Timeless: Lost Myths

I like history, specifically Mesopotamian and Near Eastern history, and i like angels. Those two facts together gave me an idea for a story I decided to try and write.

Timeless is a story about the Earthly Angel (you). An immortal guardian who has watched over humanity since before memory. Across countless eras, from before the founding of the first cities to the fall of empiires, you have been there. Through beauty and tragedy, through grief and loss, you endure.

Brief synopsis.

The world is not what it once was. Only echoes of mystery and ruin remain. Though their hidden temples stand empty, desolate,and their empires have crumbled. Would-be gods and those who believe themselves eternal still live, diminished, but not gone.

Yet even as the world struggles to move on,older things linger. Shadows from a forgotten epoch. Things once cast into darkness.

And because of you, one of them has escaped its pit..

For millennia, you have hunted it. Struck it down. Yet it always rises again, slipping through the cracks of history like a sickness. But now something has changed.

Now, it moves with purpose. It has found something, or someone, it desires.

And you are not the only one hunting

MC is in trouble 👀

It hits me so fast I barely see the movement. My ribs snap. Then I feel my spine twist sideways, and then it snaps too with a crack that screams through my skull. The world jerks and I slam into the wall so hard it breaks around me in a spray of plaster and dust. I hit the ground in a shape that used to be my human body.

Pain flashes. And I feel like I'm boiling. Anger. Rage. Pure instinct roaring up from the core of me.

I explode.

The wolf tears out of me in a burst of muscle and fur, bones snapping and reforming all at once even as my body knits itself back together in only a few seconds. The ground gets ripped to shit under my paws as I rise to my full size.

The creature screeches and scrambles backward but it is far too late.

I hit it with the force of a freight train. Its limbs snap like thin little branches under my weight. I slam it to the ground and land on top of it, sinking my teeth into its rubbery flesh, tearing chunks free while my claws rake across its torso, ripping long wet gashes into whatever passes for the creepy bastards body. It shrieks and thrashes, trying to twist around me, but I pin it with both paws and bite down HARD.

    #Run. Hard.

        I take off hard. The ground tears away beneath my paws in violent, rapid strides, trees, and brush whip past in a blur of greens and sun-bleached gold. I hit seventy within seconds, then push harder, eighty, maybe more.  

        the wind flat my fur so viciously it almost stings. I'm built for this, born for this, made to devour distance like it’s my prey. Behind my ribs, my heart pounds like war drums.

        Eithne folds herself low over my back, fingers knotted deep into my fur, legs locked tight against my sides. I can feel every breath she takes, sharp and too fast. But her eyes aren’t on me. They’re on the sky. Always the sky. She keeps her chin tilted upward, scanning the burning blue for a shape, a shadow, a wing.

        The world ahead stretches long and empty. My eyes stay fixed there, unblinking against the wind. I smell dust, old asphalt, summer heat still clinging to the earth… but no angel. No strange scent. No ozone, no divine pressure, nothing. And that makes it worse, not better.

        I start to run harder. The earth hammers under my paws, the world blurs into streaks, my lungs don't burn. Never felt it yet. But I feel Eithne trembling on my back. If something finds us out here, I need to be fast enough, and strong enough, to get her away.

    #Be careful with Eithne.

        I should start slow with her on my back. Well, not slow, but pretty fast. Fifty. Then sixty. It's a steady pace, and smooth enough that Eithne won't be jolted with every stride. 

        My paws break the dirt, eating the distance without being too crazy with a full sprint. The wind still roars in my ears, though. but it doesn't tear at me.

        Eithne can stay upright more easily at this pace. Her fingers don't pull my fur too hard. She keeps watching the sky, her breathing is clipped but pretty okay. Her fear ain't as bad now, but it's dulled into something sharper.

        I focus on what's ahead, scanning every shifting line of the horizon. With my nose, my ears, and my eyes, I catch everything. I see the grass move, and there's a rodent a hundred yards off, I smell scent of old tar baking in the sun, even the wind when it changes. Nothing that smells of angels, though. Don't hear Nothing humming with power, either.

He looked human enough when the sun was on him. That was the trick of it, though. In daylight he passed for a dangerously handsome man with courtly manners and a poet’s posture. Pale with dark hair, and a voice like still water.

