Interlude to Fire: Memoirs of a Cosmic Werewolf (Finished)

Silicon County

Interlude to Fire: Memoirs of a Cosmic Werewolf

As told telepathically by the prince to Thomas Callahan

Ahlukin (Pronounced, most charmingly, AH-LU-KIN)

Sa’Sue (Pronounced, with inflated purpose, SA-SUE)/The King of Lions

The Prince of Wolves/Clifford (unfortunately)/Me


1

Beginnings are so hard to trace. I could argue that my life began when a purple feather, drifting through the fragrant smoke emitted from Her pipe, settled upon the snout of my current vessel—a spined creature from some backwater place that I had altered to my preferences—and bestowed upon me a gift: a sliver of conscience, the blessing of empathy. I awoke to not only the pain of my vessel, but to the way its flesh shivered, as if revolted by the transformation and my usurpation of control. It made me feel bad. It made me lament my hunger, rather than merely seek to sate it. This newfound awareness marked several beginnings. Still, it would be a lie to call it the beginning.

Let me be frank:

I don’t when this all started.

I have no answers. Only assumptions.

No doubt this is not reassuring. But if it’s anything, it’s the truth. That’s what I offer you—truth, in all its uncomfortable layers.

Was I hatched? Or did a live-birth mark my entrance to the universe? No idea. I am not a precisely a physical being, either. Maybe I’m a ghost, a spirit, who got tired of being non corporeal. But I like to the idea that I had a family, a mother and a father and perhaps some siblings. Wishful-thinking, I know. But despite my condition, I’m not beyond thinking wishfully for my own comfort. The past did not concern me until recently, and already, I find himself looking too deeply. If I had a family, what happened to them? Perhaps they’re long dead. Perhaps I killed and ate them, and in the long interval between then and now, I forgot. It’s unlikely they’re alive, off in some distant somewhere, but the possibly isn’t precluded.

Anyway, there’s more than one way to be born.

A folktale can grow to life-sized proportions. A god can be brought into existence by belief. Words, beliefs—spoken and thought into life.

I think I sprung into being along with the universe. The lion and my Mistress, the She I have not yet named, agree with this theory in their own ways. But I think it goes deeper. I think we’re parallels to life in all its place, to all creatures, and yes, to all of humankind. By this theory, he is Ego; She is Generosity.

I am Hunger.

I’m your ghouls and gluttons. I’m all your insatiable qualities.


2

Whys and wherefores are unimportant and impossible to ordain. I simply am. If something preceded this existence, it must be irrelevant, because, beyond spawning me, it has had no further bearing on what followed it. I think you’d agree, what matters is not what you are or where you come from so much as what you do.

So here is what I’ve done.

For an untold eternity I was but a hungry spirit of sorts, possessing corporal bodies for their teeth and stomachs. No matter how much I ate, how many I devoured, never was I full. Down went adults and children and babies; creatures large and little, ageless and day-old. What did not stay down, I vomited up—crushed the bones into smaller pieces, tore apart fabrics and hides, and slurped it all down again. Never did my vessels have time to grow fat. Most split and died beneath the demands of my appetite.

You’ve caught me in the middle of a fast. That’s one thing that began when I entered into Her service. Don’t worry. For now, at least, I’m in control of myself.

When I shut my eyes—or when I close my mind to the outside world—I am confronted by a procession of mindless cruelties. Some consumptions are so small as to seem innocent: bacteria, fish no bigger than guppies. Other instances, however… There’s one that springs to mind. It happened on this world, soon after I found my way to it. I recall a flat horizon. Bushes, but no large trees. A land of canyons and plateaus and buttes and red dust flung by the wind, somewhere south and west of Silicon and Wisconsin, perhaps Utah. After climbing up through cracks in the rocks and emerging upon this new world and wandering the barrens for who knows how long, I found a community of white people. Homesteaders. Colonizers. Searching for riches and prosperity and promised lands. Their appetites, insatiable by all means, were no match for mine.

I was, perhaps, all the hungrier for my journey.

To me, it seemed to be a feast, laid out just for my benefit.

I moved from plate to plate, dish to dish, saucer to saucer, as quick as possible, never relishing, never full.

First, a father of six: Possessing him I consumed all of his children, from his eldest daughter of sixteen to his infant son, changing his body as I went to more suit the task of a predator. His body began to falter at the last, however, and I jumped from him to his wife. The wife ate her husband, what he had expelled for want of room, and the remains of their children that had been left behind. From her, I shaped a far better, wolfish creature. The wife ate their animals, livestock and beloved pets alike. I went onto eat her sisters and her sisters’ husbands and their children, then their friends and neighbors. An abomination I became. Something unlike a body: not of four limbs, a torso, and a head. Something nebulus and sprawling.

