And Then There Was One
[ A tribute to the fyres as I closed the SL, one most of you have likely already read. But Corey pointed out to me (amidst a strangely reassuring touch of compliments) that the board was going to be deleted, and I wanted this saved somewhere. ]
Forsaking all I've fallen for
I rise to meet the end...
Change rescinds its hold from nothing; mountains crumble and rise, boulders are ground to dust and the hardest of metals yields. Lush tropics wither into inhospitable desert, and the deserts are blessed with months of deluge. Lives are given and lost, and while their impact upon others lingers like a curl of smoke over a long-squelched fire, in the end everything comes to dust. It is the way of things.
The lands themselves lie quiet and misted; fall has brought with it a smattering of rain to cleanse the earth of the death that still hangs in the air. I remember Autumn months such as this in which the land all but glistened with color: the leaves were such that the trees seemed set afire by some divine hand. The grey skies and wilting flora of the present make time seem eternal, as though death has finally found dominion among the living. It makes me tired - I have fought for so long. But then, I suppose we all have.
In the end, we suffered for the blindness of our arrogance, for the unerring belief that nothing could touch us. We bled outward like the suburbs of some dysfunctional city, growing apart and ignoring the signs that came to the forefront. Of those still alive when this downward spiral began, only I had lived long enough to remember.. and in that sense, perhaps the fall of this great breed is my own. I did not see as I should have, forsook my birthright as alpha of these lands in favor of the shadows from which I was bred and damned. Only I remain, now; I cannot die, and I will linger on in this place alone with the Guardians, a husk of a wolf whose eyes have seen the rise and fall of greatness.
A little over two and a half years ago, our destruction began not from within, but without. Beneath the alphaship of my grandmother Black Fyre, and her esteemed mate Shadow, the land saw the arrival of two outsiders whose names became themselves a condemnation. Wasaki and Dirae, the enemy and the bad omen, were Signs. The appocalypse would not ride to meet us on the backs of flaming horses, but within the minds of four wolves. But we did not know such things then - only that the two males (the first a dirty cream, the second baked in blood) had arrived within the territory and coerced two of the fyre females to leave the lands with them. Broken Fyre eventually returned, delirious and incapable of explaining what had transpired; Volcan was never seen or heard from again, and most assumed her dead at the foreigners' hands. But nothing was seen or heard from the pair, and they were forgotten to time.
A year later, and war fell to ravage the territory as a handful of mysteriously arrived Zephyr wolves descended upon our lands. They were ruthless in the manner of their element, a hurricane's force that nevertheless possessed the drive and focus of a single-minded unit bent on our ultimate annihalation. Dramatic, yet they were methodical and decisive, and after their first test against our numbers began to slaughter our chain of leadership through the male line of the alphaship. It is to the Zephyrs that we lost Wild Fyre. It is to the Zephyrs that we lost Rune, Havoc, Neo, the sons of Mirage, and the sons - as well as the father proper - of Bane. I lost my brother to the Zephyrs, and I am condemned to mourn him eternally, incapable of joining him in death. Sacred, son of Torrid (the lastborn son of Shadow Fyre), was ultimately the savior of the lands and yet - in doing so - condemned himself to a sacrifical death as the final breath of life left the entire male half of the alphaline. And so War, coming as though from no where, had decimated our lands.
Time passed, however, and the lands began the sluggish process of healing the tattered, bare wounds left in the wake of the loss of so many mates, siblings and young. Yet the worst is never over when the omens are ignored: the gods rarely dally in the lives of those who scoff the warnings they offer us... and we were fools to drift apart once more, to allow our bonds to laxen anew and decentralize a once great pack. Obsidian Fyre, ancestor of mine through the blood of my father, whose mother was herself halfsister to the infamous first alpha during her first life, possessed the mind and body of young Naught while she mourned the loss of her sister to the fires - fires which ravaged our land in the form of a duel-personality fyre named Blaze. Death sought dominion here, and his claws sank in well and deep. Between Blaze Fyre and the following, methodical massacre of halfblooded and neoblooded wolves at Obsidian's decree and doing, over fifteen fyres' lives were lost. Death, indeed, drove the pale horse through our lands, following upon the bloody red heels of War. But we did not understand what had come upon us: death shall ride a pale horse (and was Wasaki not an offcream?), and war's mount shall be the color of blood (and, was not Dirae colored from the very blood of fallen gods?). The signs lay there for us, and we ignored them not. And so the story does not end.
