To Dream of Wolves

The first thing you feel is short grass wedging between your toes. You wiggle each toe slowly; the grass is soft and damp, already laden with predawn dew. From the tips of your toes, a tickling feeling rises upwards like a slender caressing hand, tracing over your heels, shins, knees, to your tailbone. As the sensation grooves the ridged contours of your spine, the hairs on your neck prick upwards. By the time it reaches the back of your skull, you remembers how to smell. You take a deep breath and the vapors swirl into you, becoming you. It is the smell of night and fresh crushed grass and something else. Something wilder. A soil of some sort, a forrest loam mazed by sweetly decaying pine needles. Your eyelids float up towards the lightness that now rests on your brow.

You see you are standing on the edge of a clearing. A wall of trees looms before you. Tall evergreens, melded into a jagged line against a starry sky. A gust of wind cups your cheek, prompting you to turn, and the sight that greets you sets your heart pounding with an inexplicable child-like glee. Before you is a meadow of the same short grass on which you stands. Lit up by the glow of a full moon, the meadow's gentle slopes seem for a moment to be a sea of silver waves. Another breeze passes by, sending a shiver along the grasses that soon turns into some sort of slow swaying dance, each blade moving both individually and as a part of some greater whole. The dance stills when the breeze reaches the oak tree on the hill. It is ancient and bare of leaves, yet there is something in the way the roots writhe into the soil that convinces you that the tree is still very much alive. The trunk, which is as wide as the man is tall, seems smooth as a marble sculpture; its tan color made luminescent by the moonlight.

You are drawn to the tree and find yourself longing to sprint on the pads of your feet towards it. It is as if your spirit has left you, and is already racing to join the dance beneath the tree's outstretched boughs, glancing with a half turn back, bidding you to follow. A low rumble sounds behind you, pulsating in your gut, and the illusion shatters. The tree and the meadow are no longer important, they are beyond you now. The rumble reaches your ears again, from behind you, from the forest.  You turn to the wall of trees, and strain your eyes against the foliage enveloped in shadow. Branches criss-cross and fade into a latticework of spindling twigs. Beyond the rim of the forrest's edge, behind the shield of branches, the dark unknown throbs softly.

As you scan across the woods, your gaze returns to a single spot near the ground and to your right, where the darkness seems to fold into itself. You stare at it and feel deep within yourself a strange stirring. At the center of the dark spot, two orbs of light wink into existence. The eyes are golden fire; slitting and dilating pupils to adjust to the night. They lock onto you, and the wolf steps forward, its lips curled slightly to reveal the glittering whites of its teeth.

"Human", it says in a low growl, "you have been gone for far too long." The wolf barks sharply and shakes its head."It is time to remember."

It turns, and the moonlight shines briefly on its body of grey fur. It looks back at you, waiting.

"How can I?" you ask.

The wolf rotates its head back to the wood, and its form slides into the darkness. Seconds pass, and your brow wrinkles with tension.

The low growl whispers back, "run human. Run with me."

You move forward and are swallowed by the woods. Branches and thorny vines lash out, trailing beaded red lines upon your flesh. You try to maneuver around them, to disentangle yourself from their sharp bite.

"Do not think human", says the wolf, his growl now emanating from the forest itself. "Just run. Run!"

You yell, short and loud, your lips curling back and showing teeth. You burst forward, ripping branch and vine and you mind is blank of all thoughts save one. At first you crash through, heeding nothing, but soon your body begins to remember. You duck and weave without seeing or needing to see, and your body moves like water between the trees. You sprint faster, a lightness in your stomach willing you to push past all limitations. And then it happens, you dive forward, knowing it is what you are supposed to do. Your arms lengthen, your fingers and toes curl into clawed digits. You begin bounding with the body of a wolf. Fatigue is nothing to you. The run is all you know, and all you desire is to stretch outward and feel the freedom of movement within the springing of your every step.

You are consumed by the run, and time falls away as dead leaves scattered in the wind. Blind in your elation, you do not see the end of the forrest. You leap outwards into the abyss. There is no sky, no floor, no obstacles of any kind. Just a limitless void, so profoundly infinite that the space feels cramped and the darkness seems to flow as a substance in itself. Hanging there, you look down and see that your body is human again. You look back at the woods. They seems off and flat, as if they were made of folded paper.

A crystalline ringing draws your gaze back again to the void, and you see for the first time that there is a spot where the darkness flees and a halo of light resides. You will yourself forward, flexing some imaginary muscle you had never flexed before, and you floats through the darkness to the light. As you gets closer you see that it is a bush with leaves of deepest emerald. Hanging from the branches, there are dozens of berries; each the size of a marble. Water droplets cling to them, shining like tears of diamonds with a light of their own. At first you think the berries are purple, but the longer you stare, the more the color seems to change, from purple to blue to red to orange, each shift so subtle that you can't be sure it had occurred at all.

You picks one. It falls into your hand. It is heavier than you expected. The woods then pull you away from the emerald bush and its fruit. You fold back the paper trees and enters the forrest again. No matter how hard you try, you cannot look back. You walk with ease now through the woods. They were made for keeping you out, not in. Soon you are at the meadow again, but the beauty from before seems without luster when compared to the jeweled berry in your hand. You sniff it, once. It is odorless. You place it on your tongue, maneuver it to your teeth, and bite down into its soft yielding flesh. It contains every taste you can imagine and some beyond imagination, and when you swallow it you feel the pit sink down into your stomach. You know you are somehow increased, larger and more substantial, though no physical change in you has taken place.

Before you can pin point the nature of the feeling, a grey form hurls itself bodily into you. You and your attacker roll for a moment in the grass, until the you are on your back. On top of you, the wolf's paws press heavily on your chest. Its face is close enough for you to smell the musky wet scent of its breath. Its eyes look down at you, an impossibly bright gold.

"Very good, young cub," says the wolf, "but do not think our work is done." It grinds the dirt on its paws into your chest. "You should not stray for long this time. I should not be kept waiting." With a final low growl, the wolf takes off, back into the woods.

Laying on your back and staring at the full moon, you start to feel numb. You smell the crushed short grass that lightly pricks your skin. You feel the music of the night singing softly. You then close your eyes and awaken.