Sequoia Coast [m] pineapple

Mature Content Warning

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The participants have indicated the following reason(s) for this warning: cannibalism

there's so much blood.

Wolf clicked his teeth as if he were an ant with mandibles.

but you brought her through, dreamer.

it was true. dancing fox slept now, a smear of blood high on her cheek. two living children breathed inside the snow shelter.

the rest ... the others.

wolf dreamer could not think of them now. he hated how they had all come into the world, on a packed-drift floor now melted in places by the blood and tears of their mother. it had been hours. he slumped against one wall, trying to press close so that no precious heat was lost from between them as she slept.

two boys, sons.

born in blood.

one by one he had cut the sickened threads from dancing fox's spirit until only gold remained. and then he had helped to untie the glowing strands of the souls inside her, and connect them to the white star web.

a gasp burnt his lungs with cold air.

he was outside, he was — by the sea, so close that a rime of ice had formed upon his eyelids.

and they were with him, the silent, goldless ones he had taken from the snow cave as the woman slept.

did they never have gold inside them, Wolf?

the skeleton inched on bony naked claws.

they never had souls.

wolf dreamer recoiled. but — i felt them! when i was — when i was searching for them.

Wolf waved a dismissive spiny paw.

you felt their life, boy. not their souls. theirs will not come to them for another four days.

four days!

so what are they in the meantime?

vessels. if they are not protected, dreamer, evil will enter them and all their mother's pain will have been in vain.

the empty sockets of the skinless face suddenly leered close. 

what do you remember of my flesh?

the dreamer recoiled. the darkness of the words seemed to press against him. beyond blood, beyond taste, there had been power.

the dome of the night sky was lighted by moon upon snow.

power, wolf dreamer mumbled aloud.

Wolf nodded. yes. why?

because we are all part of one —

of one dream! one illusion! tell me, boy, if you are dreaming, does illusion exist? or is it only a new reality you have created?

the pointing, barren limb; if you believe in Power, then shun the laws of illusion which still bind you, dreamer.

and the wolf upon the shoreline stopped his sluggish excavation of small graves cut in the ice.

he resisted! how could he? no matter what Wolf said, there were laws —

whose laws? yours? did you devise them, dreamer?

but i w —

throw them off! consume and dream what might have been souls back to the stars! do it before you truly comprehend what a vessel of evil might be!

and so it was done, and beside the sea did the dreamer surrender more to his dreaming. droplets of blood were cleaned from the snow. he mounded white over their bones, sensing numbly that the woman would want some epitaph to their having lived.

guilty for the warmth in his belly, guilty for the gold in his veins, wolf dreamer stumbled back to dancing fox.

he showered her awake with falling black cormorant feathers and the down of the underbelly, his face ghastly between their cascading shadows as he covered her blood with the silken offerings of the limp bird.

tucked into the down, her children would be away from the snowfloor.

wolf dreamer sat beside the doorpost, and leant his head there. for as many hours as dancing fox had labored did he sing inside his own mind for the Power of those small souls and their flight back to the stars.