he forces himself not to react, for any reaction at this point might be taken as acceptance.
He hears a distant howl, and realised that the rage and pain he feels is not all his own. The gateway to paradise recognizes not one wolf, but two, and he and the chosen one begin to overlap.
The world goes hazy-golden and then he is standing on a green hill in the shifting twilight with Kiba at his side, the both of them younger and whole. They look down upon the fallen civilization of the Nobles who were then indisgingusable from humans. Neither of them suffer pain or illusions about this place that Jagura would slice open with her talons.
It rushes towards him silently, like an owl on the wing and he is eaten up by brilliant orange-gold and the shattering sense of wrongness. This not-place is like a cut flower in a vase – lovely but a fallacy, soon to be washed in dust and decay. He does not wish to be caught forever in this moment, as peacable as it may be.
This is false, this is-
The moon is full and red as infection, and the lake is endless sparkling blue as the sky.
Sun/moonlight glows on the luna flowers that nod their heads in the grass around them, and for the longest instant he wants to give in, wants to pretend that Jagura is her sister and he succeeded, that Hamona is with him once again-
Why would you waste your life on a lie? Kiba asks him, and it occurs to him then that maybe the wolf understands loss better than he thought back at the ruined keep. The witch coaxes him with visions of paradise, but without Hamona it is meaningless, no matter what the wolf in him craves. And as the wolf beside him agrees, this thing of Jagura's is no paradise.
You're wrong, he and Kiba say in total unison. Jagura recoils with a gasp, denial plain. Perhaps failure simply never occurred to her, like it never did to him before she came and ruined it.
He and Kiba are one in this place, and their feelings on the matter are completely clear. Jagura stumbles back from Darcia, and when she turns it is Kiba's fangs-
Darcia's hand-
(the world goes white and shatters around them once more)
That rips the wolf-collar from her throat. She still bears the imprint of teeth in the physical world, as she shrinks from him, cowed. Her bewilderment is plain, and he nearly pities her.
The backlash from the failed spell shudders around them, and the nearest wall explodes outwards from the pressure. Jagura's confusion turns to rage, and she raises her head and shrieks, as close to Cheza's scream as any human throat can produce.
She draws a dagger, and in the same smooth movement, plunges it into his chest. In her fury, she slips and misses his heart by a wide mark, but it is a mortal wound all the same. Even if it may take months, he knows in that moment she has killed him.
The spell finally dies completely, and Jagura's keep begins to crumble.
The shock wears off a little, and he pulls the dagger out. Jagura cries out with her denial, and attacks him.
They always were well-matched in the blade, and although his sword is heavier by far their battle is one of equals. They clash and clash again, and in a lull where they both draw back to circle, she says, “I love you, Darcia.”
The tone and voice are her twin's exactly, and for an instant Hamona stands before him like a vision, armoured but perfect and alive once more. Such cruelty would never have occurred to his beloved, but for a single instant that lasts forever he wants so badly for it to be true.
“It's alright,” Jagura purrs, lovely and beguiling, “Come with me, come to paradise.”
“Stop it!” the illusion passes, and his grief crashes down with it like a wave, disarming him and forcing him to his knees once more. It's not her. It's not her. She killed her. She killed her.
His vision swims and his head is filled with sliding pain, and he realises however distantly that it is not only the mocking memory of his wife that is forcing him to bow to her murderer. Jagura laughs and speaks to him in her own voice once more, but everything is spinning too fast for him to rightly make out her words.
Poison. He's been poisoned. The world spins on like a top with the clatter of a wolf's claws upon the marble, and he finds it nearly impossible to rise from his slump upon the floor. The wolves come to his unlikely rescue and it is Kiba – Kiba and the tawny part-dog who lead them here – who ultimately assist him in his vengance.
He has strength enough to run her through, at least, but with her throat in shreds it he only speeds her demise.
Afterwards, he looks upon Kiba's golden-black eyes, and finally, finally he understands.
It is not merely that we search for paradise... but that paradise is calling for us.
The wolfstone will guide him to paradise, and the cursed beast within him must be the one to spill the chosen blood. No base machines will construct the true End and Rebirth.
He turns away, and begins to walk again.
Ice creeps over the skin of the earth like white mould, killing and freezing. Humans sense it, and riot, instinctively rage against the dying of the light. Animals sense it, and those few not already brutalized by man and Noble's avarice wither and waste away like the plants shattered by the bone-deep frost.
Wolves sense it, and keep running toward their destiny.
For so long has Darcia fought and raged against the Fates, the Wolves, the cruel forces which cleaved him from his beloved and buried her deep within her own heart, and finally made it so he could not ever protect her when she was at her most vunerable. For too long he has raged against the heavens and the slow decaying creep towards the ending of this desolate world. It seems that part of the curse set upon his clan is the fate to fail at all they try. He is so tired of fate.
He is so tired.
A part of him knows that it is Jagura's poison that chills his heart, numbs pain, both emotional and physical, but all his attention is now focussed on his final goal. The canker in his veins slowly twists his mind, a clockwork key, until he can think of nothing but Kiba and the store fate has set for them both.
Perhaps, if this is indeed his destiny, after everything, perhaps it will be kind enough to grant him passage to wherever his beloved's soul has now fled. After Jagura's keep, he no longer believes that Hamona is trapped in paradise. As good and pure as she was, she was Noble as much as her sister and soulmate, and there is no place for their kind after the world is reborn.
The sky is iron-grey clouds, yellowish with eternal twilight, and the sickened moon hangs low at the horizon, fat and bloated as a tumor. Stars fall from the heavens and the ice-riven earth rumbles with the impact, far away and unimportant.
He does not know how long he walks, only that he is close enough that when some other's automated system destroys the Tower of the Seal, he is close enough to see the mountain of the Gateway before the dust cloud consumes him. The hot air blasts his face, and he cares not. But there are others in this cloud.
Through the howling gale, he hears two voices – human voices. The thought of man so close to such a holy place fills his greyed, unthinking heart with a slow rage. This is wrong. No human should ever come near this place. He is so far gone already that it does not occur to him that he, himself, was once a man as well.
