Ankyra Sound "in time you'll taste all the salt in my lungs."

obligatory song for caiaphas' closing chapter... <3 thank you everyone, for the amazing run. caiaphas has been one of my longest running characters, both on and off WOLF -- and she is who she is because of all of the amazing people and character's i've threaded with through the years. thank you everyone who has written with me and her through the years. pour one out for my girl tonight!! <3

ephraim had given caiaphas one final kindness by delivering her to death. yet that kindness came at a cruel cost - a memory that was likely to haunt him the rest of his life. for caiaphas, life as she knew it had ended -- and now, the last of her neurons and synapses fired off into unreceiving black, met no answer, and faded like sparks among an endless plain of darkness.

- - -

caiaphas woke with a start, the sound of the ocean roaring distantly in her ears. the call of gulls sounded, their raucous squabbles coming over the insistent thrash of the waves. she could hear the sucking of the sea over sand, the hiss of frothing waves retracting over stone.

how long have i been sleeping?

somewhere too, the siren song of the grotto - wind whistling through subterranean halls.

the world was bright -- too bright, even. with her gaze shielded by a paw caiaphas rose, the byzantine glare of the sun blinding. it took her several moments to adjust as she stumbled down the strand.. yet for all of its brightness, caiaphas could not tell the time -- the sun hung fierce and close and wrong, straddling over the distant mouth of the grotto in a position it had never occupied before..

she cast a look around her. no other soul. the white plains of the beach uninterrupted. endless.

water lapped at her little paws. cold. she started, moving down the swash-line with her head bent downwards.

around her the normal thrum of the ocean was subsiding. no, not subsiding. another noise was taking precedence; a noise she had never heard before yet at once, was intimately familiar with. it was deep, like the throaty gurgle of rushwater over stone. it was loud, too -- thrumming with the insistence of a thirsty heartbeat.

the noise called to her, chasing away the thoughts that clouded her mind.

headed towards the grotto, caiaphas' eyes rested on the mouth of the den. the slip of stone she had traversed a thousand times. she knew every detail of its flowstone, every curve and every erosion -- some of it made even, by her own frequent passing. only this time, the grotto's entrance wasn't slung in familiar shadows. it was housed in a silvery brightness, the mouth a rippling and frayed vortex of shifting aqueous sage.

she walked alone towards it, feeling as if it were the moon pulling the sea. as she came closer, a whirring hum filled her ears and senses. a calmness overcame her - an acceptance that she stared into the face of unknowable finality, and finality stared back.

a part of her knew to step into that smokescreen chasm was to give it all up -- yet somehow, all the little troubles of her life seemed inconsequential. distant. here was a world of permanence, a world of legacy -- a world that would leave the cruel realm she had inhabited behind the moment she became part of it. it was as if her existence had been simply a dream - a prelude - and this yawning chasm of silverstrand chaos was the reality, brought home to her at last.

swallowing the last of her mortal hopes, caiaphas approached that harrowing hell-mouth. silvery tendrils along the schism's edge reached out in turn, embracing the sylph's slender form in a stunning mirage of color.

she felt whole as she stepped into the liquid shimmer of the gorge: she had been broken a thousand times, but here she was being forged anew in traces of gilded finish. different.

eternal.

it was as if her body had fed the void -- for a kaleidoscope of prismatic color rippled out from that singularity of glowing gunmetal the moment it touched her. around her body this gleaming chaos rippled, until at last it consumed her entire.

a flourishing arc of white sparked across where caiaphas' body had been, and then the grotto's mouth grew dark, and spoke no more.