The Wolf -Chapter IX: A Quiet Conversation; Part 1

IX: A Quiet Conversation

1.
Two days after Adrian told off Dade, he found himself alone with Evita once more.
She had flirted with him constantly over the week, and though he found many things about her personality that revolted him, there were many other aspects which he liked quite dearly.
On the matter of his relationship with Katy, Adrian was in doubt. As he was in so many things these past few days.
It had all happened so fast, and he found himself looking around the caves and the town and finding himself too much at home there. He had not gone back to his house once since he had first come there, and his mind felt weighted towards the idea of never leaving. More and more he was convinced that staying with Katy would be idiotic; that the two of them would one day very soon get into a fight, break up, and never see one another again. That was, after all, how all of Adrian’s previous human relationships had gone. Why shouldn’t this last one go the same way?
But Evita, strange, unnerving, and forward as she was, was still more relatable to Adrian than Katy could ever be. She was a werewolf, and she knew exactly what it was like to be one every day. Surely this was more merit for a longterm relationship than some mild acceptance from a human girl ever was?
Whatever he tried to tell himself, despite the strength and tact of his words, there still lingered a fear that he was making one big mistake. Some part of him knew that there was more to this than he understood, and that his unquestioning acceptance of their world was exactly what they wanted. But this part he repressed in every way he could imagine, just as he repressed the wolf.
This place, this speakeasy of werewolves, presented Adrian with a life wherein he was an important member of a society of confidants; an outcast among fellows who were all mutually aware of their individual plights. He wanted more than anything to believe in this reality, in this place where the wolf would never whisper to him again; where he would never have to face rejection or disappointment; where he would be a part of something bigger and more grand than himself.
But the doubt lingered.
And the dreams grew stronger.
And the wolf waited.
So it was that Adrian was once more alone with Evita, and she spoke to him thusly.

2.
“My love,” she said in her cooing, breathy voice, “you need to make a choice.”
“What do you mean?” Adrian said.
“My brother and I have been speaking, you see. He said that you were particularly enthusiastic about taking up your rite, but that over the past few days you’ve been showing some unconscious reticence. I agreed with him on this, as you might expect.” She circled around him and drew closer, drawing a finger along his chest. “You cannot dance between one life or the other. You have to make a choice. It’s either her…”
Evita put her lips to his and drew her hand up the inside of his leg.
“…or me.”
She bit his lip and ran her tongue against his teeth. Adrian’s pulse quickened, and he leaned forward, putting one hand around her back and another upon her breast.
But then she stopped, and pulled herself away from him.
She wore a vicious, lustful smile, her eyes dancing in the dim light.
And Adrian said, “Okay. I’ll do it.”
Evita pointed at the phone.

3.
As Adrian dialed the number, Evita walked up from behind him and wrapped her arms around him, kissing his neck. He gave a tickled laugh.
The line clicked, and a sleepy voice picked up. “Hello?”
“Katy?”
A pause. “Adrian? Oh my god, where have you been? Are you okay?”
She sounded so worried…
“I, um… I’m fine.”
Evita rolled her eyes, and bit the lobe of his ear. Adrian smiled.
Katy spoke cautiously, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Adrian said, kissing Evita’s cheek. “Listen, I don’t think we, uh, should be seeing each other anymore.”
“…what?”
“I just mean that…” Evita grabbed the crotch of his pants, and he gasped delightedly. He laughed as he said, “I mean I’ve found someone better.”
“Better? Like it’s a fucking contest? What the shit is that supposed to mean?”
Adrian stated simply, “It means we’re done.”
“So…what, all of the shit we went through, the whole locked-in-a-room-with-a-werewolf thing, all of a sudden that doesn’t make a difference?”
“Nope,” Adrian said as Evita sucked on his neck.
Katy was silent, and then began to speak in a rising tone, but Adrian immediately interrupted.
“Look, I’ve got shit I need to do, so uh…have a nice life.”
He heard Katy say something, but hung up the phone before he could tell what it was. Evita broke out into a fit of laughter, and Adrian joined her. It seemed incredibly funny, how quick and painless it had been, to just call her and tell her to fuck herself. How quickly the realms of intersecting lives could be ended, with such words and such unfeeling sentiment.
And then Evita threw him onto the mattress, jumped on top of him, and kissed him wildly.
As she worked to undress both herself and Adrian, she said through panted, passionate breaths, “I love you so much.”
Adrian said, “I…” and she kissed him, and when she pulled away, he found himself incapable of finishing the sentence.
And he thought about Katy’s smile, and the warmth of her arms as she hugged him the night after the full moon.
And he though of Evita’s forcefulness and one-track mind, and opened his eyes to see her smiling with glee as she pulled down his pants.
Adrian wanted to scream, wanted to kick her in the face, wanted to leave this place and never come back.
But then she began to play with him, and he closed his eyes again, and didn’t move. He hated himself, but he didn’t care. It felt too good to be turned down, too right. The rising fear and doubt was overcome by the physical imperative to be inside her, to make her his in every way.
And Adrian’s thoughts wandered, and for just a moment he fell asleep.

