The Blood Red Path

Stand Tall

The sky is tinted grey.

A salt mist slicks against my lips as the world mourns the loss of Nature. I feel the suffering—the grief.

The Moon stands with clean-licked teeth, and I have blood on my hands. I need to avoid becoming what I'm trying to eradicate, but there is a cruel feeling bubbling up from my gut: destroy everything that she has ever touched. The Moon is poison, and I will cleanse this world of her toxins.

I can hear the heartbeats of my pack. Their approach is thunderous as one large body surges forward. What's behind them sounds like the beginning of a carnivore hunt — hungry for retribution in the name of their? Moon.

Odin has a crooked smile and an outstretched hand. I take his offering, and we both now have blood on our hands. He brings my hand to the center of his chest and holds it there. There is a breathlessness that I feel with the contact of skin against skin. Muscles strain. Just underneath Odin's jawbone, I see his pulse of life bounding thick and dilated underneath thick skin — my heartbeat is in tandem with his, urgent and wild. Claim him. Every instinct I have howls it.

Claim him. Claim him.

Ancient forest greens grow wide. He tilts his neck towards my teeth. The willingness of the invitation slips warmth through my bones—a long breath caught between closed lips.

Crows roost on branches – malignant black eyes bore into the Moon.

A snarl shakes the crows out from their branches. The Moon stands taller than I have ever seen, with exposed teeth and fury in her eyes.

"Do you not care for all the suffering you are about to bring to everything you love?" The voice of the Moon rattles the ground.

"You started the suffering. I'm going to end it all." The heat from my rage is felt on her skin as she flinches away.

"Your hypocrisy is boundless. You have no idea how alike we are." I watch the skeletal wolf features of her face shift into something mesmerizing and beautiful—almost touchable. In a blink, she resides between illusion and reality.

"I'm nothing like you." Spitting words that turn to drops of rain hitting her face.

"Don't lie to yourself. That's the worst thing you can do." Her eyes stare straight into me as if trying to peel my soul.

"Stop," I root myself into the ground. Nothing will move me, including her. The Moon gasps. I laugh.

"I'm not like you. I'm more." I give her a dead-eyed stare. We focus on each other with mutual cannibalism. I want to gnaw on her until she is nothing more than the marks left against her bones.

"Charlie," my mother's Wild! Her voice sounds visceral. I've never heard her Wild call out.

She's the first to arrive, with war-teeth exposed. She left a path of upturned dirt from claws that gripped into the world to propel her forward. She has come to protect her daughter from an enemy she cannot see.

"Who would sacrifice their mother but a monster?" The Moon's tender voice feathers around my ear, but my stomach feels as if it has been split open. I look down to see if my guts have come out of my body. They haven't, but it feels that way. I feel eviscerated. The Moon disappears, but the feeling of her claws against my skin remains.

A warm hand splays over my abdomen. "Your mother would be honored to die for you." Odin's voice chisels away at my ragged breath until I can pull in the smooth air that expands my lungs fully.

"Charlie." Again, my name comes from her tightly strung throat, barely making a sound.

I face her entirely to watch her shift as she falls to her knees, trying to shield her blue eyes. A rasp of my mother's breath is heard from her chest. She bares the hollow of her throat towards me.