But every time he stepped near Eithne, something in her spine flinched.

She met him outside a tannery on Thames Street. The stench of boiled hides hung thick in the air. He smiled like this was some grand introduction.

“Where are you from?” he Asked.

Eithne tightened her grip on the basket in her arms. “Here and there.”

That should’ve ended it.

Aldric just tilted his head like she was a puzzle he wanted to break open.

“I'm warning you," Eithne said, her voice like iron. "Go away and sing to somewhere else.”

He laughed, a low, delighted laugh, and that’s when that damned light stirred behind her ribs.

SSAERZZZZ

It wasn’t gentle. It punched her breath away. A single blink of white in the back of her vision, like lightning under skin.

She backed away. That feeling had saved her before, she listened when it spoke.

When he left London three nights later, she packed nothing and followed.

He didn’t hide his tracks.

Predators rarely do.

They want something watching.

The forest outside Islington was wrong. The trees looked swollen, their bark split like old scars, and the mud dark as clotting blood.

Eithne watched from behind a fine old tree as Aldric met another woman. Young. Pale hair. Church shoes, worn down to bare leather. The kind of girl who believed soft words meant safety.

He touched her cheek with reverence, and disgust twisted in Eithne’s stomach.

“I’ll show you something beautiful,” he whispered to the girl.

Ssaerrzzzz

The light slammed through Eithne’s skull like an order, not a warning.

"Tsk." Eith hissed, "I should've thrown you into the sea."

She stepped into the clearing.

“Aldric.”

He turned, slowly, annoyed more than surprised.

“Well hello, Why are you here?”

“I'm wondering that myself,” She murmured, and the light flicked through her again.

SSAERRRZZZZZ…

Then it crawled out of the trees. Not some storybook dryad, not a stag-headed fairy tale, but a mass of limbs and teeth grown from rotting wood, the shape of a man torn open and filled with roots. No eyes. Just a hollow maw gnashing through bark.

The girl finally saw it and screamed.

Aldric’s expression was almost bored. “She has old blood. It needs…”

But Eithne could only gasp when something inside her ripped open.

It tore through her chest, a flash so violent and so fast that her vision shattered into nothing. No shapes, no trees, no Aldric, no girl, just white blindness, total and absolute. Eithne staggered, grabbing at nothing, fingers clawing air. Her knees hit the ground hard enough to bruise.

Then came the searing. Not skin burning, not meat cooking, but a line of fire under her ribs, racing up her spine and exploding behind her eyes. She opened her mouth to scream, and only light spilled out. Soundless. Horrifying.

She thought she was dying.

Really dying. Not cursed, not sorcery lost, not centuries of slow heartbreak as she wilted in damp dens or cold water, dying in a single instant to something something older than her mother's magic.

The brightness didn’t fade so much as tear itself out of her.

One second, it filled her whole body, and the next, it was gone, blasting out into the world, leaving her shaking and blind and panting on her hands and knees in wet leaf mold.

Eithne blinked hard. Nothing.

Just sheets of white across her vision like snow burning her retinas.

Even her own voice sounded foreign when she whispered, “What…wha”…

She couldn’t finish. A wave of nausea rolled through her, sharp and metallic. Her teeth felt hot, like she’d just bitten down on a forge.

She smelled char.

burned wood. Not firewood.

Meat.

But she wasn’t burned.

Her skin was hot, clammy with sweat. Her throat felt raw. Her dress untouched. She ran trembling hands over her arms, her face, no blisters, no pain.

Whatever that searing was, it hadn’t marked her body at all. It had just used it.

Her vision came back in ragged pulses, first shadow, then colour returning in shattered fragments. The world snapped into focus in pieces, ash drifting, smoking earth, roots burned where she saw the thing had last.

It was gone.

Aldric lay on the ground unmoving. A gash like twisted branches scorched into his flesh down his neck and shoulder.

The girl was lay sobbing against a mossy stone, untouched. Alive.

Eithne tried to stand. Her legs were numb, so she crawled to a nearby tree and leaned against it, heart hammering so fast she thought it might crack a rib.

There was pressure behind in her chest, faint now, like an ember cooling, but still there. Still present.