The first human he encounters is the old man that interrupted he and Kiba's first conversation. He growls as much as a human can and aims his shotgun, claims to know his wolf-eye. The smallest wolf of Kiba's pack snarls at his side, copper fur on end. Once upon a time, he might have admired such bravery.
Darcia remembers only distantly the incident of which the old man – Quent Yaiden - speaks. Soon after Orkum had stolen Cheza away from him, he had given himself into a rare fit of utter despair and rage, warping his bones for the first time to run fourlegged and mindless, hopeless across the countryside. Other wolves had followed him, and Jagura, Jagged Jagura the Wolfsbane had sent her troops to deal with and cover up his folly.
Hungry and unthinking, he and his temporary pack had feasted on the corspes of the dead in the town that her soldiers had trapped them in. Apparently there had been one suvivor of Curios, but there would be none at all shortly – he could smell the reek of a mortal wound upon the old man.
The gun he always carried as reserve (his sword was still somewhere in Jagura's keep, preferably still pining her corspe to the floor) would only speed his death.
Darcia is not a wolf, and he is not a man. The only thing he knows now is what he is not.
He draws his pistol at the same moment Yaiden aims his rifle, and the wolf leaps to the old man's aid, poorly timed. Shot from both front and back, Toboe crumples between them like a discarded rag toy.
For all his talk of hating wolves, Yaiden's shock is as though he had murdered his own child. He stumbles toward the mortally-wounded creature, blind to the danger, and Darcia's pistol cannot miss at such a close range. But the wolf is not yet dead, and the force of Toboe's snarling lunge swings his shot wide and saves the old man's life for a little while longer.
The wolf's teeth dig deep into his foream, spurting blood, but the only thing he can feel is the weight of a half-grown canid hanging from the extended limb. He feels no pain, no anger, only a vague sense of irritation. A flick of his wrist dislodges his attacker, and the half-dead creature crashes to the ground in a fountain of ice chips.
He looks into the old man's eyes and pulls the trigger, and then leaves the two of them to their death to find the other interloper.
Dust sweeps over him again, half sand and half grains of ice, and he knows that he must seem like a wraith to the man, passing through the swirling dark like a shadow thing, foreboding. Bullet and blade both gone now, he aims to squeeze the life from the pathetic creature with a single hand upon his throat.
Kiba senses his presence and comes with slashing jaws and hackles raised between Darcia and his prey. All understanding is swept beneath his snarls and the misdirected rage at one not meant to be so close to centre. Paradise requires three things to open – wolfs' blood, a flower maiden, and the wolfstone. Kiba does not understand.
Darcia realises in that moment that he hates him after all, resents that the chosen wolf should keep all that is precious to him when Darcia has lost everything. All that the white wolf values must be torn and cleansed from his hide, so that he may know true suffering. It is most likely the poison seeping to his mind that makes him think so selfishly, but in that instant he wants with every fibre of his being to ruin Kiba, ruin everything that he stands for, rip it up and salt the ashes, leave it to rot.
If the world would have him cleaved from his most beloved things, then may the world decay and crumble for its sins, without hope of rebirth or redemption.
Cruelty and mirthless joy takes him then, and he can feel his teeth warping forward as the first part of the charge takes him. He stalks off into the howling gale, away from Kiba as his bones crack, his skull warps. Jagura's poison takes even this agony from him, and his skin slashes open, clothes tear, fur bursts forth in the how-wroaw-howl of the most impressive aspect of his grandfather's curse.
When it is done, he takes a moment to lie there, panting, then snatches the paradise stone up between his massive jaws and throws his head back, swallows the golfball-sized gem whole.
It burns in his gut like a star and blights the sight from his human eye, but wolves smell better than they could ever see, and besides, the gate to paradise sings to him now, a sound no human ear could ever tell but the loveliest and most horrifying thing he has ever heard.
Darcia lifts himself on four madness-strong paws and lopes toward the mountain. He pauses at the Tree of All Seeds to scent the remains of the seal, and hears, far behind him, a communal howl go up, mourning. They are fools, to think that they have time to weep for death well spent.
His new form wants to howl back, mocking, but instead he shuts his jaws and bounds up the mountainside so lightly it is as if he is dreaming. He reaches the long dead and frozen caldera, then doubles back and finds a place to lie in wait for Kiba and all of his worthless mutts. He can already hear them approaching, far below.
He can feel the last of his sanity thawing away, ice in the summer sun, until all there is left of him is the desire to rip and ruin the white wolf and all who would stand with him.
I tell you now the words of Red Moon.
From the Great Spirit was born the wolf, and man became his messenger. The beast lives his life in silence, abiding where the blessing of the blood of the Gods is bestoed upon him. The white flower, after winning the favour of the Lord of the Night, will share her scent.
Preordained and eternal in counternnance, her form is that of a lily-white supple maiden. She distills and condenses all of time, until it becomes a precious, frozen mass.
Kiba and his pack are only just below him now, and he steps onto the edge of the spur that hid him previously from view, high above them. The white wolf starts like a scared pup, and the twisted thing he has become takes cruel joy from it.
Only then will appear... the wretched beast.
He knows he does not quite look like a wolf – his muzzle is too tapered, his skull to narrow, the joints of his legs are too long and too loose. Above all, he is three times larger than any born wolf that ever walked this earth, and he seems like a human's nightmare of the cold and snow and hungry howling in the dark.
The wolves rush to meet him as their death, and stand between him and Cheza. The black halfbreed, the blue-eyed bitch is the first to die – foolish enough to think wolfhunting tactics would work in mid-air, his greater weight bore her down and he ripped her throat out too easily.
The injured one, Jagura's mutt, is the next to go. Stupid and angry enough to bite at his leg like a terrier, his remaining blood fountains out over the stones while Kiba stares in shock. Perhaps it has not occurred to the chosen wolf that any who stood between him and the flower maiden were already dead, in this form.
Cheza's wooden bones crunch and splinter in his jaws as he runs back toward the caldera with Kiba in his wake. But the white wolf is still too whole, and so he casts the maiden aside to dance with the chosen one once more upon the mountain, snarling and slashing and crashing and biting in the clear light of the red, red moon.
He is a breath from tearing out Kiba's throat when the last of his pack, the scarred one, leaps at his face and nearly removes his blind eye. It brings him twisted joy to know that the grey one understands their destiny, and he fights well, takes a good piece from his shoulder, before the wretched beast finally shakes him from his back and unseams him from the navel to the chops.
