The Wolves' Last Gift

Chapter 3: The last breath

Miyuki's POV

The forest had its own sounds at night, and none of them were what I had expected. No howling, no snap of branches under heavy paws, nothing like the noise the pack made when they ran. You would expect me to be scared of the howling, but with how my life was, a howling forest was familiar than silence. Just a low, steady presence, like the earth itself was breathing underneath everything. A hum that lived in your bones before it ever reached your ears. I had grown up near these woods my whole life and never once gone past the patrol markers after dark. Tonight I had walked right past them without even noticing, and kept going.

I did not know how long I had been walking. Long enough for the packhouse lights to vanish completely behind me. Long enough for my feet to go from cold, to numb, to something past numb, the feeling replaced by a dull mechanical rhythm that had less to do with sensation and more to do with the simple fact that stopping was not something I was willing to do yet. One foot. Then the other. Then the one after that. My makeup was ruined. I made my makeup from some corn powder with cinamon for tint. Against my skin tone, its not really the highest quality foundation, but I was damn proud of myself for looking my best at all times.

The white dress was ruined, I knew that much without looking. The hem was dark with soil and the fabric kept catching on every low branch I passed, and I did not care about any of it. That was the strange mercy of what had happened tonight. It had taken everything I was so carefully holding onto and scattered it, and what was left in the aftermath was a strange, hollow quiet. Not peace. Not freedom. Just the absence of the fight.

I sat down.

It wasn't really a decision. My legs simply stopped cooperating and I found myself on the ground at the base of an enormous white-barked tree, the kind that seemed like it had been growing since long before this pack ever existed, its roots running so deep and so wide that the soil around it had a different texture to it, softer and darker, earth that had been breathing for centuries. I don't know how but I just knew. Staring at it and not being able to resist, i ran my hands against the bark and felt old. The tree felt like something sacred. Oh well, might as well rest on a sacred tree with my ruined cornstarch foundation as a reject on claiming day.

I pressed my back against the sacred tree and looked up through the canopy at the sky in small broken pieces, each one holding a star or two. Not enough sky to feel open. But enough to remind you it was still there.

Now what?

No answer. Just the forest settling around me, the quiet of a place that was used to being left alone.

And then the weight in the air shifted.

I felt it before I heard it, and heard it before I saw it. The feeling came first. A thickening to my left, dense and low and enormous, the kind of pressure change that arrives just before something big moves. Not threatening. Just vast. Like standing at the edge of something deep and realizing the depth has no bottom you can see. Then the sound. Not footsteps exactly, but weight. A slow, effortful movement in the undergrowth twenty feet away, each shift deliberate the way things are deliberate when a body is conserving everything it has left.

I turned my head.

I want you to understand that I had grown up around wolves my whole life. I had watched the pack shift and run and come back from hunts, watched dominant wolves move through a room the way storms move through open country. I thought I knew what a wolf was.

This creature made everything I thought I knew feel like a rough draft.

It was vast the way mountains are vast. Not just in size but in presence, the space around it having arranged itself differently, the air near it older and heavier than the air anywhere else in that forest. Its coat was a colour I had no proper name for, somewhere between deep silver and ash, with markings across its broad shoulders that caught the moonlight like old writing in a language that existed before writing was even invented. Its muzzle was low to the ground. Its sides rose and fell with a slowness that was different from rest. It felt majestic. It felt terrifying. It felt like something big. Not in size but in significance. I almost forgot to breathe till I noticed something shocking.

It was dying. This majestic wolf, this sovereign among beasts was dying. The embers of its life force were slowly going out.

I knew it the way you know things that have no words attached to them. In the quality of the silence around it, in the weight of the air, in the stillness of something that has simply run out of elsewhere to be. Whatever this creature was, whatever it had been across its seemingly long and impossible life, it had come here to finish. And I had sat down in exactly the right place without knowing it.

I should have run. I sat completely still instead.

It turned its head. One eye found me in the dark, pale and almost white, and behind the paleness was something so ancient and so awake that my throat closed up. Not the eye of an animal reading a threat. The eye of something that had been waiting, patiently, specifically, for a very long time, and had just found what it was looking for. It looked at me like it recognized me. And the strangest thing, the thing I still can't fully explain, is that somewhere beneath the cold and the fear and the wreckage of that whole night, something in me recognized it right back.

I do not know how long we stayed like that. Long enough for the cold to stop mattering. Long enough for the last sounds of the pack to be swallowed up completely by the depth of the forest around us.

I don't know why, but my body moved without thinking as I ripped up my claiming apparel and went towards the wolf. It was bleeding from its snout and from its legs too. I took my makeshift bandages and approached carefully. Slow enough with hands where it could see to assure it that I was not a threat and that I just wanted to help. I couldn't help but think to myself, 'at least this useless gown can be put to good use I guess'

"What could possibly hurt something as beautiful as you" I wondered aloud. Bending down, I examined the wounds. Remembering the lessons my mom gave me on how to survive, I quickly found some herbs around. Thank the gods the herbs were found not too far from the majestic tree trunk. I ground them in my palms and again, slowly approaching wolfie, yes I am gonna be calling it that from now on, I applied the herbs to the wounds. Wolfie shook for a bit before I reassured it as best I could and went on to bandage it later.

I took Wolfie's head into my lap as I began to carress its majestic fur and hum the song my mom always did for me to lul me to sleep.

I ended up sleeping due to my own lullaby tho and I was awoken by Wolfie's heavy breathing and shaking. Wolfie was in pain. I woke up to go search for other herbs but paused when wolfie howled at the moon the same way werewolves do before changing back. I swiftly turned. Could this be a werewolf? They're not this majestic tho.

And then, slowly, because everything it did was slow, it raised its great head from the ground, closed the distance between us in two heavy steps that sent tremors through the earth beneath me, and lowered its head, and pressed its muzzle against the centre of my chest.

Right where a wolf was supposed to live. Right where mine never had.

I sat with my hands flat on the ground behind me and felt its breath against my sternum. Warm. Impossibly warm. Slow and deliberate, each exhale measured out like something being handed over carefully and with full intention. One breath. Two. Three.

And then something left it.

I do not have a word for what happened next. Not one that fits properly. It was not pain and it was not entirely physical either. It was more like a door opening in a part of myself I had been told for twenty-two years did not exist, and through that door came light, and the light did not stop. It poured and poured with a force and a heat that was enormous and terrifying, and underneath all of it, underneath the sheer scale of what was happening to me, there was something else. The most right thing I had ever felt in my life. If I had to give it one word, the only one that works is this: it felt like something coming home.

I heard myself gasp. The heat spread out from my chest, through my ribs, down my arms to my fingertips, up my throat and behind my eyes. The forest tilted. The sky through the canopy blurred and multiplied.

I was aware of the creature's breathing slowing beside me. Slower. I was aware of something vast and patient finally completing itself. Slower still. I was aware of my own heartbeat, which had changed, which sounded different now, bigger somehow, like a room that suddenly had walls where before there had only been open air.

And then the darkness came up fast and absolute, and the last thing I knew before it took me completely was a pulse in my chest.

New. Alive. Answering back, for the very first time.