She shut her eyes, breathing hard, still seeing bursts of white dancing in her skull. The light hadn’t burned her, hadn’t scarred her.

The shaking started in her hands again. She clenched them tight until her nails dug crescents into her palms just to feel something real, something she recognized as hers.

MC's wingspan is like 8-10 feet long. They are large enough that even while folded behind MC's back, they still trail behind them on the ground

The desert wind carried the taste of bitumen and blood.

Nightfall painted the horizon iron-black, and the moon looked like a shard of broken pottery hung above the dunes.

That was where I found them. Nergal and Ereshkigal, crawling out of old Sumer like thieves in the night.

They had not fled alone.

Behind them stumbled slaves and concubines bound by hemp ropes, their wrists raw, eyes vacant from heat and fear. hundreds of them, perhaps more. Servants stolen from temples, farmers dragged from riverbanks, girls taken from reed houses along the Tigris.

Nergal held his golden scepter like a cudgel, guarded by warriors with lion masks carved from hammered bronze. His mighty shoulders trembled.

Ereshkigal, pale and lifeless as the tomb, draped in veils woven from grave-cloth, held a single obsidian blade resting lightly against the throat of a boy too young to understand why he was trembling.

They saw my wings first, embers on the horizon, burning slowly I wanted them to know fear.

Nergal hissed.

“Mušen?”

I came to them, and my wings burned like torches, and the sand scorched beneath mt bare feet.

I demanded the mortals be released.

Ereshkigal’s jaw tightened, her lips curling like something dead drying in the sun.

She pressed the blade harder against the child’s skin, just enough to draw a single line of blood down his neck.

I decided then that her blood would wet the sand.

Nergal barked,

“They are ours. Our protection. You won’t strike while we hold them.”

Once again, I demanded they be released.

And my eyes burned.

Ereshkigal laughed, like brittle, hollow bones tossed in a crypt.

“We know what you did in Eridu. In Byblos. We know what happened to Ninurta, to Inanna, to Enki, to Enlil, To Anu, To the fools Marduk called gods. You would murder us all”

She tilted her head, eyes catching firelight, pupils dilated with something that was almost madness.

“We keep them,” she whispered, “and we live. Because you won’t risk them.”

Her blade slid from the boy’s throat to his jaw, softly, almost tenderly.

“They are shields,” she said.

She would feel pain before she died.

Nergal stepped closer, his face twisted brazen and sticken with fear.

“You can’t kill us both before we kill half of them,” he growled. “And half is enough.”

I looked at the mortals then, the dirty faces, the ropes, the bruises, the hopelessness.

The air changed.

And for the last time, I demanded that Ereshkigal release them.

She spat at my feet.

“Oh I will not,” she whispered. "But listen closely, fire-thing, so long as they keep us alive, their lives are extended beyond the collapse. They are precious. Bargaining tools. Memory. If we die, everything dies with us.”

She leaned her forehead against the boy’s hair in a gesture that pretended to be affection.

“This world falls apart, Mušen,” she murmured.“We fall with it unless we carry pieces with us.”

Nergal swallowed, voice cracking.

“Let us walk. We go east. Beyond Elam. We start again.”

I fanned my wings high as I looked at them.

I told them that they would not poison another city.

Nor would they lord themselves over mortals.

Nergal’s eyes flickered toward the mortals again.

“Then perhaps we take the wilderness,” he said. “Maybe we build new ones.”

Ereshkigal’s smile was thin as a knife.

“Tell us no,” she breathed, “and watch them die first.”

For the first time, I let silence stretch long enough for the wind to return.

And then I spoke slowly, my words heavy as stone placed onto a burial mound.

“I do not bargain with the dead.”

Ereshkigal tensed.

Nergal raised his scepter.

And every mortal holding their breath suddenly understood, one way or another, death had come.

The boy with the obsidian blade against his throat flinched.

He did not see me move.

No one did.

My wings snapped outward so fast the air cracked like thunder, and in the space between one heartbeat and the next, I was beside Ereshkigal.

She reacted with a reflex born of centuries of ruling the underworld.

She cut deep.

The boy’s throat opened like a second mouth, bright arterial red spilling into the sand. He fell without a sound, eyes wide, fingers grasping at nothing.

Ereshkigal gasped in triumph.

“One.”