Kiba's cry tells him that Cheza has leapt to meet her own fate, falling like a flower to the darkness of the pit at the mountain's crown. Unhindered now and spiraling from lucidity, he leaps to join her.
On the shores of the ice-bound lake at the bottom of the hole, the moon seems to fill the entire sky. He goads Kiba, gives into his despair, and brings up the spell-drained wolfstone as evidence. The white wolf denies his destiny, and he wants to laugh at his denial.
The snap and snarl and spasm of their bloodshed, the white fur that was more now shades of pink and red now, and still Kiba will not give up, will not despair. He turns each blow around and ripped holes in his unfeeling blue-black pelt.
He flinches and snarls as tendons were ripped asunder, but still he felt nothing. He felt just fine.
Once upon a time he might have admired such determination as he now saw in his foe, but that part of him had been left far behind. It was still screaming and sobbing in the room where he was mere hours too late, minutes too late to save her, to scrape her lost soul back from whence it had strayed, to protect her from her twin.
Jagged Jagura, with Hamona's face but none of her soft edges, none of her sister's gentle acceptance. Jagged Jagura the Wolfslayer, wolfeater, with her blades of poison and hate.
When he had beaten Kiba hard enough that the white wolf could no longer rise to defend his maiden, Darcia sank his teeth into Cheza'a side once more and flung her down across the snow. The fragile roots that spidered from her knees ripped up like weeds from paving stones, and her skin popped under his teeth like that of an overripe plum.
He stalked to toward where she lay. Kiba's final whines and pleads only made him laugh. Had Hamona pleaded, somewhere deep inside her silenced heart? Had anyone listened to him when his world and home were torn down, razed and shattered?
Something deep inside him wrenched violently, and he heaved, spewing green-black bile from his jaws. More poison. More attempts to end him before he ended all else.
Awful death-rattling mirth shook him once more. He gazed upon the gate, where the flower maiden's blood spilled down to the frozen lake. He could see the diseased red moonlight gleaming on it. His mind bucked and twisted further, skewing his thoughts with deadly drug.
He was full of the flower's sap, was he not? And he held the essence of the paradise stone in his very self, in his shape. He could still open paradise, even if his would be wrong. He could still ruin Kiba and this world that would see him wrecked and alone forevermore.
He staggered down to the icy shoreline, weaving like a drunkard.
He could still... he could still... the entrance to paradise...
He took one step upon the stillness of the frozen lake, and then blinding hot flame of a billion colours seared him, agony and ecstasy and purest feeling-
The world went white, and that was the last thing Darcia the Third, late of his House, ever knew.
In the silence after the pillar of fire, a single wolf's eyeball plopped into the half-thawed lake before it froze over once more.
This is where he knows he must go, for where the wolves are, the flower maiden is. Cheza, the girl made of luna flowers, was created by his grandfather, and holds the key to awakening his wife from her endless sleep. Where the flower maiden lies, therein lies his one hope for a future.
She had been stolen from him by a rival lord, an old man called Orkum. Cheza was no more necessary to Orkum than the thousand hedonistic entertainments he provided at his castle, but she was beautiful, and she was unique, and thus Darcia had been robbed.
He whispers one last tender promise to Hamona in her coma, touches her flowing hair, and dons his ceremonial Noble's mask and feathered headpiece to find her cure again.
Freeze city is one of the older domed cities, crumbling around the edges and full of ruin. It is still more intact than his own keep, though, so he cannot feel superior in that. But it is almost too easy to disable all the power to the secuirity grid and walk right into the lab where Cheza is keep in her sparkling green sphere, full of the suspension so necessary to keep her healthy.
A blonde woman, a scientist, tries to stop him from taking her back, but a single flash of his wolf's eye is all that it takes for send her careening into unconciousness. And then Cheza's eyes open, and for the first time in a very long time, he feels the first stirrings of hope.
For the first time since he has known her, Cheza is awake. And more than that, she is aware of the world around her, seeking the one whose blood awakened her. Only wolf's blood will awaken the flower maiden, thus it was written in his grandfather's book. He must move swiftly.
Even then, with Cheza in his arms and not a step away from activating the teleport to his ship, when a grate clatters below him and not one, but two wolves run down the narrow alley below the walkway on which he stands.
His wolf's eye is covered, so he cannot see them clearly for what they are, but it throbs so painfully that it is an effort not to raise his burdened hand and clutch at it. But they are helpless in their confusion and indecision, and he owes them at least gratitude.
The one closest to him snarls like a engine. What he does next is cruel, but will not harm her – he lifts Cheza by the scruff of her neck, letting her dangle like a puppy. Her albino's eyes open, and she screams, high as a dog whistle and louder, as the white light of the transporter engulfs them both and they are carried away.
The flight back to his keep is long, and with the route so familiar he allows his mind to drift in rememberance.
A pair of centuries have passed, but the flowers nod in the sunlight of his mind's eye and he pursues her though his family's lakeside gardens, joyful with youth and love. Hamona flings herself backwards into the long grass and smiles up at him, violet eyes warm. Star-like white flowers ring her flowing green locks, and she is his goddess.
She was never afraid of his curse, never sought to humanise him like her sister or punish the beast in him for existing. She loved him, all of him, and to her his gold wolf's eye was a thing of wonder.
Paradise is something all Nobles talk about, and something the wolf in him can't help but crave. But Hamona never desired it so instinctively, and tells him in that warm sunlit memory that paradise was already hers if they could remain together always.
In the dream, she rises and he contents himself with watching the shining wavesof her hair in the wind. But then the scene changes, the colours bleach from the landscape and all goes to wreck and ruin and death and cold-
Behind him, in the dark, he hears Neige's voice.”My lord, the Lady Hamona has fallen ill.”
“Paradise Sickness?” in his heart he had known the light-filled days were not for one such as him, that he was soiling her silvian purity even by being near her. But oh, how it rends his heart so to see her fall into unwaking dreams.
Every day is pain, but he loves her so, still, and devotes himself to his grandfather's work. In the Book of The Moon is the clue to her revival, to his peace.