Again, exhausted by upset and turmoil, the pack attempted to rebuild. Halfbloods arrived within the lands, their demeanor distant and calm: Taisho Fyre (``beginning``) and Omega Fyre (``end``), the start and the finish, beginning and end. None alive save Rayn Fyre was old enough to recall the coloring, the similarities.. the blood lineage that placed the pair as the sons of Wasaki and Dirae, respectively, birthed from our fyre females they lured away... and Rayn had been called from the lands but days prior. Coincidence, you call it? Laughable. Not a single death since years ago has ever, in hindsight from the present, been attributable to coincidence. We were puppets upon strings we could neither see nor sense, driven like cattle before the four horses - horses that came to us, unwittingly, in the form of wolves. Taisho - the black horse of famine... his coat an unmitigated pitch faintly powdered with white.. and Omega, the white horse of disease, his coat a snow barely peppered by black. We said nothing, knew nothing, accepted them into the fold as brothers and kin. And so time passed.
Alphaship passed on to the rebirth of a wolf whom I once called father, and the silver spitfire Mercury Fyre whose blasphemy almost cost the fyre pack their lives on the journey north. But we did not know such at the time: fyre wolves are not cognizant of past lives until they have cycled through enough times that their power has grown to such an extent. Perhaps Wild might have been so, had he been offered the chance at maturity. Yet the lands were struck by blight, a familiar contagion known as the Tortuosus Deorsum - the Downward Spiral. Pestilence had come, her horse the white of mortem's chilling touch. Many died - the alpha heir among them, as though condemning our future with so simple an act as slaying the reborn Wild. The outlook was suddenly bleak; the easy path of light guiding us onward suddenly obscured by shadow. Mercury Fyre slid into the position of command as barely over a yearling, and young Lucin Fyre - driven nigh mad by the spirits in her mind - finally voiced the whispers she had been hearing for weeks. There was a cure, but it was no simple matter.
Yet expeditions were launched while the sick hung lethargically to their life by stands of will. Frost Fyre, blighted by the pups she birthed from her rape via Ravage, was the martyr for the cause: the chanthira flower's blossom lay in a nest of poisoned thorns, and with no thought for its ills she managed to wrest the deceptively lovely floral blues from their niche before death overcame her. Cloud returned with the cure and - with the death of Saika from an incorrect blending of the various ingredients - the lands were cured once more. Three horses - three wolves - had paid their tributed tasks. Only one remained, and it was to an already weary, weak pack that Famine soon struck with blinding, vicious ferocity.
Perhaps Tortuosus Deorsum had mutated to cast its disease into the herds; there was never an identifiable cause by which the horror spread, nor was there visible sign of how it seared through many miles' distance in a day to infect herd upon herd. Deer, elk and moose stumbled in their motions, death following within days. Smaller mammals became scarce as they left the lands, and there is no pack fit for surviving upon the fare of lizards and snakes. The eldest died off first, followed by the pups of parents who had starved themselves for the sake of the newly born. Entire litters were decimated or stillborne, and it was a haggard Mercury who roused the pack and began the exodus southward in an attempt at abandoning the lands that had seemingly forsaken their children. Famine had dones its duty, and the four wolves - cream, russet, white and black... death, war, pestilence and famine - were there to greet the fyres when they sought to cross through the southern pass of the mountains.
There are no words for the slaughter that ensued. Were I to relate it here, it would seem to you a child's tale of blood and horror fit for instilling a perfection of piety within even the most scornful wolf. For the fyres, for my clan and my breed, this was Armageddon. Fire razed the whole of the lands, entrapping us within. And I looked on from shadows - a part of them, unphysical - as my clanmates burned, or (the unlucky ones) met the fangs of the four. Some died instantly by a touch from the cream colored Wasaki, wolf of death; others had every past wound of every battle they had fought brought back to the surface by red Dirae, wolf of war; some, at a mere touch from white Omega, wolf of pestilence, were blighted with a fast-acting plague, left to die or infect those around them; and still others bore the prick of hunger that turned their very bowels inside out at the condemning brush of black Taisho, wolf of famine.
They knew I was there, I have no doubt. Yet my false father stood at my side, and there is no force on heaven, hell or between that has power over the shadows. When the whole of the world is met with true Armageddon, only darkness will remain. I am condemned eternally to this silence, this decimation.. this solitude of pack and existance, for all time. Forever shall I wander these lands, its watcher and its companion, blessing soils that have seen more blood over the three years passed than a hundred such territories together. I will shed tears for the dead and damned, mourn those for whom there would otherwise be no mourning. My whispers are your only eulogies, and in my silence, I listen to what murmurs the winds bring me, and hope that you have all found one another again in the Naught.
Perhaps, someday, a litter - or even a single wolf - shall be reborn. Perhaps fyres still linger elsewhere in the world and shall continue to be drawn to this place, and to what once was. Whatever the case may be.. it is not for me to guess. I have buried the last of you, and your pendants lie enthroned in a cache of the central den. And it is above it I rest, waiting for the lands to heal, and for the silence of this isolation to either settle, or be broken anew.