I answered with a whisper:

“One.”

And I tore her arm off at the elbow.

No flame, no dramatic blaze, just the raw strength of my rage.

And my rage unraveled gods.

Her old bone cracked in my grip like river reeds. Veins and sinew snapped in wet ropes. Her hand still grasped the obsidian blade even as it hit the ground.

Her scream was a jagged, shivering sound, half fury, half disbelief.

Then came the second and third.

Nergal’s lion-helmed guards surged forward with bronze swords and painted shields, roaring prayers to their dying pantheon.

Two of the mortals tried to run, a mother and a little girl.

A guard cut them down from behind before you could reach them.

One thrust, two bodies in the dirt.

I saw it.

I counted it.

“Two. Three.”

And my voice was colder than the stone under the rivers of the dead.

By his next breath, my hand closed around his throat.

I lifted him slowly.

So slowly he realized what was coming.

His feet kicked.

His helm fell.

His eyes bulged bloodshot red.

“Two,” I murmured as his first scream broke.

“Three,” as the bones in his neck began to give.

I crushed him until there was no more sound left in him.

Then I dropped what was left.

The fourth through ninth.

The slaves panicked.

Some tried to hide

Some fell to their knees, praying to me.

Some prayed to anything.

Ereshkigal, still clutching her stump, shrieked.

“Kill them! ALL OF THEM!"

Her lion-helmed warriors obeyed.

One stabbed a man in the belly.

Another slit a concubine’s throat.

A third, while laughing, speared a little girl in the back as she tried to crawl away.

I counted every death.

“Four.”

“Five.”

“Six.”

“Seven.”

“Eight.”

“Nine.”

Each number was a promise.

No fire this time.

No celestial blaze.

Just precision. A surgeon’s cold arithmetic.

For every mortal death, one lion helm was shattered in my hands, skull and metal crushed like eggshell.

For every scream, one servant found his voice stolen permanently.

For every drop of human blood spilled, there was a price, paid in torn limbs, broken spines, and eyes pushed in until the screams died.

One guard tried to run, dropping his sword and fleeing toward the dunes.

I didn’t have to chase him.

I speared him with his own discarded weapon.

“Nine.”

His body twisted from the blow.

Bones folded.

Organs burst.

He died before my fist even passed through him.

By the time I reached Nergal, there were fewer than ten mortals left alive, and half of those were bleeding too badly to see sunrise.

Nergal’s voice broke into cracks and ash.

“Enough—enough—Mušen, STOP!”

I stood over him, wings folding in tight, my face and body dripping with dust and blood that was not my own.

I did not stop.

“Nine,” I growled.

“Where is ten?”

He thrust his scepter out, shaking like a cornered animal.

“TAKE ME INSTEAD!”

You stared down at him without emotion.

“I do not bargain with the dead.”

He lunged.

I caught his wrist.

And with the same motion someone might use to snap a reed, I ripped Nergal’s right arm off at the shoulder.

Blood sprayed across the sand in a wave of red heat.

He collapsed, choking on his own breath.

“Ten,” i whispered softly.

Ereshkigal crawled toward the dying mortals, dragging her stump, face white with pain and madness.

“You think you’re better,” she hissed. "But you counted them. You counted them.”

She smiled then, a gruesome, broken thing full of teeth and blood and hate.

“You and I are the same.”

I knelt beside her, my hand closing around her jaw, not cruelly, precisely, clinically, like a potter deciding whether a vessel is cracked beyond repair.

My voice carried none of the rage I felt inside, just truth older than kings.

“No.”

I twisted.

Her neck snapped.

“I remember every mortal.”

I left her beside the dead boy she killed.

And the desert, for a long moment, felt… still.

Not peaceful.

Never peaceful.

Or so I told myself.

Mercy was a choice.

I have like 4 or 5 of these. And as you'll be able to see, the MC was pretty damn brutal in their younger days.

Amar-Utu.

Before the ages that mortals call myth, I was there.

Before oceans swallowed the old world, before there were gods who carved their names into clay tablets, I remember hair like sunshine.

I remember Selah.

I did not drown with the rest. 

I watched as mountaintops vanished beneath black waves of chaos, and when the waters receded, I was alone in a silent world.

Until They came.