He jerks back to himself as the compass twitters and the ship's computer targets the ragged spire of his now-ruined mountain villa. After Hamona... went away, such things as asthetics and standing ceased to matter quite so much, and the House of Darcia crumbled with his neglect.
But he has Cheza, and she is now awakened. She will bring back his wife's soul from paradise. He is utterly sure of it. Soon. Soon he will look upon her gentle smile once more, and all will be right again.
Pink warning lights blaze upon his screen, and the ship's proximity alarm blares as the shadow of Lord Orkum's battleship, five times the size of his small personal flyer. They fire upon him, and he is forced to dodge. All of his concentration is taken up by avoiding the dancing red lines of attack.
He notices Cheza's sudden awareness, her widened eyes and parted lips, all too late. She rises from her jar of nutritional fluid and his entire world is taken up by her dreamlike walk to the opening hatch, her serene smile as she falls.
He lunges for her, too slow, and his hand misses hers by a fraction of an inch. All he can do is watch helplessly from his winged and spiralling craft. The flower maiden floats, light as a sycamore seed, down into the gardens where he had run with Hamona so long ago.
His wolf's eye throbs, once, before he crashes, and he knows the flower maiden will be found by wolves.
One such as he is not so easily damaged by falling from a height, and although this craft is not beyond repair, it will take time before it recovers. He tries hard not to be impatient. Wolves can run for miles in a day, but they cannot run if they have Cheza in tow.
The Flower Maiden is a delicate creature, sensetive and fragile. She can no more run like a wolf than fly like a bird, and the Forest of Death will hamper progress even for their kind.
While his craft heals from the damage, he goes down into the gardens of the place that was once Hamona's favourite, especially in the summer. He finds a pavillion still fully intact, unsullied, not too far from the cemetary, and even if his heart resents his grandfather's foolishness, the dead cannot complain if he rests here a spell.
He brings flowers from the town, nonetheless, and among the obelisk grave-markers he surprises the blond woman from Orkum's laboratory. She is comely enough, if human, and her fancination of Cheza is just the diversion he desires. She does not remember the glow of his wolf's eye, nor can she withstand it anymore than the first time.
When she awakens on the settee of the pavillion, they have a long conversation. Her intial fear is amusing, not entirely without reason. Humans have been servants to Nobles for as long as either race can recall, and it is simply the natural order of this world.
Her fear dissolves into wonder when he shows her all of his work on the Flower Maiden and paradise, however. If nothing else, it is a pleasant distraction to speak to a fellow enthusiast, even one who cannot be entirely trusted. Even if that was how Cheza was robbed of him in the first place.
Her news confirms what he already suspects – Cheza is in the company of her chosen wolves, and they are those who challenged him when he left Orkum's laboratory. And as much as she now believes in wolves, he can see that the blonde woman's confusion still remains about paradise.
They watch the moon rise together, and know the flower's time is brief.
In the morning, his small airship has healed, and the woman stays in the pavillion while he checks and rechecks it's systems to confirm that is it flightworthy. His heart aches, torn in two directions – one for paradise and the other for Hamona. He curses Cheza for her very nature.
Once a year on the night of a full moon, the flowers will hear the moon's call and return to paradise.
If the instincts of the fell beast within him are correct, then it will be all too easy to track them. He returns to the pavillion to find that the blonde has, in his absence, wandered too far into the underground rooms that connect the pavillion with the laboratory underneath the mountain.
He finds her at the psychic communications device, and even though his irritation is tempered with amusement at her childish wonder, she has gone too far. If she ever managed to return to his enemies, what little remained his would be gone forever.
He straps her roughly to the comms chair, unable to justify her death yet unable to let her go, either. It eases his soul a little to explain his curse, his reasons, and once again the wolf's eyes sends her falling into slumber. She can stay imprisoned here until Hamona's gentle mercy releases her.
Before he leaves, Neige contacts him to inform of Lord Orkum's demise at the hands of his sister-in-law. Jagura is a fierce warrior with a deep love of battle, and hopefully crushing Orkum's remaing troops will distract her long enough not to interfer with his retrieval.
Night falls, and he flies towards the moon. It is not long at all before he sees the glowing white carpet of flowers from the air, a pretty dream that makes the wolf in him howl with longing. But the airship's landing dispells the illusion, and he smiles to face his true opponents for the first time.
A moon-white wolf for the flower maiden makes too much sense, of course, but he has no time to fight fairly today. He stands behind the shield and lets the ship's motion sensory fire tear at the four wolves' hides. One white, one iron grey, one terracotta and the last tawny, all battered all too soon by the dancing rays.
Cheza screams and weeps, but he cannot bring himself to care. He has waited too long for the flower maiden to heal Hamona, and will not wait longer. He lets her say her last goodbyes to her chosen wolf, and beckons her onto the ship, into a new solution thick with sedative.
As he flies away with Cheza once more, the fat moon turns a diseased harvest red.
The journey is hours long, but eventually he sees his home once more. The bloodied moon tells him that the world is dying, but as long as he can see her loving smile once more before it all ends, it matters not.
Aerial city is a ruin without populace or dome, drowned in a lake some time long ago. But the keep there is home and its high walls and cold, echoing corridors have kept Hamona safe in her slumber for decades.
He docks and carries Cheza's limp unconcious form up winding stairs and empty halls, all blue traced with gold and brass, windowless and dark.
Some sense of wrongness prickles his neck and glows in his eye, but he ignores it until he turns the corner to face the great double doors which guard Hamona's shrine. It takes a long moment for him to make sense of what he sees, but when it registers, Cheza crashes from his nerveless hands.
Neige has been crucified, nailed to the doors, and for an instant he thinks her dead. But then her head rises feebly, voice contorted in agony and dazed relief. “Lord Darcia, you're here...”
He nearly tramples the Flower Maiden in his rush to reach his loyal servant, the remaining soul of a household that vanished when the House of Darcia fell to neglect and ruin. The stakes driven into her palms are deep to support her weight, but pull out swiftly for one of his strength. She cries out in pain, and tries to grip his coat with ruined hands. “I beg of you... please forgive me, my lord...”
Unknowable terror grips his heart.
The doors clang like the gates of the underworld, flung wide open. He barely hears Neige's terrified, babbled explaination, but understands one word.
