Child of Man: Chapter 6, Part 2

Watcher sat over his heels, his tail slowly wagging behind him. He stared through the pungent smoke rising from the fire pit, his gaze as much on the flames as on his patient. Across from him, Shadowdance sprawled on his side, snoring softly. His lungs rattled quietly on every exhale, but he didn’t stir in his sleep, his paws remaining still against the hard-packed ground. Around the edge of the makeshift lodge, and circle of sunlight slowly faded, the day fading into twilight.

Fresh curls of greyish blue smoke rose from the fire pit, filling the inside of the lodge with a heavy moist aroma, reminiscent of a coming thunderstorm. The tan-furred Child of Wolf perked his ears in a smile at the scent, his tail dusting the ground behind him. The smoke spoke to him, telling him of quiet minds. Next to the flames lay a small wooden bowl. A few drops of dark red liquid clung to the bottom, the last of the medicine he had prepared from the ingredients that Briar had recovered from the scattered pile, mixed with fresh water from the stream that edged the clearing. With these, Shadowdance could get the rest he needed, the rest his soul required to begin to purge the poisons from his body. When his spirit was well again, his body could truly recover, and then he could rebuild his Protectorate.

If he were given the chance to recover, the old wolf thought with a frown. By itself, the toxic spill would have been more than enough. Even his knowledge of remedies, Watcher admitted silently, would have been no match for whatever poison it was that they inflicted upon Shadowdance. Seemingly unsatisfied with this violation, however, the Shepherds had been steadily pushing forward their assault, even going so far as to demolish the home of a bystander. The attack against an outsider, even a Lost One, was shocking in the extreme. It seemed like the sort of scorched-earth tactics that even a seasoned war veteran would find surprising.

Even more terrifying, however, was the attack on Briar. A direct assault against a Child of Nature within the borders of another’s Protectorate, however wounded its caretaker might have been, would have seemed unthinkable until earlier this afternoon. The safety of isolation and sacred land had been taken from them. Before, the Shepherds might have fought for their genocide, but they had never stooped to raids within their territories, and some level of decorum could at least be taken for granted. Now even that safety net was gone.

Throwing a fresh log onto that emotional fire, the wolf realized with dim horror, was the fact that Shadowdance, in his delirium, had not sensed the intruder coming. Normally, one pledged to a Protectorate would know instantly if someone had entered his lands. It was that very reason that prompted him to stop and enter the grey wolf’s scape to ask for passage. Had he not, he might well have found himself staring into the maw of someone in the middle of a hallucination, mistaking him for some random intruder. Now, that certainty of advanced warning was gone, by some means the wolf could not determine. Had the Shepherds rediscovered some ancient magic lost to even the Children of Nature? There was no way for him to know.

With a grimace, Watcher pushed himself to his hindpaws, grabbing for the bowl sitting beside the firebreak, his tail hanging limply behind him. “If our lands are no longer safe,” he whispered quietly, “then only their lands will hide us.” Taking the fight to the enemy had long seemed the whelp’s choice, the easy road to a quick suicide. Now, staring down at Shadowdance’s tired and battered frame, he realized it was probably their best hope of a decisive victory. It was that, or a slow death by attrition.

Watcher spun on his heels, pushing aside the leather flap that served as the door to his makeshift lodge. Outside, the air was crisp and cool, a welcome change from the warmth and smoke within. Normally on a night like this, the sky would be clear, and a velvet sea specked with diamonds would stretch out overhead; tonight only a few dim dots of light shone through the thickening smog from the fires that raged less than a mile away. Most of the flames were gone, but smothering them had created great black billows of smoke that stained the sky. It would be years before the land recovered. Its guardian might never.

Tail curling between his legs, he forced that idea from his mind. That train of thought led only to memories of Mirror. His paws clenched into fists, his claws digging into the thick pads of his palms. He tried to bring her back to life in his mind as she was when he first met her, her freshly groomed coat mottled strands of silver and brass, her short tan-grey pelt warm beneath his touch. If he tried, he could force himself to remember her eyes, golden drops of sunshine that warmed his own when they met. Instinctively, he tilted his head back, reliving the scrape of her claws against his back, her muzzle pressed into his neck as they lay together under a dark green canopy, a slow breeze rustling their fur as it whispered through the underbrush.

He choked, pitching forward, his arms wrapped around his chest. Mirror’s Smile lay on the ground before him, staring vacantly up at him, her once-bright eyes gone dull with pain, pus seeping from their corners, staining the pelt around them a mucousy yellow. She swallowed constantly, licking her cracked lips futilely to trace down any straggling drops of saliva. Her joints, especially her elbows and knees, seemed horribly distended and swollen, but the rest of her body seemed to shrivel in on itself, as if the muscles had simply dissolved from the bones beneath, leaving the skin to hang in empty folds. She coughed suddenly, and blood splashed the ground at his feet.

He screamed silently to himself as he lifted the revolver, pointing it down at her head. He looked down, and she tried to smile up at him, nodding once in encouragement; her throat was too cracked and split to talk. All the herbs, all the chanting, all the prayer in the world had not saved one life, and now this was all he could do to ease her pain. He tried to stop the hammer from falling, to pull his finger from the trigger, to throw away the gun, to do anything but watch and yet the events played out in slow motion in his mind as they had so many times before. The shot rang out like a thunderclap, her face pulping as the heavy slug spread on impact, shattering the bones of her skull and tearing through the brains and soft tissues beneath. She slumped soundlessly to the ground, and then he collapsed next to her, weeping, the stink of burnt gunpowder, blood and sickness clinging to his fur.

That last was the same stench from the fire, that sickly mildewed sweetness that clung to the insides of his lungs.

Watcher opened his eyes and looked down at the pads of his paws. Four neat puncture wounds sat near the heels of his thumbs on each. His claws were tinged pink, the fur of his fingers darkening as his own blood seeped out of his unconscious injuries. He pushed himself back to his hinds, then turned his head back towards the lodge where Shadowdance lay, and a strange relief surged through him, making his senses spin for a moment.

“Not this time,” he whispered to himself, not even aware of his words. “Not again.”