We Walk As Wolves

Chapter 11

Wilder

Most would say he didn't need the dreamcatchers. 

Wilder didn't need any kind of protection, not with the way Redd watched over him during the night. No beast would dare come within a foot's distance from her, especially when he was with her. 

They were dangerous apart, but they were lethal together. Every fragment of the island knew it. 

But inside his head was something different. He knew she tried, knew she did everything in her power to reach him, before he could fall and the world could shatter. But it didn't matter. Asleep, he couldn't even remember his own name, couldn't remember the difference between his heart and the island's. 

Always, he dreamt of flying. Ages ago, when the dreams first began, he'd had sharp black wings - scaled like a dragon. They had sprouted up from in between the blades of his shoulders, cracking through muscle and bone and cartilage until they sprung out of his skin like steel from a switchblade. 

But as the dreams continued and his rule over the island grew, the wings evolved. He evolved. They shrunk, shriveled into dried skin that eventually scabbed over until there was nothing left. He didn't need wings any longer. As the magic intensified on the island, it grew inside of him, too. It took over. Magic was like that, a virus attaching itself to a host until one of them killed the other. 

Except, he hadn't wanted to kill magic. Instead, he'd become fascinated by it. Especially when he found out what it could do. 

With it, things were clearer, sharper, finer. His vision inflated. His senses dramatized. His head wasn't muddled, not like when he was awake. The island's tiny details were everywhere he looked. He didn't just feel the wind on his arms, he felt the whispers of creatures blown in from the tips of the trees. He didn't just feel the salt of the water, he felt the kisses of ocean breathers that had rolled in from the bottomless pits trailing along his neck. 

He was the island.

Who will remember?

The voice was a trickle in his ear, the edge of a nightmare. He laughed in the wind, drowning it out. 

He was everywhere. He -

Who dies? Who survives? Who tells your story? 

The wind howled with a laugh of its own. Never forgotten, always remembered, by every granule of matter in the world. His world. 

No, he didn't want to kill magic. He wanted to control it. And he'd done it. He had torn magic down until it knelt as his servant. He'd domesticated it, a wild animal snagged from the treetops and shoved in a cage. 

But magic was smart. Deceitful. It was notoriously relentless, rebellious, and the bars of a cage wouldn't hold it. It had found another way, had caught a glimpse of a chink in his armor. And magic had a sharp sword and a trained hand. 

Experiencing a sense of flight meant that he could also feel a sense of descent. 

Thick clouds slunk through the threads of his hair like gentle hands. He caught droplets of rain on the tips of his fingers. He heard the world calling to him, sighing his name. 

Then it split. 

Cracked. 

A flare in his head, a voice loud enough to outrank thunder. The face of a half-dead woman, skin crystalized with ice and snow. 

Who will remember us? 

Then he was falling. Always falling. Through the breaks and the cracks in the world. Whispers turned to screams, kisses turned to bites. His head pounded with a foreign beat. The world pulled him down, spinning him endlessly, smashing him down until he broke. And it repeated. Each night, it repeated.