Jagura. Jagura had come in his absence, with her troops, and... her own sister...
Like one in a dream, he touches her flowing hair, her throat. Hamona's skin is cold, cold, colder than even the pall of cursed sleep can bring. He cannot breathe.
The Flower Maiden's song fills the room, and Cheza stands beside him, too late to call his beloved back from cursed paradise. The tone is sweet, but it cannot revive the dead.
“Don't do that.” he hears his own voice from very far away, like a stranger's.
Cheza hums her nonsense-words lullaby, lays her hands on Hamona's arm. For anyone else to touch her... her... it seems profane, even by one so pure. “Don't do that.”
The sadness in her pink-red eyes seems complete, and her lover's hymn sounds like a dirge. Before he has even thought the action through, he has gripped a slender arm and flung the flower maiden away from his wife. “Don't do that!”
Jagura did this to further her goal to remove the wolves from the world, says Neige. She never did approve of their marridge.
Hamona's eyes are slightly open, a slice of perfect violet. He closes them with one hand, and speaks her name, just to hear it again, lost and loving. It feels as though the ground has opened underneath his feet, a split a mile long. His world crumbles around him like it never did before.
As though from memory, he hears her voice. My love, I wish to see you. Just once more.
The eye of the wolf lets him follow her vanishing figure down the paths of the dead, even as he lifts her still form from her bed, ripping cables and tubes from their moorings, and dances with her body in his arms.
Her eyes sparkle in the sunlight, beautiful and warm, and she falls backwards into the grass, body limp. I know I will see you again.
Yes, my love. Some day soon.
I love you, Darcia..
The vision passes, the dance ends, and he sets her back down on her cold bed so carefully, so as not to wake her. Then grief wells up like lava and he shakes, strives and fails to keep it contained. He throws his head back and a howl rips from his throat, the cry neither human nor bestial but pure emotion.
He screams and screams and screams like a child, and drives himself against a pillar until his forehead bleeds to make it stop, make it go away make it right again... but nothing ever at all can ever be right.
Screams give out to heaving sobs and madness rips his soul asunder, and fury, and it hurts so much, it hurts and hurts and hurts make it go away please...
Exhaustion eventually takes him, but he knows not if he sleeps, or even how long he lies there in the grey shreds of his shattered world. His ears are full of static, and he thinks of nothing at all.
Hours pass, or days.
His wolf's eye throbs, and the world outside yawns with the jaws of a blizzard. He doesn't know what to do. He doesn't know what to do. There is a gaping chasm, aching hollow in his chest. It hurts to be alive without her. It hurts to think that she is never coming back.
His wolf's eye throbs with piercing pain, and across the floor, Cheza opens her eyes. Neige stirs. There is a wolf in the castle.
If he cannot be content, then let no other in this world find their happiness in his presence.
Cheza rises shakily to her feet, and turns to face the door, as the young man, the bone-white wolf from before bursts in and calls her name.
“Kiba,” she replies, and the joy and relief in her voice lashes him like a blade. “Kiba!”
Something in him snarls, and he rises from his slump by Hamona's bed to grab Cheza by the neck once more, toss her away like a ragdoll. Her back strikes a pillar. She screams, the white wolf snarls and leaps at him. His sword is in his hand before he knows it, and his blade cuts the wolf's cheek as the wolf's fangs cuts his own. They speak together, then, wolf to man, and Kiba's unwavering loyalty to the flower maiden is as deep and clear as a mountain lake.
Cheza is all that matters.
Hamona is all that matters. The mirroring of his own views fills him with uncontrolled rage. It was Kiba's fault – all the fault of the wolves. If they had never existed, his line would have remained uncursed and- and- she would not be lying there in such a way if it were not for their wretched Fate.
They leapt at each other once more, fangs clashing with sword. The next pass finds him next to the flower maiden, and a sharp tip strays to her throat. He should kill her now, and rob the white wolf of all that he held dear, just so another could feel the pain he now knew so intimately. But he wants to know.
“Have you found it? Have you found paradise?”
“ We will, no matter what!” the wolf lowers his head, fangs bared but no longer snarling.
“And what do you expect to find there?”
“A future.” the answer is so unexpected that he takes his eyes from the flower maiden and stares at the wolf. “Not hope, or despair. Just a future. Nothing more.”
He thinks about Hamona's hair, shining in the sunlight. His throat is raw from screaming. His head hurts. “I no longer have any need... for a... future.”
A white muzzle wrinkles back on black lips and ivory teeth, and muscles under blood-pinkened fur brace to leap, but a gunshot interrupts, changing the leap into a startled dodge. An old human who must have snuck upon then while they spoke aims at the white wolf. It doesn't matter. Nothing matters any more.
He drops his sword with a resounding clang. He ignores the sudden appearance of the blonde woman and a stranger, four more wolves who seem to be Kiba's pack. He ignores the whine of airships far above them, and is only distantly aware of the light-missile that rents his keep in two, splitting the floor and forcing his unwelcome visitors away.
It doesn't matter. He finds his way to the shrine and lifts Hamona into his arms one last time, remembering her warm body, the scent of her, her laughter. The stained-glass window shatters into a million shards, and the grey light catching on their corners makes him think of sunlight on the lake.
He walks out onto the wide ledge and presses his cheek to her hair, watching the massive black ships above him glow with red glyphs, charging up to fire. He sees a small white shape dart along a broken causeway and leap at the underbelly of one, and realises that he does not hate Kiba himself, despite everything.
Then all the ships fire upon the keep at once. Darcia, Hamona, and everything that was their's vanish in white-hot light.
But it is too hard to kill a Noble the height of physical health and the unwilling prime of his life, and as cursed as he is, he does not die. He lives on without his love, and he feels nothing at all.
Hamona's body finds ignoble rest at the bottom of the lake that drowns the keep, and Lord Darcia dons his headress and mask once more, and begins to walk.
He needs to talk to Jagura.
Sunset finds him stalking the boulevard of Jagura's too-clean and too-whole city, toward the high spire of the Moonlight Crucible. Her desire to take paradise for the Nobles, and to forever ruin destiny for Kiba and his ilk, is his fault as much as it is her sister's for falling for a cursed man.
