“I do not seek your thanks,” Wotri says.

  “And sometimes a man does not seek water, and yet it rains on him all the same.”

  The wolf casts a glare your way. “I despise human sayings.”

  “That’s rather impressive, given it’s the first human saying you’ve ever heard.”

  You grin at the wolf. You’re tired, hurt, cold, and hungry, but by the Sisters, you’ll at least crack a smile out of this dour beast.

  “You are clever, human,” he says after a moment. “But that cleverness makes me dislike you even more. Is there a word for that?”

  “Friendship?”

  Wotri snorts. “Never mind. The trees carry more wisdom than you.”

  He walks the rest of the way in silence. When your tired body has had enough, you pick a spot relatively clear of snow and press up against the cliff side, hoping it will protect you from the wind. When settled, you check your other wounds. Nothing serious, but that cut on your arm worries you enough you cut a bit of your shirt and wrap it.

  When finished, you count your flamestones. After that fight, you have eight left. An uncomfortably small amount, given how dangerous the world has become.

  Wotri settles down near you, his head resting on his paws as he closes his eyes.

  “I’m jealous of your fur,” you say as you shiver underneath your coat.

  “Is that why you murder us for it?”

  All right, perhaps not the best choice of conversation. You let the matter drop immediately. Your breathing slows, and you close your eyes and try to forget the sound of black spider legs clacking across the mountain pass. Or better yet, stop imagining more of them climbing along the cliff side, hunting you, eager for when the pair of you let down your guard so they can sink in their fangs…

  “Do you know what is happening?” you ask, deciding maybe sleep won’t be coming after all. “The quake, the black water, what happened to your pack…”

  You hear Wotri shuffle a bit.

  “There is little I know, and much I do not. I know that I am not like I was days ago. I was…simpler. Wild. I feel new, and I feel old. Like I am an old wolf in the body of a young pup. But there are things I know. I know them like I know the scent of pine or the crunch of the snow beneath my paws.”

  You crack open an eye. Wotri is staring at the cliff, his gaze distant.

  “I was the king of fur and fang. The simple creatures obeyed my commands. My boundaries were loose, and all feared to cross them. My pack numbered in the thousands, and we were fierce. We were mighty.”

  He lowers his pointy ears.

  “That was long ago. I sense it. Countless numbers of your years. Something happened to us. We were not slain. Banished. Forced into slumber. I cannot describe it, for I remember only darkness.”

  “Banished?” you ask.

  Wotri shakes his head quickly, as if dismissing you.

  “I cannot explain better. The world that was, our world, was put to darkness.”

  You frown and try to make sense of what the wolf is saying, and how it fits with your understanding of the world taught by the Keeping Church. The First Canon details the creation of the world, of how the Three Sisters came upon a barren rock floating within the void. Together, they birthed life upon it. They created the wolves and the deer, the bird and the fish, and then declared it good. Its inhabitants were ephemeral though, simple and incapable of worship, and so they reached across the grand emptiness known as the void and withdrew the very first light of a soul.

  Within that soul were the concepts of love, forgiveness, compassion, and selflessness. The Sisters would gift this soul to their favorite amongst all their creations: the humans.

  But there was one who hated this new world of light, and it was the void itself. Angered by the stars the Sisters created to hold it at bay, the void took the form of a great dragon and tried to swallow the first soul on its journey to the Cradle. They battled for a thousand years, but at last the void-dragon was defeated and fled far, far away to lick its wounds. The Sisters delivered the first soul to the Sacred Mother, and with it, the divine right for her children to bear a new soul upon birth.

  Yet to the Sisters’ great sorrow, they discovered that the blood of the void-dragon had fallen upon the Cradle during their battle, and it tainted the purity of their creation. While humans now knew love and compassion, they also gained the capacity for hatred and cruelty. From that day forward, nothing was ever perfect upon the Cradle.

  “The black water,” you ask. “Is it the void-dragon’s doing?”