3.
It was a smell he knew from long ago, that of burning pine and hot chocolate.
Above the fireplace were portraits of people with blurry faces, items of memorabilia which had no discernable features except that they existed, in some form or fashion. There were paintings on the wall of glens and prairies, and on a dining table there was a faded red tablecloth with hanging strands. Empty plates around a burning candelabra, whose smoke had over the years collected a spot on the ceiling.
There was a creaking sound, like and old rocking chair, and it took him only moment to understand that he was in it. Curled up in the lap of someone…someone…
Adrian looked up into his mother’s eyes for the first time in what felt like a hundred years, and wrapped his arms around her as tight as he could.
“Oh, mom!” Adrian yelled through his tears, “I have no idea what I’m doing! Help me! Help me, please, I feel so lost and alone!”
And a voice answered that broke his heart, for he did not know how much he had missed it until that moment.
“Give him strength, Luna,” she said. “Give us all strength.”
And then she was holding him by the neck, holding him above the fire, and her eyes were black as coal, and her lips curled into a snarl as she said, “Don’t let them find you. Do you understand me?” She screamed, “DON’T LET THEM FIND YOU!”
And then she dropped him into the fire, and the house was burning down, and he saw scratched into the wall behind her,
THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE BETWEEN GENESIS AND APOCALYPSE.
And then Adrian woke up.

4.
“Oh god!” he screamed as he rolled out of bed.
Evita looked confused. “My love? What’s wrong?”
“I… I…” Adrian looked around at the room, feeling the walls close in around him. He remembered his mother talking to him that day, remembered every word of her warning. Why hadn’t she just let him remember, why had it been revealed so late? How had she made it happen in the first place?
He looked at Evita and felt scared.
“I had a dream,” he said.
“You were asleep?” she asked, eyes narrowed.
“I must’ve…passed out for a second while you were…” he nodded towards his groin. He rubbed his head and gathered his clothes. “I can’t do this right now, I need… I need some time to think. I need to go for a walk.”
“Can I come?” Evita asked, grabbing his hand.
He looked at her and pushed it away, saying, “I really need to be alone right now.”
“Oh,” Evita said, disappointed. “Well, I’ll just…be here, then. Should you need me.”
Adrian buttoned his pants and pulled on his shirt, and nodded as he left the room.