I was there when the first mud bricks of Jericho were laid. I remember the dust, bitter and pale, clinging to my wings like ash. 

In the dark, I kept watch over the settlers, and I drove off the things that crawled from old holes to feast on them in their sleep. 

They never knew my name.

They never saw me.

I walked Mesopotamia in its first breaths, though no one called it that back then. 

I gave aid to Ubaid herdsmen when drought and starvation stalked them. I slew the carrion eaters that haunted the Zubi marshes. I burned the jaws of what lurked beneath Ur, before the people could finally start building their great city.

But mortals are not the only ones who rise.

There came a time when the old powers thought themselves kings. Pretenders. Would be gods. They built temples in the marshlands and demanded worship in languages now forgotten.

Then came the sacrifices in blood.

Anu was first. I crippled him. Their god of Heaven, arrogant on his star throne. 

Enlil, in a rage, sent Ninurta to avenge his father. The warrior came with seven great weapons, thunder in each hand.

I broke Ninurta in two.

Enlil fled to his stronghold, walls forged from bronze older than writing, but my wings are of fire. I tore them down, and every single Annunaki god I found within died by my hand. 

Inanna tried to flee, gilded and perfumed, Queen of Vanity. but she tasted y white lightning, her silk became rot, jewels into slag, and I left her crawling from her own temple as the Queen of filth.

The skies burned when I chased Enlil across the wild lands, but he hid in storms and shadows, a coward in wind.

Then I came for Enki.

Clever, treacherous Enki. 

He unleashed a great fire, a weapon older than cities, upon Eridu itself, forcing me to reveal yourself, over crowds of terrified mortals, my wings burned as I caught the flames. I saved them, but Enki escaped into the deep waters, one eye scorched white from my touch.

Mortals told stories of that night, though they did not know mt true name, they called me by another.

Erim Mušen.

Enemy Bird

They said it was I who tried to reign fire down upon Eridu.

That it was their great god Enki who turned the fire back on itself.

I wanted to burn him. 

I was younger in those days.

I believed that mercy was a choice.

The Isle did not sit on any traveler’s map. It appeared as its Queen wished, and vanished when she grew tired of eyes upon it.

Some seasons she opened her gates wide, letting mortals feast and dance until they swore oaths they did not understand. Other years she sealed the place in mist, and even seabirds forgot how to fly near it.

She was Erin of the Willow.

Her hair was as pale as moonlit water, and her hands were slender and restless, always weaving something, garlands, wreathes, and snares of words that tightened around those who listened

She loved easily, but it meant a different thing to Erin. She might keep a companion for a summer of bright fires and storm swept nights, only to send him away when the leaves turned or when the mood left her.

Her daughters were many, born in whispers and raised among finches and foxes. Erin taught them courtesy first, a sweet voice for bitter truths, and sorcery second.

But none were taught mercy. That lesson she did not know.

Then came a wandering man who sang his way into her chamber one autumn then vanished before winter set. The child he left behind kept the sound of him, though, defiance tuned like music, impossible to silence.

Of the last girl, the brown-haired one, Erin said little and thought too much. The girl was a mirror Erin could not bear to look into. She tried gentleness as one tries on a borrowed cloak, then returned to the habits of her blood. A twist of will, a change of fate, a curse disguised as teaching.

And as the willow in a storm may break, so did Erin’s patience. She stripped the girl of her gifts and sent her away where magic could not reach easily.

The girl tried to live quietly. She built a home, and though she swore never to love again, she adopted two girls who pulled laughter out of her like drawing water from a spring.

When the girls were gone, and something remained in their place. Grief drove Eithne back across the water to her mother’s hidden isle. She wanted only what was taken. Erin gave it back, but not in any way that healed.

For thirty-one years she ran with red hunger in the hedgerows

Then for thirty-two years she lived as a hare, startled by every sound, sleeping in fits.

Then thirty-three years as an otter, drowned in river. Cold. lonely. Unable to leave the shifting current. Time stretched thin and shapeless.

When at last the final curse fell away, she crawled naked from a lake that had known her too long.

The lake lay behind her like a wound, ringed in reeds and black alder. Dawn had not yet woken. The world was cold iron and gray silence. She lay curled in the frost, and for a long time she did not move, only breathed and remembered pain.