Both of them sunk too deep in myth and alchemy, he in his experiments and her in her magecraft. He wonders if her vendetta against every wolf has base in a spurious legend. No wolf bit him or his grandfather, however. Murdering the beast that cursed his line will not cleanse them.
The curse within him stirs and bristles at the thickness of the air, the scent of magic and blood coating the walls like paint. Copper and ozone. Burnt almonds and hot metal.
He barely notices when the blonde woman joins him once more. Cheza charms the wolves from the mountains and the sick back to health, so it is little wonder at all she calls mortals to her path. He doesn't even try to listen to her prattle.
He needs to understand. He needs to learn why she would end Hamona's life, when he was so close to bringing her back. But the vivid pain flares in his chest once more, and he squashes any thought of his wife out of sheer necessity.
Darcia finds his sister-in-law in the midst of one of her great gatherings of nobles, celebrating the her iminent victory. He would leave them to their joy, but the desire for closure consumes him like sharpest fangs.
She spins like a top, dancing in perfect grace that is too much like her twin were it not concealed so in wolf-proof armour. Her courtiers only withstand a barest glance of the burning golden glow, and all fall like string-cut marionettes.
Jagura's long cloak swirls around her as she turns to look, and the smile that curves those familiar lips is nothing at all like her sister's. They are alike as clones, but different as a hunting hawk and a caged songbird.
I've been waiting for you.
Her voice is much the same, but the tone speaks of someone so much colder and crueler, a fierce warrior's heart like his own. He casts off his headress and mask in a single movement, desiring to look her in the eye when she admits her crime. Unlike all besides her twin, Jagura may look upon the mark of his curse and remain concious.
She casts off her helm in much the same move, and for an instant he cannot breathe.
It was easier thinking of her as only a sister of the same womb, but Hamona's hair ripples in a wave from that helmet and Hamona's face gazes upon him with unfamilar serenity, and her loss claws his heart for the hundreth time, no less painful than the first.
He has not spoken to Jagura since he married her twin. Nothing of his pain is bared to her, but she seems to sense it anyway, even if it is not acknowledged. Surely the death of her sibling at her own hands cannot have gone unfelt.
Her younger sister, by some hours, from memory. It hurts to speak to that face and know that the other owner of it is long gone. She always did believe Hamona unsavable, as did everyone. But belief does not make a fact. It was his fault, so he would bring her back.
And finally she explains the reason of her sin. “I wanted to release you from that terrible burden.”
Released from his burden... but it was a burden he would have – and did – walk over red hot knives and swallow deadliest poison to bear. He would have done anything at all for Hamona's good health, for her revival.
I did it all for you, beloved.
White-hot rage suffuses him, and while his face remains inert, for the first time in his life he actually longs to split his skin with fur and crunch this imposter of his beloved between his teeth. How dare she call him thus, having robbed him of all he lived for.
In that instant he hates her with everything that he is, and he knows that her declaration will never be returned, Hamona's face or not.
She calls him an unrivalled instigator, as though her supposed love is his fault as much as everything else he brought down upon the three of them. She invites him to dance while the world crumbles, and he realises only then that she has gone insane.
The air crackles and he feels the hair on the back of his neck lift. To his dismay, he recognises the scent of the spell she is calling forth – it is the very same incantation which obliterated his grandsire and blasted his line with wolfsblood taint, centuries ago.
Jagura's expression is blissful, and she approaches him with open arms as though he might abruptly change his mind about her hateful words and replusive attitude. She embraces him, and he forces himself not to react, for any reaction at this point might be taken as acceptance.
He hears a distant howl, and realised that the rage and pain he feels is not all his own. The gateway to paradise recognizes not one wolf, but two, and he and the chosen one begin to overlap.
The world goes hazy-golden and then he is standing on a green hill in the shifting twilight with Kiba at his side, the both of them younger and whole. They look down upon the fallen civilization of the Nobles who were then indisgingusable from humans. Neither of them suffer pain or illusions about this place that Jagura would slice open with her talons.
It rushes towards him silently, like an owl on the wing and he is eaten up by brilliant orange-gold and the shattering sense of wrongness. This not-place is like a cut flower in a vase – lovely but a fallacy, soon to be washed in dust and decay. He does not wish to be caught forever in this moment, as peacable as it may be.
This is false, this is-
The moon is full and red as infection, and the lake is endless sparkling blue as the sky.
Sun/moonlight glows on the luna flowers that nod their heads in the grass around them, and for the longest instant he wants to give in, wants to pretend that Jagura is her sister and he succeeded, that Hamona is with him once again-
Why would you waste your life on a lie? Kiba asks him, and it occurs to him then that maybe the wolf understands loss better than he thought back at the ruined keep. The witch coaxes him with visions of paradise, but without Hamona it is meaningless, no matter what the wolf in him craves. And as the wolf beside him agrees, this thing of Jagura's is no paradise.
You're wrong, he and Kiba say in total unison. Jagura recoils with a gasp, denial plain. Perhaps failure simply never occurred to her, like it never did to him before she came and ruined it.
He and Kiba are one in this place, and their feelings on the matter are completely clear. Jagura stumbles back from Darcia, and when she turns it is Kiba's fangs-
Darcia's hand-
(the world goes white and shatters around them once more)
That rips the wolf-collar from her throat. She still bears the imprint of teeth in the physical world, as she shrinks from him, cowed. Her bewilderment is plain, and he nearly pities her.
The backlash from the failed spell shudders around them, and the nearest wall explodes outwards from the pressure. Jagura's confusion turns to rage, and she raises her head and shrieks, as close to Cheza's scream as any human throat can produce.
She draws a dagger, and in the same smooth movement, plunges it into his chest. In her fury, she slips and misses his heart by a wide mark, but it is a mortal wound all the same. Even if it may take months, he knows in that moment she has killed him.
The spell finally dies completely, and Jagura's keep begins to crumble.
The shock wears off a little, and he pulls the dagger out. Jagura cries out with her denial, and attacks him.
They always were well-matched in the blade, and although his sword is heavier by far their battle is one of equals. They clash and clash again, and in a lull where they both draw back to circle, she says, “I love you, Darcia.”