5.
The speakeasy barroom was empty, only a few lights left on, and he walked as fast as he could towards the other side of the room. But each step seemed to build an emotion up into his chest, and as he let out a sob he fell onto his knees. He cradled his head in his arms and bawled.
And then there was something of a click, and his vision went dark.
“I was wondering when the message would come through.”
Adrian opened his eyes and turned towards the source of the voice. He sat on a red and brown plaid couch, frayed at the edges. The wolf’s hair was tied back, and he looked at Adrian over the rim of glasses he hadn’t been wearing the last time.
“You,” Adrian said. He stood up and looked around at the blackness.
The wolf put his feet on a table that hadn’t been there a second ago.
“Where am I?” Adrian asked.
“I dunno,” the wolf said. “Somewhere in your brain, I guess. Wherever it is us wolves get to live whenever it’s not the full moon.”
“You don’t look like a wolf,” Adrian said.
“Well shit, sorry I don’t measure up.”
Adrian again looked around, then rubbed his eyes. “Am I dreaming again?”
“Jesus, I wish. Right now you’re drooling on the floor of a repurposed cave. So to speak.”
“What?”
“Nevermind. So what brings you to my corner of the metaphorical woods?”
Adrian said, “I…didn’t come here on purpose?”
“Sure you did,” the wolf said. “You don’t just end up somewhere in your brain accidentally. You’ve got to make it happen. It is your brain after all.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“A pissier, more emotional wolf might put on a humanitarian air and go on about how we share a space, how it’s our brain, but for one that ain’t my style and for two, you wouldn’t give a shit anyway.”
“How do you know?”
“You’re one of the most selfish people I have ever met, and furthermore the person you have, historically speaking, cared about the least in your life, is me. Well, next to maybe your girlfriends.”
“I care about Katy!”
“So much that you called her to tell her you should “see other people,” all the while practically fucking that horndog bimbo Evita? That’s one hell of a show of emotion there, friend.”
“It’s none of your damned business!” Adrian said.
The wolf stood up and pointed a finger at Adrian. “I think you need to change your fucking attitude here, bub. All our life I’ve been pushed back and repressed, and I’m pretty well sick of it. You ain’t the only one in here,” he said, tapping his skull, “and you should stop acting that way before it bites you in the ass. Now sit down,” he said, doing so himself. “We need to have a chat.”
Adrian turned around to find a similar couch behind him.
“What’s with the furniture?” Adrian asked. “Why does it smell like cigarette smoke?”
“That’s just the way I remember it.”
“…but I’ve never seen these things before in my life.”
The wolf gave a sarcastic chuckle as he sipped milk from a glass that hadn’t been sitting on the table. “There you go again, thinking it’s all about you. I never said they’re anything you would remember.”
He motioned towards a jug of milk on the table, and a tall glass next to it. “Thirsty?”
“Umm,” Adrian said. “How are you-”
“Okay, if we’re going to have anything close to a productive conversation, we’re going to have to set a few ground rules. The first of which being that shit appears out of nowhere.”
“But how?”
“Being a nonphysical space, abstract thoughts often very quickly lead to manifestation. It’s like what the real world would be if people were more intelligent. The second rule is that when one or the other of us is talking, the other shouldn’t interrupt until a statement is finished or a point has been made. Questions should be held until after a general statement, as they might be answered outright at some point afterwards.”
The wolf smiled and said, “I really don’t miss teaching high school.”
Adrian said, “What?”
“Rule number two,” the wolf reminded. “Hold your horses.”
Adrian shook his head. “Okay so, what are we doing then?”
“Like I said, we’re having a chat. Think of it as an intervention. I thought you were going to talk to me when Katy said so, but you got the jitters and backed out at the last second. I thought maybe Dade had talked some sense into you, but you were too busy dry humping crazy-face Evita. Too much longer and you’re going to end up fucking things up too much even for me to fix. So we’re setting the record straight, right here, right now.”
The wolf crossed his arms, and stared at Adrian expectantly.
Adrian sat down, and the wolf nodded his head. He then poured a glass of milk, held it in front of his face, and then took a sip.
The wolf smiled and said, “There we go. Feeling better?”
“…a little.” Adrian set the glass back down, then put his arms on his lap. “So what do you want to talk about, then?”
“I hate to sound self-obsessed, but unfortunately it’s the course of action at this point. Me. We’re going to talk about me. It’s a subject that you have been particularly ignorant of the past ten years or so. More than that, really.”
Adrian squinted his eyes. “I don’t remember you before ten years ago.”
“Some part of you does,” the wolf said. “I was there though. In something of a larval state, I suppose, until you turned sixteen and shifted control over to me for the first time. But those first sixteen years, they were something else. I was very confused.”
“What?”
“Rule number two,” the wolf said again.
Adrian rolled his eyes and drew his fingers across his lips in a mime of zipping them shut.
The wolf smiled and continued.