I was a river of wolves, my arms tipped with mouths and teeth, all working to ferrying out every last soul that remained in hiding, every scrap of flesh. When I had exhausted what remained, and the last quick-footed survivor had fled into the desert and out of reach, I began to tear up the gardens I had crushed beneath my massive body and grash the fruit and vegetables and stems and leaves with teeth ill-suited to the task. Next, I swallowed anything left—anything: tools and toys, kitchen wear and clothes. Then the houses, though the wood splintered and stabbed me, though the metal cut my throats from the inside. Then the ground itself, filling myself with mud made from dirt and blood. Then, because nothing to this point had filled me whatsoever, I began to eat the unsullied dirt. I broke my teeth against rocks. I dried out on the inside and from wounds inflicted by my very eating I bleed this land’s red dust. I slowed, eventually. In time, nothing could be heard but the wind howling through a nearby canyon. I left and followed the sound, bereft of flesh, leaving that amorphous body to cook in the sun.

Then I left your world.

Down, through cracks only I could find.

I had been there, in total, no more than twenty minutes.


3

If I had not come into your world through a desert, we might not be speaking. I have a distant memory of an even more distant, technologically-advanced place. I recall only bits and pieces, none so clear as those twenty minutes in what might have been Utah. But through the cracks I arrived and by the same process that I would devour the homesteaders’ community I devoured a whole planet and left again when it did not sate my hunger. I can see flashes of the nightmare: skies filled with smoke and creatures trying to escape on flying devices that were caught by my tongues. Perhaps the Dreamers will walk this world and see ruined cities scratched all over by my teeth.

You must think I’m telling you all this to scare you. That I’m making it up.

I wish I was.

I regret the mindless consumption.

Though I don’t regret that it led me to Her.

I ate, and traveled, and ate, and traveled, and ended up somewhere new.

In this backwater place, I possessed a spined creature, pushed it onto all fours and drew its nose into a snout, and roamed the alien woods, which encompassed my soon-to-be Mistress’s domain. These were troubled times, full of die-offs. Had there been an abundance of life, I might have entered a frenzy, as I had done to the homesteaders. As it was, the spined creature had only one friend, and that one’s body and the dead and living animals I found on the way were not enough to deepen my hungry. I turned their substance toward growth. At the moment, I resembled the beast I appear as now, but with features that you might call growths or tumors but were in fact harmless and served functions that not a single zoologist from here would be able to guess at.

My nose, however, functioned as one would expect. It lend me on through the trees, which I shouldered aside if they were grown too closely together to admit me. I smelled life. Bustling, crowded life.

I came to a twenty-foot wall and scaled it, carving out mortar to make nooks for my claws as I went. I perched atop it, completely like a cat despite the fact that I must have weighed several tons, and gazed down into the garden courtyard it protected. I scented life, closer still. I jumped down and crushed the most beautiful plants of surely any place without heed; the death of a flower did not concern me in the slightest. The courtyard connected to a structure, humble in its materials but proud and intricate in its design, more like a monastery than a palace. There was an arched threshold, large enough to allow me to enter unimpeded.

I encountered servants. When neither flesh nor hair remained of them, I lapped their blood from the stone floors.

The halls and passageways eventually spilled out onto central chamber. Stretching like a banquet before me was a clear path of flooring lined on either side by persons of some status in this place, for they dressed finely in robes in various shades of pink and red, their hoods concealing bowed heads. Their heads were not bowed toward me—nor did I care if they did—but toward a Woman standing on a dais, in front of a throne, at the far end of the room. She was white, and Her hair was whiter stubble upon Her head. Her dress was made of glimmering purple feathers. She had a long, thin pipe held in one hand, which She had evidently been smoking for a while, for the smoke and the smell, like lavender, hung about the room.

I did not plan to eat everyone in the room. I merely advanced to do so, drooling.

That made the Woman smirk.

I had not seen the feather.

Purple, like the ones that composed Her dress.

It drifted for the smoky air. And I crossed my eyes to watch it settle on my snout. And things changed. Perspectives. Perceptions.

Her gift to me.

Her curse. For didn’t I now feel a painful dimension of emotion, whereas before I had suffered only hunger?

Shame and self-loathing and fear.

These things were new. While my vessel didn’t change physically, my perception of it did. I was suddenly aware that I was clothed in disgusting, manipulated meat. Every eye in that chamber had turned toward me. But the collective gaze of the robe-wearers, their faces turned up and looking toward me, was nothing compared to the Woman’s gaze. Her expression was neutral, the usual ticks and blinks not stilled. She waited, merely, to see what I would do.

I left my vessel. It collapsed to the floor, no one left to run it since the spined creature’s mind had been burnt up by my hunger. I floated up, up, up, yet Her eyes still tracked me.

Up, through the ceiling.

The sensation of Her gaze lingered, though I was now alone in an attic chamber decorated with cobwebs.


4

She is Generosity.

Well, She was.

