The Wolf & Yearning

Chapter Four

WuguLang had a nightmare. It wasn't as if he'd never had a nightmare before, but this was different. The images gnawed at his bones. He was himself in the dream, but he was taller, broader, stronger. Older. His fangs were thick with saliva and he snarled. Everything was tinted red from his glowing eyes.

Behind him, the world was on fire. Puny mortals were throwing themselves at him, begging him.

"Great Lord ChenXing, please!"

He lifted the loudest one, ripped into his jugular. He clasped his own braid in his hand. It glowed, but this house was cold.

A spindly sexless creature clomped behind him. Its skin hung off its insect-like body.

Thunder shook the earth. The braid in his hand pulsed under the renewed spell.

"Where are you?" he cried.

Droplets pelted down, wet his face. When he went the wrong direction, the cold burned him. Rain was clouding his eyes. The storm was throwing oceans of water at him by the time he found the road up the mountain.

He willed his hair to glow again. A few zhang away, just a few unsteady, upsetting footsteps. Freshly turned earth. He fell to his knees, tore through the clumps of mud. It clung to his body, was thick on his knees. His nails clawed through the soil. He hit a rumpled shirt.

The wail burst out of him anew, shook the forest and trees and the birds braved the rain rather than stay with the shrieking demon. A memorial post was shoved into the ground and sticks of incense were piles of ash. He touched the characters carved on the post.

Rain played a cruel game on his head. It was like someone took a searing hot poker, jabbed it down his throat, incinerated his soul, then forcibly ripped it from his chest. A pool of goo, he forced his hands to the decayed form. The pink-tinted gray body was bloated in some places, gone in others. Hair and skin had sloughed off of the skull. He cleaved to the slimy figure. Some fingers on the corpse were bulging, others had been nibbled back to bone.

Beloved wasn't in that deformed body anymore. The bulbous head, the skull blooming like a cauliflower, both signs that this flesh shell couldn't contain her. The eye sockets were empty. He hugged the body again, paid no mind to the foul odor and the filth. Another tear burned his eye and rain slipped over his face.

The skinny sexless figure stood by with folded arms.

He breathed. "How dare you die on me."

He scrubbed the tear off the corner of his mouth.

Images came off the body. A careless cart-driver. He yelled, cracked the whip, paid no mind to the crutch or the slight size of the child. The figure spun, was dizzy, crashed to the ground. The horses' hooves snapped the ribs. Splinters of bone stabbed into the chest. He embraced every blow, every gash. He gurgled blood.

Light, floating, drifting.

Death crept around this body before the horses trampled it. He touched his friend's chest, tried to sense the damage from the cough. He puckered his brow, put effort behind his spiritual energy, rebuilt the putrefied lungs in his mind's eye.

A mortal body, a weak, normal, mortal body! Not altered at all. No human body could contain them. The spiritual energy was busting from the form.

"How dare you leave me."

He shook his head. He couldn't get ahead of her and, if she was insisting on unaltered human flesh, he'd never catch her in time.