6.
In the moments after they are born, Adrian opens his eyes to see light.
The wolf sees only black.
There are echoes of words and thoughts and memories, but the hold no meaning, and fade away quickly. As Adrian’s mother holds him in her arms, the wolf too feels her warmth, and is comforted.
At this point, the difference between Adrian and the wolf is practically nonexistent. But as the body ages, the minds grow separate and unique; the wolf remains in his black space, with a sly window into the eyes of Adrian; Adrian remains more or less oblivious of the wolf.
Because the wolf does not know. The wolf does not feel. The wolf does not understand. He simply waits.
He watches Adrian’s life pass by like sand in an hourglass, feeling a slow sensation building inside him. What is it? Excitement? Purpose?
Whatever it is, it’s all the wolf can comprehend. And it takes the form of a glowing white sphere, and for no reason that he knows, he calls it Luna. It is not his mother; mother is, though she has never mothered him directly. Luna is the only other thing in the universe that knows he exists, and it makes him less empty.
The wolf waits in silent watchfulness and anticipation, as each day passes into the next, and the sensation grows and compounds and intensifies.

7.
Now it is the eve of their sixteenth birthday, and the wolf is all but ecstatic. He is starting to feel, he is starting to think, he is starting to know; his consciousness is quickly becoming something that is deserving of the word.
Adrian steps outside and grabs a bundle of wood.
The wolf’s arms begin to tingle.
Adrian looks up at the moon, and the wolf lets out a cry to his the sphere outside his own body; and he realizes that for the first time in his life, he has spoken.
He said, “Luna!”
Adrian drops the wood as the wolf stands and reaches for the moon. He has never believed that she could exist outside his own realm; but there she is, glowing more brilliant and more real than anything he could have ever imagined.
And as Adrian’s eyes widen, his pupils dilating, the wolf finds himself compelled to step forward.
As he did this, Adrian convulsed and fell to the ground.
The wolf felt fear surge through him that the moon should be out of his sight for even a second. What if she should disappear? What if Adrian were to look back and the sky be empty?
So he runs forward, as fast as he can, and as he does so, he feels an odd tingling in his arms that slowly spreads downwards.
For the space of around five seconds, Adrian’s body is now their body. They share a space, albeit one consciousness is moving forward and the other backwards. And the wolf’s mind alights with information.
He does not notice that Adrian, unconscious, is now inhabiting the dark space.
The echoes of thoughts and memories return to him, regain their meaning, and he realizes that he is alive. The wolf pushes through the patina of consciousness and finds that their arms are now his arms, that their legs are now his legs. This body, which has been nothing but a pipedream in the past, is now fully in his control.
The wolf looks up and finds that the moon has not moved an inch, and he smiles as he sees her. He does this because she is looking back at him. Luna is holding out her arms and she is saying, “You’ve done it! Welcome home!”
The wolf almost wants to cry.
And then he hears the cracking of a twig in the distance.
His heart races, his thoughts simplify, and he realizes now that he is here to hunt.
And he does exactly that.

8.
“That moment right before I looked at the moon, that was when I was born. I existed before that, but it was an entirely circumstantial existence. The flood of understanding that came to me, that was…” The wolf exhaled and shook his head. “It was amazing. And it’s like that every time I take control.”
“But…that whole hunting bit… You’ve taken control without hunting before, haven’t you?”
“Well, recently, sure. I’ve gotten older. More capable of controlling my...” He smiled and made a growly face, bringing his hands up into claws, “animal instincts. Considering how much I’ve grown over the last ten years, especially compared to how much you haven’t, I’d say I’ve done fairly well for myself.”
“So…memories? How could you remember if-”
“I’ll get to that, don’t worry. You remember when you got shot?”
“Uhm…yeah, why?”
The wolf continued.

