2.
The Renegade
Alanki was a creature driven by violence.
The dreams began during the second summer of her life—for several nights on end, she would wake up with bared fangs and cold blood, spastic visions still flashing before her eyes. They began flimsy, as flashes of images that she forgot when she awoke, and left her with nothing more than the washes of leftover colors and a racing heart. But the pictures strengthened as summer gave way to autumn—soon, she awoke with fear buried deep in her bones, faces and voices still playing on an endless loop in her head. What could she dream about? She had been a renegade her entire life; she was haunted by nothing and no one. But the dreams came in strengthening lines, demanding explanations she could not give.
Alanki was very much afraid of going insane.
When the dreams began gaining coherence, however, she gained some sense of familiarity. Her sleeping self fled dark-furred demons, flying over some screaming expanse of black and grey ripples. Often, she would turn full-circle and sink her fangs into a throat, an artery, anything that would give blood to her teeth. She found herself seized with a frozen brutality, an instinct to destroy whatever creature would approach and destroy it quickly. She woke with the taste of blood in her mouth.
That, at least, made sense to her. Alanki was familiar with the sweeping exhilaration of the kill, the endless game of prey and predator that was created to entertain renegades such as her. She had found a sense of power in maintaining what was hers—her forest—and fox, badger, and lynx were all driven from her territory. She still bore the scars from the lynx encounter. The lessons, too. For what could be more fearsome than a creature that is as strong as a wolf and can fight like a lynx? Alanki had sharpened her claws since then, and learned to use them. Alanki did not know how wolves fought. Alanki had no pack of her own, only a herd of deer that roamed the fields and forest in the warm seasons. The deer were enough for her.
It was the deer who had raised her. Alanki had grown under unusual circumstances. The deer had a peculiar legend about a deviance in the great balance—the balance of hunter and hunted—a deviance who would, one day, come to save the very people who had given her shelter. The prey, the deer, were children of the mild earth. The predators, the wolves and lynxes and foxes, were children of the fierce river—River, the Lankhi, as the deer called it, for out of respect they would give a name and spirit to anything that moved. Alanki had been brought to the deer by means of a river and so, the deer had told her, she was obviously meant to save them all.
Alanki didn’t believe that, but she did owe the deer a great debt.
She knew, however, that wolves were not meant to be raised by deer. This came clear to her when she had reached the age of several seasons—she found violence in herself, where it had not been before. She saw the fluid grace of a deer’s neck and thought that such beauty was surely meant to be broken. Growls rolled around in the back of her throat, and she found herself watching those who had raised her with a practiced, hunter’s eye—she followed their movements and, unconsciously, determined at what time it would be best to strike.
When she killed the first of them—a doe a year older than her, a doe named Tormentil—she was sent from the herd to live on her own. As a renegade so young, Alanki had been forced to teach herself to break other necks, moving her own way up the food chain until she had established herself as the only large predator in the forest. That position was still defended even now, as she a young she-wolf of two years.
Over the passing of seasons, Alanki had earned her way back into the trust of the deer herd—or, at least, some of them. But she knew now, as the deer themselves did, that she was a wolf. Alanki did not live among them. In summers, she would visit, perhaps to listen to a tale or two from a misty-eyed story teller. The deer were creatures of mysticism and omens, and though Alanki tired of insubstantial superstitions, she did hold a great respect for them. After all, she owed them her life—in fact, she owed them two lives. One extra to replace the one she had taken.
And so, when the violent dreams began, Alanki’s first thought was of the deer. She remembered how she had sunk her yearling’s teeth into the doe Tormentil’s throat, feeling the warm pulsing of blood below, the empowering break that came when the doe fell limp in her jaws. It brought a shudder to her mind, now. How could she have done such a thing? It had been an accident, a sudden loss of control that the deer should have foreseen when they chose to take a predator’s child into their own herd. But Alanki told herself, again and again, using the event as a sort of memento, a brutal reminder of what she was capable of: it was my fault; it was my fault.