The tone and voice are her twin's exactly, and for an instant Hamona stands before him like a vision, armoured but perfect and alive once more. Such cruelty would never have occurred to his beloved, but for a single instant that lasts forever he wants so badly for it to be true.
“It's alright,” Jagura purrs, lovely and beguiling, “Come with me, come to paradise.”
“Stop it!” the illusion passes, and his grief crashes down with it like a wave, disarming him and forcing him to his knees once more. It's not her. It's not her. She killed her. She killed her.
His vision swims and his head is filled with sliding pain, and he realises however distantly that it is not only the mocking memory of his wife that is forcing him to bow to her murderer. Jagura laughs and speaks to him in her own voice once more, but everything is spinning too fast for him to rightly make out her words.
Poison. He's been poisoned. The world spins on like a top with the clatter of a wolf's claws upon the marble, and he finds it nearly impossible to rise from his slump upon the floor. The wolves come to his unlikely rescue and it is Kiba – Kiba and the tawny part-dog who lead them here – who ultimately assist him in his vengance.
He has strength enough to run her through, at least, but with her throat in shreds it he only speeds her demise.
Afterwards, he looks upon Kiba's golden-black eyes, and finally, finally he understands.
It is not merely that we search for paradise... but that paradise is calling for us.
The wolfstone will guide him to paradise, and the cursed beast within him must be the one to spill the chosen blood. No base machines will construct the true End and Rebirth.
He turns away, and begins to walk again.
Ice creeps over the skin of the earth like white mould, killing and freezing. Humans sense it, and riot, instinctively rage against the dying of the light. Animals sense it, and those few not already brutalized by man and Noble's avarice wither and waste away like the plants shattered by the bone-deep frost.
Wolves sense it, and keep running toward their destiny.
For so long has Darcia fought and raged against the Fates, the Wolves, the cruel forces which cleaved him from his beloved and buried her deep within her own heart, and finally made it so he could not ever protect her when she was at her most vunerable. For too long he has raged against the heavens and the slow decaying creep towards the ending of this desolate world. It seems that part of the curse set upon his clan is the fate to fail at all they try. He is so tired of fate.
He is so tired.
A part of him knows that it is Jagura's poison that chills his heart, numbs pain, both emotional and physical, but all his attention is now focussed on his final goal. The canker in his veins slowly twists his mind, a clockwork key, until he can think of nothing but Kiba and the store fate has set for them both.
Perhaps, if this is indeed his destiny, after everything, perhaps it will be kind enough to grant him passage to wherever his beloved's soul has now fled. After Jagura's keep, he no longer believes that Hamona is trapped in paradise. As good and pure as she was, she was Noble as much as her sister and soulmate, and there is no place for their kind after the world is reborn.
The sky is iron-grey clouds, yellowish with eternal twilight, and the sickened moon hangs low at the horizon, fat and bloated as a tumor. Stars fall from the heavens and the ice-riven earth rumbles with the impact, far away and unimportant.
He does not know how long he walks, only that he is close enough that when some other's automated system destroys the Tower of the Seal, he is close enough to see the mountain of the Gateway before the dust cloud consumes him. The hot air blasts his face, and he cares not. But there are others in this cloud.
Through the howling gale, he hears two voices – human voices. The thought of man so close to such a holy place fills his greyed, unthinking heart with a slow rage. This is wrong. No human should ever come near this place. He is so far gone already that it does not occur to him that he, himself, was once a man as well.
The first human he encounters is the old man that interrupted he and Kiba's first conversation. He growls as much as a human can and aims his shotgun, claims to know his wolf-eye. The smallest wolf of Kiba's pack snarls at his side, copper fur on end. Once upon a time, he might have admired such bravery.
Darcia remembers only distantly the incident of which the old man – Quent Yaiden - speaks. Soon after Orkum had stolen Cheza away from him, he had given himself into a rare fit of utter despair and rage, warping his bones for the first time to run fourlegged and mindless, hopeless across the countryside. Other wolves had followed him, and Jagura, Jagged Jagura the Wolfsbane had sent her troops to deal with and cover up his folly.
Hungry and unthinking, he and his temporary pack had feasted on the corspes of the dead in the town that her soldiers had trapped them in. Apparently there had been one suvivor of Curios, but there would be none at all shortly – he could smell the reek of a mortal wound upon the old man.
The gun he always carried as reserve (his sword was still somewhere in Jagura's keep, preferably still pining her corspe to the floor) would only speed his death.
Darcia is not a wolf, and he is not a man. The only thing he knows now is what he is not.
He draws his pistol at the same moment Yaiden aims his rifle, and the wolf leaps to the old man's aid, poorly timed. Shot from both front and back, Toboe crumples between them like a discarded rag toy.
For all his talk of hating wolves, Yaiden's shock is as though he had murdered his own child. He stumbles toward the mortally-wounded creature, blind to the danger, and Darcia's pistol cannot miss at such a close range. But the wolf is not yet dead, and the force of Toboe's snarling lunge swings his shot wide and saves the old man's life for a little while longer.
The wolf's teeth dig deep into his foream, spurting blood, but the only thing he can feel is the weight of a half-grown canid hanging from the extended limb. He feels no pain, no anger, only a vague sense of irritation. A flick of his wrist dislodges his attacker, and the half-dead creature crashes to the ground in a fountain of ice chips.
He looks into the old man's eyes and pulls the trigger, and then leaves the two of them to their death to find the other interloper.
Dust sweeps over him again, half sand and half grains of ice, and he knows that he must seem like a wraith to the man, passing through the swirling dark like a shadow thing, foreboding. Bullet and blade both gone now, he aims to squeeze the life from the pathetic creature with a single hand upon his throat.
Kiba senses his presence and comes with slashing jaws and hackles raised between Darcia and his prey. All understanding is swept beneath his snarls and the misdirected rage at one not meant to be so close to centre. Paradise requires three things to open – wolfs' blood, a flower maiden, and the wolfstone. Kiba does not understand.
Darcia realises in that moment that he hates him after all, resents that the chosen wolf should keep all that is precious to him when Darcia has lost everything. All that the white wolf values must be torn and cleansed from his hide, so that he may know true suffering. It is most likely the poison seeping to his mind that makes him think so selfishly, but in that instant he wants with every fibre of his being to ruin Kiba, ruin everything that he stands for, rip it up and salt the ashes, leave it to rot.