9.
The wolf watches with amusement as Adrian tries to hunt. He’s gotten better at it; living alone in such conditions pretty much forces one to. But there are still several very important factors of the hunt of which Adrian is entirely oblivious.
One of these being listening to more than just the sound of your prey.
The wolf knows that there’s someone following them, but as of this moment he doesn’t consider it a threat. Though smarter than Adrian in many ways, he is still young, and still assumes that there isn’t much that could pose a threat to their body.
And then there is a loud crack, and Adrian’s leg explodes into pain in mid-leap, and he crumples to the ground.
The wolf feels no pain, and is immediately attuned to the sound of the approaching hunter.
He tries to speak, but the words fall flat even to his own ear.
He concentrates, and then says in a calm, deliberate tone, “You don’t have time to run. You need to go up.”
Amazingly, Adrian hears his advice through the chaos of his mind, and he takes it unquestioningly. Adrian looks around himself and climbs up the nearest tree, and they watch as a man in an orange vest searches for the deer he has been hunting.
And then the man walks away. And when he is a safe distance gone, the adrenaline leaves Adrian’s system, and he collapses off the tree.
He hits the ground with an unastounding thump, and the wolf blinks.
And he hears an odd sound, like a click, and he turns to see Adrian laying on the floor of the dark space.
“What?” he says to himself. He walks over to the unconscious body and kicks him in the side.
No reaction.
He goes down onto his knees and pokes Adrian on the face. Nothing.

10.
“Is that what happens every time?” Adrian asks.
The wolf nods his head.
“Why have I never woken up here, then?”
“Hell if I know. The brain’s an amazing machine. Anyway…”

11.
The wolf looks out through the eyes of their body and feels the ghost of a pain in his leg as he pushes himself forward. He knows this is foolish; the wolf is an idea in this state, a metaphysical gathering of thoughts and memories that he still does not entirely understand. The pain is a window to the truth of their symbiotic relationship that the wolf refuses to acknowledge. But he knows more than anything that Adrian is out cold. He has bled out almost fully, and the wolf can feel the constructs of their mind falling apart.
The main support, the thing which represents Adrian’s consciousness, has retreated to some inner portion of their mind, leaving a cavity in its place that is very quickly collapsing. If there is not a quick intervention that place will fall, and they will both be trapped in this body until death.
With a momentary hesitation the wolf steps forward. He pushes through the patina like bubble of air surfacing out of the water, and suddenly-