  “The void-dragon?”

  “The darkness that lives beyond the stars. The source of all weakness and failures upon our lands. In the time of Eschaton, the Three Sisters are prophesied to descend from the stars to do battle one last time, and defeat the void-dragon so we may all be free of its corruption and live in true paradise.”

  Wotri turns to look at you, his mouth hanging open. Mockery, you realize, when he speaks.

  “And who told you such nonsense?”

  You weren’t told these prophecies, of course, but instead read them in the collected writings known as Anwyn’s Mysteries, penned by the famous Soulkeeper Judarius during his exile upon the Estranged Isles. They had long been debated by the Mindkeepers as to their authenticity, but the collected sentiment was that, while they may not be perfectly accurate in their predictions of the coming days, they were close enough as to have been guided by the Sisters’ wisdom.

  You suspect Wotri will not care about any of that.

  “If not the void-dragon, then what created such a horrid thing as the black water?” you ask the wolf. “The trees rot. The grass explodes into powder, seeking to strangle and choke. The dead rise, and the living become strange, grotesque monsters.”

  Wotri lowers his head back down to his paws.

  “All I know is that we are children distinct from you,” he says. “Children…but of who? I knew, once.”

  “We?” you ask, still prying for information.

  “They are names and flickering images, Soulkeeper, and I suspect you will not understand them. The foxkin. The avenria. The lapinkin, viridi, and dyrandar. I had a rival, the queen of the winged…Arondel. Her name was Arondel.”

  The names indeed mean nothing to you. The wolf could be talking nonsense, but you don’t think so. After spider-wolves tried to eat you, you find it hard to argue against the possibility of things beyond your understanding.

  “Who were the foxkin?” you ask, deciding to go with the simplest sounding name.

  Wotri snorts. “I do not know.”

  “Who are the viridi?”

  “I do not know. They were green. I remember plant life, the scent of grass unique only to them.”

  “The others then, the aven…avenria? The lapinkin? What are you talking about? Are they monsters? Creatures? Intelligent, like you, only squirrels and foxes?”

  The wolf puts both paws over his face, covering his eyes.

  “You ask many questions for such a late hour.”

  “I thought wolves are nocturnal.”

  He softly growls.

  “I. Am. Injured. Would you have me hunt, and leave you to fend against whatever may follow us, or would you have me stay?”

  Despite his grumpiness, you’re surprisingly touched that he was choosing to stay with you out of concern for your safety. Maybe the cranky wolf wasn’t so cold hearted as he pretended to be.

  “Forgive me,” you say. “My curiosity is born out of desperation. There is so much I do not understand, to an extant that leaves me feeling like I am drowning.”

  Wotri lifts his head once more, and he looks to the moon. He is still, very still. His eyes close. You watch and wait, giving him his moment.

  “There was a name you used for us,” he says at last. “A moniker that bound us. You cast it against us, as you went to war.”

  Another moment of silence.

  “We were…we were…”

  His eyes open, and he looks back to you. Their yellow glint offers no comfort.

  “I remember,” he says with a flash of teeth. “We were the dragon-sired.”

  9

  Morning brings you no comfort. Feeling has returned to your leg, which is a relief, but it also means the pain of the bite is sharp and pulsating. Your muscles are stiff from sleeping on the hard ground, but to your surprise, your back is warm. You stir, and realize Wotri has curled up beside you. His large body is a bulwark against the swirling wind, and his fur, an extra layer of protection against the cold.

  The moment you move, the wolf king stands up and trots a few feet away.

  “You wake,” he says. “It is about time. I thought humans rose with the sun.”

  The sunrise is hidden behind the mountains towering to your right, so that only orange rays of it peek over the tips. You suspect it is still much earlier than you’d prefer to be up and about if given the choice, and a warm bed to sleep in.

  “It has been a long few days,” you say. “Forgive my need for rest.”

  Wotri eyes you for a moment, then looks away.