Rampant Fyre
Daughter of Shadows
The Last
Obsidian Dawn || Northern Fyre Wolves || Wolves of the Shattered Fyre
1998 - 2003
Rest in Peace, Beloved
Forsaking all I've fallen for
I rise to meet the end...
Change rescinds its hold from nothing; mountains crumble and rise, boulders are ground to dust and the hardest of metals yields. Lush tropics wither into inhospitable desert, and the deserts are blessed with months of deluge. Lives are given and lost, and while their impact upon others lingers like a curl of smoke over a long-squelched fire, in the end everything comes to dust. It is the way of things.
The lands themselves lie quiet and misted; fall has brought with it a smattering of rain to cleanse the earth of the death that still hangs in the air. I remember Autumn months such as this in which the land all but glistened with color: the leaves were such that the trees seemed set afire by some divine hand. The grey skies and wilting flora of the present make time seem eternal, as though death has finally found dominion among the living. It makes me tired - I have fought for so long. But then, I suppose we all have.
In the end, we suffered for the blindness of our arrogance, for the unerring belief that nothing could touch us. We bled outward like the suburbs of some dysfunctional city, growing apart and ignoring the signs that came to the forefront. Of those still alive when this downward spiral began, only I had lived long enough to remember.. and in that sense, perhaps the fall of this great breed is my own. I did not see as I should have, forsook my birthright as alpha of these lands in favor of the shadows from which I was bred and damned. Only I remain, now; I cannot die, and I will linger on in this place alone with the Guardians, a husk of a wolf whose eyes have seen the rise and fall of greatness.
A little over two and a half years ago, our destruction began not from within, but without. Beneath the alphaship of my grandmother Black Fyre, and her esteemed mate Shadow, the land saw the arrival of two outsiders whose names became themselves a condemnation. Wasaki and Dirae, the enemy and the bad omen, were Signs. The appocalypse would not ride to meet us on the backs of flaming horses, but within the minds of four wolves. But we did not know such things then - only that the two males (the first a dirty cream, the second baked in blood) had arrived within the territory and coerced two of the fyre females to leave the lands with them. Broken Fyre eventually returned, delirious and incapable of explaining what had transpired; Volcan was never seen or heard from again, and most assumed her dead at the foreigners' hands. But nothing was seen or heard from the pair, and they were forgotten to time.
A year later, and war fell to ravage the territory as a handful of mysteriously arrived Zephyr wolves descended upon our lands. They were ruthless in the manner of their element, a hurricane's force that nevertheless possessed the drive and focus of a single-minded unit bent on our ultimate annihalation. Dramatic, yet they were methodical and decisive, and after their first test against our numbers began to slaughter our chain of leadership through the male line of the alphaship. It is to the Zephyrs that we lost Wild Fyre. It is to the Zephyrs that we lost Rune, Havoc, Neo, the sons of Mirage, and the sons - as well as the father proper - of Bane. I lost my brother to the Zephyrs, and I am condemned to mourn him eternally, incapable of joining him in death. Sacred, son of Torrid (the lastborn son of Shadow Fyre), was ultimately the savior of the lands and yet - in doing so - condemned himself to a sacrifical death as the final breath of life left the entire male half of the alphaline. And so War, coming as though from no where, had decimated our lands.
Time passed, however, and the lands began the sluggish process of healing the tattered, bare wounds left in the wake of the loss of so many mates, siblings and young. Yet the worst is never over when the omens are ignored: the gods rarely dally in the lives of those who scoff the warnings they offer us... and we were fools to drift apart once more, to allow our bonds to laxen anew and decentralize a once great pack. Obsidian Fyre, ancestor of mine through the blood of my father, whose mother was herself halfsister to the infamous first alpha during her first life, possessed the mind and body of young Naught while she mourned the loss of her sister to the fires - fires which ravaged our land in the form of a duel-personality fyre named Blaze. Death sought dominion here, and his claws sank in well and deep. Between Blaze Fyre and the following, methodical massacre of halfblooded and neoblooded wolves at Obsidian's decree and doing, over fifteen fyres' lives were lost. Death, indeed, drove the pale horse through our lands, following upon the bloody red heels of War. But we did not understand what had come upon us: death shall ride a pale horse (and was Wasaki not an offcream?), and war's mount shall be the color of blood (and, was not Dirae colored from the very blood of fallen gods?). The signs lay there for us, and we ignored them not. And so the story does not end.
Again, exhausted by upset and turmoil, the pack attempted to rebuild. Halfbloods arrived within the lands, their demeanor distant and calm: Taisho Fyre (``beginning``) and Omega Fyre (``end``), the start and the finish, beginning and end. None alive save Rayn Fyre was old enough to recall the coloring, the similarities.. the blood lineage that placed the pair as the sons of Wasaki and Dirae, respectively, birthed from our fyre females they lured away... and Rayn had been called from the lands but days prior. Coincidence, you call it? Laughable. Not a single death since years ago has ever, in hindsight from the present, been attributable to coincidence. We were puppets upon strings we could neither see nor sense, driven like cattle before the four horses - horses that came to us, unwittingly, in the form of wolves. Taisho - the black horse of famine... his coat an unmitigated pitch faintly powdered with white.. and Omega, the white horse of disease, his coat a snow barely peppered by black. We said nothing, knew nothing, accepted them into the fold as brothers and kin. And so time passed.