She pressed her forehead to the muddy earth and whispered for the first in a century.

“…no more…”

She rose, slow and shaking, and wrapped herself in fallen reeds and moss for modesty. That was when she felt it, a pull, faint but insistent, old magic. Older than the curses laid on her. Older than her mother’s pale towers.

She began to walk.

Through hollow forests, beside ruined ringforts, under branches heavy with sleeping crows. She walked until her legs would not carry her, and then crawled again, following the quiet thrum beneath the ground.

By dusk she reached a river.

Not wide, not mighty, but older than written speech, and shaped like a question across the land. Mist hovered over its surface, silver and unbroken, and something ancient whispered beneath the current.

She stepped into the water.

It embraced her. Cold, but not cruel.

She lay down in it, letting the current take her. She did not intend to dream. She intended to end.

Years passed. Then centuries. Roots grew over her resting place, and the stones changed with their slow patience. Kingdoms rose and fell.

Plagues came.

Wars came.

The river did not move faster for them.

She might have slept forever, if not for the woman with white hair like winter snow, who one night reached down through water and silence and pulled.

She gasped as air returned, as burning life seared through every nerve, ancient magic stitching itself into a shape she could control.

Her grandmother did not speak at first. Only wrapped her in a cloak of linen and guided her to halls unseen by mortal eyes. Green light, endless chambers, walls that hummed with forgotten hymns. She stayed there thirty years. Thirty years of recovering strength and memory and the bitter taste of her mother’s name.

When she left at last, she did not look back.

Her grandmother placed something in her hand before she stepped beyond the threshold, wrapped in embroidered cloth. It felt warm. When she touched it through the fabric, she thought she saw a faint glow.

She did not ask what it was. Some things were not meant to be spoken aloud.

She walked out into the mortal world in the year 1420, wearing a new name, and carrying only three things.

a borrowed cloak.

A half-returned power.

Thank you to everyone who got me to 50 likes!

It's a Wolf’s Life.

I used to think the world ended at the back fence.

That was before.

Before my bones broke and changed, before fur grew over my skin like water, before my fingers became claws, and suddenly everything smelled sharp and alive.

Before I ran. I left that house and never looked back. I don’t like remembering it. I just remember too many rules, too many closed doors, and the kids that went quiet when I walked into a room.

I remember hands that grabbed me too tight. I remember learning how to stay small and quiet and out of the way.

Now I don't do that.

I ran until the houses disappeared and the roads disappeared and the stars came out over my head, and I felt I could breathe again.

I have been running ever since.

I'm sixteen now, a year after the my Change, everything was still new and strange and wonderful. My body felt too big sometimes, like I could break trees just by leaning on them.

I learned I could chase deer for hours without getting tired. I got real good at stealing fish from rivers with my paws, snapping them up before they even knew I was there.

Sometimes I watch my reflection in a lake and just stare. A huge wolf, bigger than any wolf, my fur is even darker than my hair was, and my eyes are so bright.

I met bears. Big ones. Once a grizzly stood up on its hind legs and swiped at me, and I thought we might really go at it, but when I dropped into a play-bow, tail wagging, he just huffed and ran. They always run.

One summer, I went north. All the way to Alaska. I swam across freezing rivers, climbed ridges just to see what was on the other side. I curled up in moss under the trees and listened to elk breathing a mile away.

I could smell storms. I could smell birds in their nests. I could smell a can of beans someone left in a campsite three days before I got there.

I smelled something worse, once.

In an old part of a forest nobody walks in anymore, near a burned building, I smelled rot and hunger and stones that remembered screaming. Something was there. It was long and thin and bad.

It was eating someone. I could hear the bones cracking in its mouth.

I don’t like killing, not really. But some things are bad.

It came at me fast. It was so fast. It clawed at my face, It hurt, but not much. I bit it in half, right through the center like it was twigs and mud.

I buried what was left of the person it was eating. I didn’t know their name. I whispered sorry anyway.

Sometimes the anger comes. Like something wants out inside my ribs. I want to tear and smash and rip, and when that happens I run. I run until my lungs burn and my paws bleed and the sky goes from purple to gold. And then I feel better.