  “Your pack is light, and you have no food or water. We are in need of both.”

  That was putting it mildly. Your stomach is an angry knot, your tongue is painfully dry, and you feel lightheaded. Concentration is difficult, even more so than the day before. Eventually the wolf’s full meaning pierces the veil.

  “Did you go through my belongings?” you ask, torn between insult and amusement.

  Wotri somehow looks indignant, even as a wolf.

  “There was little to look through,” he says. “And if we are to survive, I must know what is available to us.”

  You push yourself to a stand, pause momentarily for the dizziness to leave you, and then stretch your arms. The tightness in your back eases, but only a little. You take a few steps, testing your bitten leg. It holds strong, with barely a limp. At least there’s that. Whatever venom the bizarre creature injected you with, it appears its purpose was to numb, not digest.

  Still, you roll the trouser leg up just to check. The wound is unpleasant to look at, and reminds you of snake bites common to the men and women who work the fields east of Alma’s Crown, where the grass is tall and hides all sorts of creatures. While angry, it does not look infected, for which you are thankful. No matter how kind Wotri might be, you suspect he would leave you to perish if you had to amputate the limb and hobble down the mountain pass.

  “I suppose water should be our first goal,” you say. “Then food, if you think there is any to be found.”

  “Is there another human village near?” Wotri asks.

  You nod. “At the end of the pass, just beyond the mountains, there’s a little trading hub named Westwall. We could reach it tomorrow, if we aren’t delayed.”

  “Can you walk without delay?”

  Your life as a Soulkeeper has worn out many pairs of boots. Under normal circumstances, you could push yourself to reach Westwall by nightfall, but on an aching leg and empty stomach?

  “I can try my best,” you say. You swallow, and find it difficult. “But it will not be easy.”

  Wotri trots over to your rucksack, sticks his nose in, and pulls out a little traveling pot by its wire handle. He sets it down on the rock.

  “We cannot eat the snow,” he says. “We must melt it. To do that, we need a fire.”

  You reach down and grab the little pot you bring with you everywhere, plus the rucksack, and hoist both onto your back.

  “If we could build a fire, I would have already,” you say. “But I have nothing to burn.”

  Wotri tilts his head slightly.

  “Do you now?”

  *

  With a bit of oil, and a minute of striking your flintstones together, your rucksack steadily burns. You position the cooking pot beside it, using its heat to steadily melt the snow you dump inside it. The rest of your belongings are strewn about the cliff side, that which will not fit inside the pockets of your heavy coat.

  Luckily for you, you have two separate waterskins, and as the morning drags on, you fill them both to near bursting. After that, you melt even more snow so that you and Wotri can drink your fill from the pot itself. The water is unpleasantly lukewarm, but that is a mild complaint against the warmth spreading in your belly and the absolute relief you feel in slaking your thirst.

  “Those waterskins will have to carry us to Westwall,” Wotri says when you finish, and your rucksack is down to smoldering embers. “As for food, we must hope little creatures are on our path, and that they escaped the black water’s flow. Otherwise, we put our hopes upon your human village.”

  As much as you hate leaving comforts behind, you tell yourself you can make do without most of it. You keep your needle and thread, to fix both clothing and stitch flesh, depending on the need. The same goes for your skinning knife, sharpening stone for your sword, repair tools for your pistol, and the cook pot. The rest, things like rope, hunting traps, and several empty containers meant to store dried and salted food, you leave behind.

  Westwall is a trading town, and it thrives on supplying goods to those making the trip to and from Elkwerth and its silver mines. It would surely have everything you need to replace what was left behind.

  Assuming the village has survived, you think, but do not voice the dour thought. You still do not know the extent to which the black water has buried the world. Hope may await you at Westwall, or a horde of disfigured, ashen-skinned things the people became like in Elkwerth.