Alphaship passed on to the rebirth of a wolf whom I once called father, and the silver spitfire Mercury Fyre whose blasphemy almost cost the fyre pack their lives on the journey north. But we did not know such at the time: fyre wolves are not cognizant of past lives until they have cycled through enough times that their power has grown to such an extent. Perhaps Wild might have been so, had he been offered the chance at maturity. Yet the lands were struck by blight, a familiar contagion known as the Tortuosus Deorsum - the Downward Spiral. Pestilence had come, her horse the white of mortem's chilling touch. Many died - the alpha heir among them, as though condemning our future with so simple an act as slaying the reborn Wild. The outlook was suddenly bleak; the easy path of light guiding us onward suddenly obscured by shadow. Mercury Fyre slid into the position of command as barely over a yearling, and young Lucin Fyre - driven nigh mad by the spirits in her mind - finally voiced the whispers she had been hearing for weeks. There was a cure, but it was no simple matter.
Yet expeditions were launched while the sick hung lethargically to their life by stands of will. Frost Fyre, blighted by the pups she birthed from her rape via Ravage, was the martyr for the cause: the chanthira flower's blossom lay in a nest of poisoned thorns, and with no thought for its ills she managed to wrest the deceptively lovely floral blues from their niche before death overcame her. Cloud returned with the cure and - with the death of Saika from an incorrect blending of the various ingredients - the lands were cured once more. Three horses - three wolves - had paid their tributed tasks. Only one remained, and it was to an already weary, weak pack that Famine soon struck with blinding, vicious ferocity.
Perhaps Tortuosus Deorsum had mutated to cast its disease into the herds; there was never an identifiable cause by which the horror spread, nor was there visible sign of how it seared through many miles' distance in a day to infect herd upon herd. Deer, elk and moose stumbled in their motions, death following within days. Smaller mammals became scarce as they left the lands, and there is no pack fit for surviving upon the fare of lizards and snakes. The eldest died off first, followed by the pups of parents who had starved themselves for the sake of the newly born. Entire litters were decimated or stillborne, and it was a haggard Mercury who roused the pack and began the exodus southward in an attempt at abandoning the lands that had seemingly forsaken their children. Famine had dones its duty, and the four wolves - cream, russet, white and black... death, war, pestilence and famine - were there to greet the fyres when they sought to cross through the southern pass of the mountains.
There are no words for the slaughter that ensued. Were I to relate it here, it would seem to you a child's tale of blood and horror fit for instilling a perfection of piety within even the most scornful wolf. For the fyres, for my clan and my breed, this was Armageddon. Fire razed the whole of the lands, entrapping us within. And I looked on from shadows - a part of them, unphysical - as my clanmates burned, or (the unlucky ones) met the fangs of the four. Some died instantly by a touch from the cream colored Wasaki, wolf of death; others had every past wound of every battle they had fought brought back to the surface by red Dirae, wolf of war; some, at a mere touch from white Omega, wolf of pestilence, were blighted with a fast-acting plague, left to die or infect those around them; and still others bore the prick of hunger that turned their very bowels inside out at the condemning brush of black Taisho, wolf of famine.
They knew I was there, I have no doubt. Yet my false father stood at my side, and there is no force on heaven, hell or between that has power over the shadows. When the whole of the world is met with true Armageddon, only darkness will remain. I am condemned eternally to this silence, this decimation.. this solitude of pack and existance, for all time. Forever shall I wander these lands, its watcher and its companion, blessing soils that have seen more blood over the three years passed than a hundred such territories together. I will shed tears for the dead and damned, mourn those for whom there would otherwise be no mourning. My whispers are your only eulogies, and in my silence, I listen to what murmurs the winds bring me, and hope that you have all found one another again in the Naught.
Perhaps, someday, a litter - or even a single wolf - shall be reborn. Perhaps fyres still linger elsewhere in the world and shall continue to be drawn to this place, and to what once was. Whatever the case may be.. it is not for me to guess. I have buried the last of you, and your pendants lie enthroned in a cache of the central den. And it is above it I rest, waiting for the lands to heal, and for the silence of this isolation to either settle, or be broken anew.
Rampant Fyre
Daughter of Shadows
The Last
Obsidian Dawn || Northern Fyre Wolves || Wolves of the Shattered Fyre
1998 - 2003
Rest in Peace, Beloved