-suddenly he remembers everything.
It is jumbled, fractured, and many pieces are missing. What little he has before him is difficult to decode, its frame of reference almost impossible to identify, but at the same time the wolf knows that these bits and pieces of thoughts and images are the memories of the lives he had before. These are the remnants of himself in previous incarnations;
He remembers sitting at a desk and grading papers, watching the grades deteriorate with each passing year; giving speeches about mathematics, trying his best and failing to relate the subject to his students in a way that will make sense; watching his wife grow older and more pale and more angry; watching himself grow more and more cynical; The year is 1964 when his heart seizes mid-speech, and he falls to the floor in a crumpled mess, and his students watch him die in paralyzed fascination.
He remembers riding the back of a horse through grassy fields across the land; the feeling of a broadsword firmly beneath his hands and the weight of his armor testing his strength every moment of every day; the freedom to kill or maim anyone he wanted, and the satisfaction that came with never doing either; the humility he felt before God as he knelt and prayed every night, for health and for strength, and for the endurance of mother Spain; he accosts an unruly drunkard for humiliating a young woman and watches the man draw a blade, and as he reaches for his own he somehow loses his footing and finds his neck punctured and his spine severed at the end of it.
He remembers being a monk hid away in the mountains and writing haiku of his observations; he remembers conditioning his body every moment of every day through breathing and physical trials; he remembers the patient motions of catching fish, gutting them, cooking them, and dividing them amongst his Brothers; he remembers a day where the sky is so blue and the clouds so perfect that he falls to his knees and cries, and thanks the Spirit for the world that He made; he remembers falling asleep one night, and never waking up again.
And then he remembers something else. Another life, another set of memories, and in this way it’s simple.
But in so many other ways, it’s different.
Even without context, even in this phase of memory and overwhelming sensation, he understands that this life is thelife. All the others afterward were merely a side effect. This one is the reason that he still exists, the reason he has been allowed to be birthed again and again.
He thinks to himself, with the sense only of stating the obvious, that this life may very well be the most important life of them all.
He remembers a grassy, hilly place below the mountains, nestled within a clearing in the forest. He remembers being a werewolf there, as well, though it is only he; his body is his own. He lives among a clan of wolves, in a world very different from this one. The entirety of the life is not recollected, not yet, but he remembers being raised by a young woman, because his parents had been killed. And he remembers that he was in an arranged marriage at ten with a girl from another clan, and this was to be an example to the other clans to come together in the wake of…
Of what?
Every moment that the wolf is at the wheel of the body, so to speak, more and more of his memories come to light; hundreds of lives, all of them as unique and varied as one could ever consider. He cannot purposefully recollect any aspect of a life. It has to come to him.
And this life, which he now understands was his first life, is no exception.
And amid the chaos of this recollection, he is bleeding to death. It takes him a moment to pull himself together and put all the various pieces in their places. The life that he is living now, that is the one he needs to pay attention to; the others can wait.
He only hopes that his memories will not fade when he and Adrian trades places once more.
But there is one thing he refuses to forget, something that feels novel and odd and personal. Something that gives him definition, and reminds him of who he is.
His name.

12.
“Wait, you have a name?” Adrian said.
“Is that really such a surprise? You have one.”
“Yeah, but…I was given mine!”
“…and?”
“And I never named you!”
“Well shit, I guess because you never named Shakespeare that he didn’t write some of the best stuff ever written.”
Adrian sighed. “It’s not that, I just-”
“You just prefer the idea that I am a hallucination and that you are the only active body. Once again, that is the illusion I am attempting to break.”
Adrian rubbed his arms and looked at the ground. “So uh…what is your name, then?”
The wolf crossed his arms and said, “I don’t think I want to tell you.”
“Oh come on!” Adrian said. “I’m being as cooperative as I can, here!”
The wolf smiled and said, “Now you are, sure. But it only takes a sideways glance from the life you wish you had to get you forgetting who your real friends are.”
“I’m sorry, okay? I’m an idiot.”
“You are.”
The wolf stared at Adrian for a time, and then said, “But, I guess everyone is, to a point. My name is Akashi.”
Adrian’s eyes narrowed, and he said, “Why does that sound familiar?”
“Fuck if I know,” he said. “That’s the kind of response I get from a lot of people.”
“What? You’ve talked to other people?”
“Rule two, Adrian.”
“Aggh, fuck, get on with the story then!”

13.
Akashi stands up. The body feels weak, the leg hurts, but somehow he is distanced from it. Somehow the wolf can push the body to limits Adrian could never reach. He takes a few steps to get the hang of it, as he has never done this without the aid of the moon.
His urge to hunt snaps to attention when he hears from very far away the sound of the injured deer falling over onto its side.
He sympathizes, and makes to track it and eat it.
But then takes a breath and remembers who he is, and stops. How many lives has he led? In only one of them was he a wolf. It’s silly for him to have such memories, and in spite of them be brought down to such simplistic urges.
The thought halts again as he finds the scent of the blood, and can practically see its trail on the air. He saunters down onto his hands and knees and makes to run after it.
And then he falls over.
He looks at his hands in confusion to find that they are human. Not wolven.
And Akashi shakes his head and stands once more.
Surviving is far more important than hunting.
And then there is a thunderclap, and he takes a deep breath, and he begins to run. The pain is far more obvious now, but that does not matter.
The storm behind him is giving him a terrible feeling, and he doesn’t want to be anywhere near it.
But distantly, he knows that one can never outrun a storm.