  You won’t know until you arrive, and so you try not to dwell on it. For now, it is time to put one foot in front of the other. Together, you and Wotri travel the path carved out along the mountainside. No hint of more spider-wolves, so there is that, at least. High above, you catch the sight of several vultures, as well as a hunting hawk. Seeing life, normal, untouched life, warms your chest more than the sun rising over the crests of Alma’s Crown.

  “What does it mean to be dragon-sired?” you ask Wotri after a bit. As comfortable as you are to travel in silence, your curiosity is stronger.

  “It means what it means,” he says. He trots a little faster ahead of you, for the path has been sloping downward for a good part of the last hour.

  “As in, the void-dragon?” you ask. That something as majestic as Wotri could be made by the great corrupter upsets you, but the rest of what you have seen, the ruined wolves, the twisted humans, and the choking grass, all very much fit perfectly.

  “I do not understand your obsession with this void-dragon,” Wotri says. He glances back at you and licks his lips. “There are dragons, but not of the void. Why do you believe this so?”

  You decide you definitely do not wish to argue the merits of Soulkeeper Judarius’s work on Anwyn’s Mysteries.

  “It’s what the Keeping Church teaches,” you say, purposefully vague. “What is it that you believe, wolf king?”

  Wotri snorts, but you can tell by the way he stands a little taller during his trot that he likes you calling him ‘king’.

  “It is not belief. It is knowledge. Five dragons. Five creators of this world. We are their children.”

  “You certainly do not look like the children of dragons.”

  “They did not birth us as pups. They…made us. Made everything. And then the Sisters came, and they made you, and they…” He shakes his head. “I do not know. It is hazy still. When I think on the Sisters, I feel rage, but I also feel betrayal.”

  “And the dragons?”

  Wotri breathes in long and deep, and then lets it out in the wolf equivalent of a sigh.

  “I remember not even their names. It vexes me. Give me time. I do not yet feel…complete.”

  You can’t imagine what that means. Does he plan to grow bigger? It doesn’t seem possible, but you swear his size is even greater than when you went to sleep. When walking side by side, the top of his back is just above your hip. If you thought he wouldn’t eat you for suggesting it, you’d have requested a ride like he were a small, furry horse.

  The hours pass. You stop occasionally to sit and rest your legs as well as drink from your waterskin. It’s a bit tricky for Wotri to have his share, and you end up pouring it slowly above his head as he licks at the opening.

  “Demeaning,” he says afterwards, and leaves you alone for a bit.

  The slope grows steeper downward, and it feels like you spend more time tumbling forward than actually walking. Your first blessing arrives just after midday, at the sight of a pine forest sprouting before you. You’ve reach the end of the mountain pass, and while the spires are still tall about you, there is vegetation now, and a path slicing through the woods toward Westwall.

  A forest, you pray, means potential game.

  The black water, though, has beaten you here. It swept halfway up the trees, turning the needles to little gray barbs and trunks into rotting black poles weeping a disturbing, inky sap.

  “The rage of it,” Wotri says as he carefully walks the center of the worn path. It is the only place where you are safe from brushing against the needles and the awful explosion of ashen powder that occurs when they are disturbed. That it happens only by your touch, and not the rustle of branches against branches, or the blowing of the wind, adds a strangely sentient nature to its hostility.

  “The water did not reach the top,” you say. “That means we can burn those portions, and that maybe some birds or squirrels survived.”

  “Have you a means to chop the trees down?” Wotri asks.

  “Forgive me, I did not pack an ax during my panicked flight from Elkwerth.”

  “A shame.” He pauses, lifts his nose toward the trees, and begins to sniff. “But your optimism has merit.”

  Another few sniffs, and he trots off the path. You have to crouch to follow, and you’re quick to replace the mask you fashioned to protect against the occasional brush of needles and the ashen mist that results. You do not know where Wotri is leading you until he stops before a tree no different than any other.

  “Ready your pistol,” he says.

  You scan the tree, and after a moment, you spot the squirrel amid the still green portions of the pine. It is clinging to a branch, wary and silent.