In these dreams, however, it was wolves. Alanki had never seen another wolf before, but her subconscious mind had killed scores of them—nightly, she ran beneath an orange claw-moon and brought bones to breaking beneath the crush of her shoulders, her sharpened claws raking through thick pelts and across featureless faces, her jaw gripping the neck of another and shaking it until it ceased to move. Alanki did not know how she was supposed to feel about these dreams. It was wasteful, wasn’t it, to kill so many creatures—but how could she feel sorry for them? The deer had impressed upon her after her accident that killing, in all forms, is wrong; but Alanki killed rabbits weekly to feed herself. What separated wolves from rabbits?
But nothing shook her until the wrong dream came. Alanki could not quite say what separated this dream from the previous ones, but there was a clear difference in the feel to it—it felt as she did during the months after her exile, after she had killed Tormentil. A racing reprimand, the cruel voice in her mind telling her: this is your fault, this is your fault.
In it, she found herself racing along a smooth expanse of ground in the dead of night. There was no moon in the sky. Behind her flew a screaming wind of what could only be other wolves—black and knife-furred and flaming-eyed, they snapped at her heels and drove her forward into the blackness ahead. She ran for her life, as fast as she could drive herself without bursting into a thousand pieces, but she never gained any ground on her pursuers.
In this dream, she made no kill. But she watched as others fell around her—deer and wolves and rabbits—and somehow, it came to her that this was because of what she had done. What? Alanki did not know.
She knew the wolves behind her wanted to kill her. And with the panic of this realization, the ground broke to flakes beneath her pounding paws; water sprang from the cracks of the dry earth and before she knew it, Alanki was surging forward with the power of the river behind her, surging ahead of all who would do her harm. The mild old prophetesses of the deer looked on, nodding their heads knowingly—she had become a part of the predators, the River; she was the Lankhi, never to let anything stand in its path.
She crashed through stones, through trees, through dry earth—there was another pack of wolves ahead, a huddled, hungry-eyed group with fur blackened as scorched wood, and she crashed through them as well and sent them scattering. Alanki laughed wildly, and found she was unable to control herself—she could not stop running; she could not stop laughing. The moment this realization came, that was the only thing she wanted to do: stop.
But it was impossible. The river bent and twisted the helpless bodies of the wolves she had torn through, breaking them beneath its cold wrath. Alanki snarled, and the river, the Lankhi, did the same—she bared her fangs and the river pulled spikes of ice-cold up from its roiling depths. Her bones went numb; her legs thrashed mechanically.
The wolves that had been chasing her were drawing closer. She pushed herself to run faster, but it made no difference—they had a new target in mind. Alanki saw the other wolves, the scattered, weak wolves. She saw the fear in their eyes, the hopelessness in the set of their shoulders. They all had green eyes the shade of the sap found in the heart of a young tree, and they all were watching Alanki without blinking—sad, wide, doe-eyes, the eyes of Tormentil as she watched Alanki approach her, the eyes of the other deer when they saw what she
had done. Alanki cried out and turned away, but she felt their gazes on the back of her head. She heard them erupt into howls, too, as the chasing pack fell upon them. Claws scraped bone, fangs tore throats—she felt her own mouth fill with blood, her own claws grow tangled and clotted with someone else’s fur, as though it was she who was killing the green-eyed wolves. Alanki choked and spat the blood into the river, but the taste lingered. It was bitter and burning. It was not rabbit’s blood.
It tasted of ashes.
She saw, then, as though through the movement of space: an orange moon hanging like a salamander’s egg in the burnt black sky, a steel-blue river rimmed red with the froth of blood, the savage Lankhi baring its watery fangs, the ivory white of old wolves’ bones tangled and hidden in the undergrowth of her forest. She had left them there. She was standing there now, drenched in water and stained by betrayed green eyes.
“Innocent blood, Alanki!” cried Delphinium, the old doe that was her foster mother. Alanki looked up to see the deer herd thundering past, broken-throated Tormentil leading them in a desperate stampede. “Run for your life, run run run! Run for what you haven’t lost yet—what shall be vanished by sundown! Run, Alanki, and never stop!”
Alanki could not run. She watched the two packs of wolves collapse and sink beneath the frothing waves of the river—the river tossed its glittering arms in celebration—and the water at her paws bloomed with red flowers. She could not run; she could not move. She was frozen—she opened her eyes with a gasp of breath and a racing heart, and found that it was because she had been sleeping.
It was her first true nightmare. It would not be her last.