14.
He collapses into the hollowed base of a tree as rain punches through the canopy and hammers the ground. Thunder is echoing constantly through the air, and though he knows that in a tree is hardly the safest place to be in a storm, it is better than being anywhere else. This storm wants him, he can feel it in the wind. It screams through the leaves and whips at his face, and he curls up into a ball and cries.
Akashi is tired from the exertion, even through his impassive control of the body. He can feel its dying gasps, and this terrifies him. He is overwhelmed with the sense that his being alive is more important than anything else; if he dies, so much will be lost.
But perhaps, he thinks, this is only an illusion. Perhaps he is only afraid of death. But why should he be, if he has died so many times in the past?
Another flash of light, and a bowling roar of thunder, and Akashi winces and holds himself. His body is cold, its blood almost run out. That it should have made it this far is a miracle. But without activity the last few chemicals keeping it afloat will be worked out of the system; with too much more activity those same chemicals will overload the system and cause it to shut down. Akashi cannot win; to run is to die. To stop is to die.
He is shaking so hard that he can barely move his mouth, but he manages to speak nevertheless. It’s something that he picked up from a memory, one of the old ones from his first life. He does not know if it will make any difference, but it’s the only thing he has going for him.
So Akashi whispers, “Echolalia, goddess of storms, hear me, I beg you; through time and worlds, hear me, help me, please.”
And there is nothing.
Akashi simply mutters the name over and over hopelessly, knowing that it will do nothing.
And then, the sound stops. He doesn’t register it at first, but when he finds himself more able to hear his mutterings, he looks up. The rain is frozen in mid air. In the sky, a lightning bolt pulses in the midst of its phased stepladder passage to the ground. He watches this with fascination, and then his eye is drawn to a feminine figure walking forward through the motionless rain.
As she moves, the rain hits her body and drips away. She has blue skin flecked with gold, and half of her face is the white of rainless clouds.
One eye is blue, the other, whose place is in the white half of her face, is gone. The hole where it once rolled is now painted gold.
He realizes that the chattering of his teeth has stopped, and that he can no longer feel the pain and numbness and death that had been seeping into his body.
She reaches the hole and kneels before Akashi, reaches an arm out to his cheek.
“I have not heard that name in a hundred thousand generations,” she says. “I had almost come to think it had never been at all.”
“It was, my lady,” Akashi whispers, “in a world that has long since passed.”
She smiles and sits next to him. “Your name is Akashi, isn’t it?”
He nods.
“It’s a name that’s been whispered a lot lately,” she says. “As it was…” she looks out as if remembering something distant, and smiles, “As it was in the old world. In the world of the five divisions.”
“Aye,” he says. “My people worshipped you, among others. Luna was our favorite, however. For obvious reasons. Of course, in the last few years, we lost much of that tradition.”
She nods. “They were tumultuous, weren’t they? Even we were at the mercy of… But how is it that you remember? You are mortal, yes?”
“My body is,” he says. “But my mind, my…soul, whatever you’d call it. I’m not so sure.”
“That isn’t solely your body, is it?”
“No. I’m a werewolf again.”
She puts her head on his shoulder. “I think you should take that as a sign of the times, Akashi of the old world. Recurring symbolism rarely happens without reason.”
Akashi closes his eyes and his mouth, as he feels a sudden rush of emotion. He recollects the very last moments of his first life, the efforts that he made to be shed of his responsibilities.
“Why is it always me?” he asks, fighting off tears. “Why can’t it be someone else?”
Echolalia whispers to him, “That is a question I cannot answer, Akashi of the old world. But I can hazard a guess.”
He looks up at her hopefully.
“Because you are the best at what you do.”
She stands up and walks away, and the rain slowly begins to fall again.
“And what is that I do?” Akashi yells back after her.
And she says, “Fix things.”
And then the thunder finishes its arc, and there is a deafening explosion