If the world would have him cleaved from his most beloved things, then may the world decay and crumble for its sins, without hope of rebirth or redemption.
Cruelty and mirthless joy takes him then, and he can feel his teeth warping forward as the first part of the charge takes him. He stalks off into the howling gale, away from Kiba as his bones crack, his skull warps. Jagura's poison takes even this agony from him, and his skin slashes open, clothes tear, fur bursts forth in the how-wroaw-howl of the most impressive aspect of his grandfather's curse.
When it is done, he takes a moment to lie there, panting, then snatches the paradise stone up between his massive jaws and throws his head back, swallows the golfball-sized gem whole.
It burns in his gut like a star and blights the sight from his human eye, but wolves smell better than they could ever see, and besides, the gate to paradise sings to him now, a sound no human ear could ever tell but the loveliest and most horrifying thing he has ever heard.
Darcia lifts himself on four madness-strong paws and lopes toward the mountain. He pauses at the Tree of All Seeds to scent the remains of the seal, and hears, far behind him, a communal howl go up, mourning. They are fools, to think that they have time to weep for death well spent.
His new form wants to howl back, mocking, but instead he shuts his jaws and bounds up the mountainside so lightly it is as if he is dreaming. He reaches the long dead and frozen caldera, then doubles back and finds a place to lie in wait for Kiba and all of his worthless mutts. He can already hear them approaching, far below.
He can feel the last of his sanity thawing away, ice in the summer sun, until all there is left of him is the desire to rip and ruin the white wolf and all who would stand with him.
I tell you now the words of Red Moon.
From the Great Spirit was born the wolf, and man became his messenger. The beast lives his life in silence, abiding where the blessing of the blood of the Gods is bestoed upon him. The white flower, after winning the favour of the Lord of the Night, will share her scent.
Preordained and eternal in counternnance, her form is that of a lily-white supple maiden. She distills and condenses all of time, until it becomes a precious, frozen mass.
Kiba and his pack are only just below him now, and he steps onto the edge of the spur that hid him previously from view, high above them. The white wolf starts like a scared pup, and the twisted thing he has become takes cruel joy from it.
Only then will appear... the wretched beast.
He knows he does not quite look like a wolf – his muzzle is too tapered, his skull to narrow, the joints of his legs are too long and too loose. Above all, he is three times larger than any born wolf that ever walked this earth, and he seems like a human's nightmare of the cold and snow and hungry howling in the dark.
The wolves rush to meet him as their death, and stand between him and Cheza. The black halfbreed, the blue-eyed bitch is the first to die – foolish enough to think wolfhunting tactics would work in mid-air, his greater weight bore her down and he ripped her throat out too easily.
The injured one, Jagura's mutt, is the next to go. Stupid and angry enough to bite at his leg like a terrier, his remaining blood fountains out over the stones while Kiba stares in shock. Perhaps it has not occurred to the chosen wolf that any who stood between him and the flower maiden were already dead, in this form.
Cheza's wooden bones crunch and splinter in his jaws as he runs back toward the caldera with Kiba in his wake. But the white wolf is still too whole, and so he casts the maiden aside to dance with the chosen one once more upon the mountain, snarling and slashing and crashing and biting in the clear light of the red, red moon.
He is a breath from tearing out Kiba's throat when the last of his pack, the scarred one, leaps at his face and nearly removes his blind eye. It brings him twisted joy to know that the grey one understands their destiny, and he fights well, takes a good piece from his shoulder, before the wretched beast finally shakes him from his back and unseams him from the navel to the chops.
Kiba's cry tells him that Cheza has leapt to meet her own fate, falling like a flower to the darkness of the pit at the mountain's crown. Unhindered now and spiraling from lucidity, he leaps to join her.
On the shores of the ice-bound lake at the bottom of the hole, the moon seems to fill the entire sky. He goads Kiba, gives into his despair, and brings up the spell-drained wolfstone as evidence. The white wolf denies his destiny, and he wants to laugh at his denial.
The snap and snarl and spasm of their bloodshed, the white fur that was more now shades of pink and red now, and still Kiba will not give up, will not despair. He turns each blow around and ripped holes in his unfeeling blue-black pelt.
He flinches and snarls as tendons were ripped asunder, but still he felt nothing. He felt just fine.
Once upon a time he might have admired such determination as he now saw in his foe, but that part of him had been left far behind. It was still screaming and sobbing in the room where he was mere hours too late, minutes too late to save her, to scrape her lost soul back from whence it had strayed, to protect her from her twin.
Jagged Jagura, with Hamona's face but none of her soft edges, none of her sister's gentle acceptance. Jagged Jagura the Wolfslayer, wolfeater, with her blades of poison and hate.
When he had beaten Kiba hard enough that the white wolf could no longer rise to defend his maiden, Darcia sank his teeth into Cheza'a side once more and flung her down across the snow. The fragile roots that spidered from her knees ripped up like weeds from paving stones, and her skin popped under his teeth like that of an overripe plum.
He stalked to toward where she lay. Kiba's final whines and pleads only made him laugh. Had Hamona pleaded, somewhere deep inside her silenced heart? Had anyone listened to him when his world and home were torn down, razed and shattered?
Something deep inside him wrenched violently, and he heaved, spewing green-black bile from his jaws. More poison. More attempts to end him before he ended all else.
Awful death-rattling mirth shook him once more. He gazed upon the gate, where the flower maiden's blood spilled down to the frozen lake. He could see the diseased red moonlight gleaming on it. His mind bucked and twisted further, skewing his thoughts with deadly drug.
He was full of the flower's sap, was he not? And he held the essence of the paradise stone in his very self, in his shape. He could still open paradise, even if his would be wrong. He could still ruin Kiba and this world that would see him wrecked and alone forevermore.
He staggered down to the icy shoreline, weaving like a drunkard.
He could still... he could still... the entrance to paradise...
He took one step upon the stillness of the frozen lake, and then blinding hot flame of a billion colours seared him, agony and ecstasy and purest feeling-
The world went white, and that was the last thing Darcia the Third, late of his House, ever knew.
In the silence after the pillar of fire, a single wolf's eyeball plopped into the half-thawed lake before it froze over once more.