People walk in the forest sometimes. Couples. Campers. Kids sneaking away from home. I follow them sometimes, quiet and careful, I like the sound of their voices. They never see me. I listen. I smell their candy wrappers and their shampoo and their campfire smoke.

When they leave, I sometimes curl up in the places they slept. I like the warmth.

I should sleep right now, but I don't.

I just sit near the road where the grass is tall and dry and gold, and I rest my chin on my forelegs.

I like listening to the trains humming in the dark.

I try to think about good things. Like running so fast that trees are only green blurs, hunting rabbits that dart like little shadow, rolling in snow until I’m covered and shaking cold.

Sometimes I pretend I am just a wolf. But wolves don’t have memories like knives. Wolves don’t remember voices yelling in a house late at night or the other things I don't like thinking about.

I shake my head. No. I don’t hate them. I really don’t. Hating just makes everything tight inside. So I don’t think about them much. I smell the stars instead.

But tonight… tonight won’t leave me alone.

It was so late when it happened. The woods were wet and dark and and everything smelled like old leaves. I could smell the trail of a mother bear and her three cubs, fresh prints, fuzzy smell, milk-scented fur.

I smiled. (Wolves can smile, even if people don’t think so)

I wasn’t going to play with them. Cubs get scared. Mommy bears get angry when cubs are scared..

Then I heard metal smashing, rubber screaming, the smell of hot oil and fear.

I ran toward it, claws tearing dirt, running like my heart was being pulled that way.

A car was pulled over, the lights were on, and the door bent open. Something came out of the forest, wrong-smelling, like old rusted pennies, and it hit the car door so hard the glass burst like ice.

People screamed.

It wasn’t as strong as me.

Most things aren’t.

I hit it and knocked it down, and it hit the road so hard the ground jumped under us. It clawed me, but it couldn’t hurt me. Its body was like wood and stone and meat all mixed together when I bit it, so I just bit harder until It screamed and stopped moving. It smelled dead, but still wrong.

Then I turned and looked at the people.

They smelled like fear and sweat.

The man was bleeding from his face, and he was crying. The woman smelled like salt and panic and she kept saying words over and over, voice breaking.

Then there was a bang so loud it stabbed my ears, and the night, and something poked my neck. It didn’t really hurt, but the noise, the light, everything made me growl and bare my teeth.

I didn’t want to scare them.

I didn’t want to hurt people.

So I ran so Fast.

Into the trees and the dark.

I could still smell the blood for miles.

Now I’m here, curled up by the road.

The trains keep going by, one long chain of steel and thunder, heading somewhere. People are probably inside, warm, moving toward something.

They don’t know I’m here. No one knows I’m here.

But that's okay…

I close my eyes and listen to the train until it’s gone.

Then another comes.

Plus she was nice and gentle to D that I almost thought those two were ROs for each other's and mc just looks at it from the side. Kinda strange feeling 🧐 It's not really the biggest drawback for me, because I'm not looking for romance in this story anyway, but still...

Although maybe there are reasons. Her sympathy for wolves/werewolves or animals in general? mc is adorable too with those shiny feathery wings. Such birdie 😘

Hi,

Would you believe me if I told you that I wrote the MC basically saying nope and flying off, but I removed it because it felt like an easy way for her to start trusting the MC. And Eithne really does not trust the MC.

First off, Eithne acts the way she does with D because, yeah, she likes wolves (who doesn’t), but mainly because she knows what it is like to be abandoned and alone in the world. Her past is a crash course in tragedy, so there is kind of a big sister thing going on. Plus, she is hella old, and D is only in their early 20s, so there is a protective thing there, too, even though D is capable of turning into 1.5 tonne monste wolf that can bite through steel.

But with the MC, she is genuinely intimidated and with good reason. She knows a lot more about us than the MC realises (hint light of hers matching our wing colour). She was also raised in a very warrior-eaque/honour culture, so for her, when you're scared, you face it.

And lastly, I didn’t write the MC snapping back because, again, she is genuinely scared of the MC. If we made her even more afraid of us, I really don't see how they could become closer if you choose her route. I could say more, but that's the ist of it.

Oh no. Does the writing imply that Eithne and D are together? Please tell me it doesn't. Otherwise, II'll ve to change it.

Anyway, thanks for the ask and I'm lad you enjoyed it 🙂