15.
And Akashi wakes up.
He looks around at the forest and sees that the earth is damp, that the leaves are windblown, but that the sky is blue and the sun is shining.
And he doesn’t feel entirely like shit.
Akashi pulls himself out of the knoll and stands, as best he can. His leg throbs, but it isn’t rotten. The wound is infected, but that’s alright for now. He can get as far as he needs to go on it.
Because all this time he’s felt a destination somewhere in the distance, and it’s close now. Even through the storm he was following his internal compass.
So Akashi limps through the forest, using a fallen limb as a crutch.
As he does so, he ponders the visitation of the goddess in his dream, and his general feeling of betterness. He knows that this world is not the same as that of his first life, but how is it that a goddess of the old world can be present in the new world?
But the question gives little up in the way of an answer, so he circumvents that question entirely with another.
How is it that one world follows another?
He had one life in the old world; he knows that much.
He has had hundreds of lives in this world; he knows that as well.
Were there lives before his first, lived out by other souls? Surely yes, he remembers just such things. Stories, and the like. So that world had dimension, had history.
But he had only one life there.
And more than that, that life was important. That life was the culmination of a thousand years of war and oppression and rewritten history.
All his other lives are virtually meaningless; some stand out as noteworthy, but none of them compare to his first.
So his first life was important, and it ended; the death he cannot remember, though much of the life is coming back to him. And then what?
What changed between that life and the next that caused his soul to travel from one world to another?
He recollects the law of conservation of energy from a life as a physicist; energy can neither be created nor destroyed -it merely changes form. If this is a universal truth, then his soul could not have travelled from one world to another.
Which means that one world must have become the other.
At some point between his first life and his second, the old world transformed into the new world. Rules were changed, creatures were reshaped, bits and pieces were repurposed and transferred altogether.
But somehow, there were remnants. The transformation was either incomplete or wasn’t thought through, if that’s even possible, because seemingly outdated aspects of that world still remain in this one.
Werewolfism, for example.

As Akashi ponders this, he hears a sound from behind, and turns as fast as he can.
But he forgets about his limp, and his crutch, and trips over them both.
He lands on his back, and moans in pain.
“You aren’t doing very well, are you?” a voice asks.
Akashi tries to roll onto his feet, but simply falls forward.
“I’d say that leg will be the end of you, if it goes much longer without intervention.”
“I’m fine,” he says.
“No, Adrian,” the voice says, “I don’t believe that you are.”
He looks at the man who just said his name and squints his eyes. “Who are you?”
“An interested party. Someone who won’t be out of your life for quite some time, even if you hate me with all of your guts. Give me your hand.”
“No.”
“Come now, Adrian, let’s not be difficult.”
The man reaches down, and Akashi barks, “NO!”
The man scowls, and kicks Akashi in the side, “I’m trying to help you!”
“I don’t need your help,” he says. “Besides, you’re breaking the rules.”
The man steps back. “What?”
“I can tell what you are just from the look of you. You’re one of the wolves positioned to watch me, aren’t you?”
The man kneels and grabs Akashi’s skull, looks into his eyes. “You’re not Adrian, are you? You’re the other one.”
Akashi brings a fist to the side of the man’s head, and he falls into the mud. He moans, and Akashi grabs his crutch and brings himself up.
“I don’t need your help.” Akashi spits in the man’s face. “And if I ever see you again, I’ll kill you.”
As Akashi limps away, the man laughs and calls back, “We’ll see about that, won’t we! But even if you do, I’m hardly the worst of your problems!”
He continues to laugh, and Akashi bites his tongue and fights the urge to kill him where he lay.
But he keeps moving forward, and soon enough the laughing has stopped, and the man is gone. Reporting the news that Adrian isn’t in sole control of his own body anymore.
And that’s just fine with him.