Later, She ventured into the attic of the castle. “My name,” she said to me, “is Ahlukin.”

I did not feel like conversing with the one responsible for the horribleness of self awareness, and so I did not respond.

She stood in the poor light, beautiful. I hunkered like an animal in a corner, prepared to scratch with phantom talons, all the good that would do. Among paintings and furniture and statues that had all lost their glamour with the passage of untold years and the ladling out of immeasurable bad luck. Truth: as high as they have risen, and as much as it seems they have to lose, monarchs can never fall the farthest. The same can be said of entire monarchies. They’d twiddled their thumbs here for only they knew how long, impoverished—by their standards. She stood there watching for an eternity. Then just as unhurriedly She turned and left the chamber.

I… warmed to Her, eventually. Despite what She did to me. Despite the anguish of knowing right from wrong, and knowing that my very existence was wrongness. But that is Her greatest power. It used to be, your desires became Hers. Now, Her ambitions are so strong that they become yours. So, I warmed to Her more each time She visited me, the wretched creature I was. I listened when She spoke, and took those grievances and injustices and made them mine. When She asked me to be Her agent, I was all too eager to agree. I was to work with Her automaton to scatter the Dreamers within the dream, and then, I was to protect them in their waking world.

She gave another gift to achieve this. She tamed my hunger.

She called me to her throne chamber, which, unlike my first day in the backwater, was empty but for the two of us. She held a wire-thin sword, its blade like a sweep of grass, or a feather. Then She held Her right arm high. Then She made the blade cut the air. And the ghost of Her arm drifted to the floor. And the material arm fell to Her side, and she clutched it.

I ate it. While She stood there watching and in pain, I ate a piece of Her ghost, Her soul. It was the best thing I had ever consume, because I could consume it without a host, I could eat it with a ghost’s mouth, and it was worst thing, because in that moment I consumed my queen. But it worked. She knew it would work. She has never made a needless sacrifice.

For as long as She lives, I will never hunger. Her spirit fills me.

Her ambition.

5

You should know

Before we go on

That if she dies

All will die

6

So, under her guidance, I slipped into your world again.

And again, in a different era. And again, in an earlier one, then a later one, then between. Etc.

I planted legends that weren't there before. Entire species. And so the world changed. I am every legend of the werewolf, I added the wolf, which you twisted into the modern dog. These went there before I came to your world, and now, you accept them as givens, as things brewed by evolution or god, not as transitory additions made to your history by a single agent leaping through time and history at the behest of a great will power. The canine is mine. The birds are Hers. The cats, big and little, his.

These jumps, these meddlings, they're purpose was to exercise my abilities so that I might keep my future host sane. The host (you eventually, Thomas) would be more a better agent when sane rather than driven mad. So I possessed, I fed, I failed, and I tried again until we agreed, Ahlukin and I, that it was not possible to preserve the host's sanity for long, nor was separation possible without complications. Madness. Uncontrolled mutation.

I knew this when I picked you, Thomas. I'm sorry. I held the orbs in my talons that the interloper had given me and I picked the one I liked the best and scattered the rest on other dead worlds.

I knew, as I watched you flirt like an awkward fish that night in the bar, that your choices would be symbiosis as long as we lived or a cruel fate.

The evening... Well, you know. It took a turn to a surprise.

As soon as you began to drift to sleep, I began to worry. When you crashed, you forced my hand. You would have died. So I possessed you, and changed you, healing you in the process. You unconsciousness spared you the madness of remembering the change.

Then the other man showed, Wade Pittman, the one who had done this to you. And I decided to have a little fun. I drove him mad and sent him raving into the woods.

I would have killed him outright if I had known what would happen. I'm sorry for that.

But anyway, after Pittman, I had the whole night to myself and the feet needed to tread it. I went searching for the other Dreamers. I was only able to find one.

Young Tyler. Who had crashed into a tree and suffered a minor head injury.

I gave him a bit of a scare, which was mean but hilarious. After he fainted, I wrote a mark on his back which would cause ethereal insomnia and I carried him back to the restaurant. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to reach the other Dreamers before they took their first steps into the Divine Dream. Now, they walk in both worlds at different times. Now, they can be compromised or capture in two places rather than just one.

Then, the shooting at the diner. I am sorry for using your body to commit murder, as necessary as it was. The lion had made Pittman his agent, and so he had to die.

It's a bit funny how our words change as we do. It's "your body" now, not "my host."

I escaped into the woods before the authorities could get their sights on me. If it was a risk exposing myself to Tyler—look how the rumors spread, grew, but ultimately fizzled out—transforming at the diner was perhaps the biggest fuck up of all. You'll never return to how your life was. People know it was you. They'll find you.

Never mind. This line of thought is stupid. Life will never be as it once was.

No matter who wins.

Ahlukin or Sa'Sue.

You lose.