Distant Howl

Ciran

Everything was like a mirage. An illusion. Something you can see on the dark night, but you can't see well. You could be alive but not survive in the same way. You could breathe, bring oxygen to your lungs, feel your heart beating and blood running through your veins, but all that was only mechanical instinct, muscle memory ... something that had to work, because that's how nature tried. It was like a dark impulse of what is no longer alive, but that must follow the path of the gloom as punishment. An illusion. A mirage of a vaguely hostile life.

Then you could survive, but even though being a hollow corpse that walks around the world, knowing that you lacked the most important part of you. But that does not matter. At all. Just follow and continue, without looking back. Since there is no look in retrospect. This is the curse that looms above all who is a lycan.

And that is what all the creatures of the other world felt when they did not have their partner destined. Something that they needed, to be able to continue in that gloom of darkness.

I distracted the slow circles around my sternum. The older it was, the more I felt that loneliness, that missing piece of myself that made me the living dead. Like the small hands of a clock, which helps to give time to the large hands. I was the big hands, very high with great force, so much that I could destroy someone just by hitting him. A dramatic comparison, but the truth was that it was a precise description.

And during the last two hundred and fifty years, he had not been living. I had taken one day at the same time, because I had responsibilities and obligations. Serve my king, train the guard and keep looking for her. Always for her. All I did was for my face without a face and without a name, totally unknown to me, the instinct of my inner animal told me to continue regardless of that.

And although I was loyal to Bartet, I would die for each of the Guardian soldiers, I would kill and mutilate to protect the royal family, my priority would always be to look for my wife. She was out there, maybe she was not yet alive, maybe she was born at a different moment, too far for me to find her, it hasn't even been too long.

Or maybe she was there, fragile and old already, after having lived a full and happy life, in love with someone else, with many children and grandchildren who surround her. It can be one of the possibilities

And although I get the idea of thinking about my wife with any other person, it was a reality, especially if she was human.

Wherever he was, whoever was, sustained my heart and soul in his hands and did not even realize. That was what my inner beast told me, howled inside for the need to find her, and I know that echo of that howl resonates in the distance.

I closed the door to the small minimalist cabin that I had called home for more than two centuries. Located in the highlands, still within the territory of the Lycan, close enough to get to Bartet or the royal family, could change and be there to protect and defend. But I stayed far enough, with a fair proximity, so that they could still revoline with my own loneliness, as a crust in which it was constantly collecting so that it would never heal. My wife's call was getting closer, my internal animal knew it.

My life could be much worse, I thought. I could have had a shit hand treated like my brother in arms, Odreant. I could have found my partner just to take it away from me. Thinking about seeing her, being close enough to touch her, but that brutally started it from me before I could do mine would be the most cruel punishment, a destination worse than death. Although he was already dead, but continuing to hover this world without her, knowing her already, it would be indescribable torture.

Yes, I could have had much worse. Destiny may not be on the side, but I didn't complain about what I had to happen.

I stayed there with the main door behind my back, the cabin spread in front of me, and once again I was surprised how naked and empty it was. I had enough comforts to keep me as good as someone could be, although with a partner I know it would be much better. I turned around and left, back from where I had come, heading for the side of the house, taking off my clothes while I was going and letting them fall where it was going through.

I didn't want to be locked between those four walls. I want to leave, let me run out of my inner beast, listen to the howls of other Lycan, and let that adrenaline be channeled throughout my body to drain that usequivable loneliness of the torture that meant being there without anyone to see. I didn't want to look at the fireplace and see the flames eat the trunks little by little while finishing a bottle of half empty whiskey. And that was becoming my typical night. It was increasingly monotonous. I thought very often about all the things I had to do, this burning sensation in my instinct that said I needed to find, to find it. It was the only need I had for a long time.

I was naked next to the tree line, closed my eyes and leaned back back, inhaling the crunchy autumn air. It was colder at this time of the year, the air was so icy that it clung to the skin and almost fulfilled the same function of the fire, almost burned by the cold, penetrated my flesh through my frozen fingers. He felt well in my overheated body, taking the sweat of the day but doing nothing to get rid of the restless energy inside me. That unstoppable power had to free him.

And although I knew that a race in my Lycan form would not help much either, it was better than the previous alternative.

I let my beast be seized from my body, to break my bones and tear my skin, realize everything until I dropped on all four legs, shaking the fur that covered my heavy shape. My inner animal was huge and incredibly powerful, as large as a damn Clydesdale horse, large enough to tear down anything that got in my way.

In my wolf body, things with more force and listened to everything, the perception increased supernaturally, my senses was at his stop. My vision was marked and precise, crystalline while taking the sound of insects in the distance, the aroma of another wolf running through the forest. I left, letting my front and rear legs cross the distance, my legs sank into the soft earth. I saw everywhere, I didn't care about absolutely nothing that I crossed on my path. I had become a beast.

I ran faster, jumping on fallen logs, throwing me around low -cost branches. I could see the brightness of the green moss that covered the rocks along the stream.

I could smell the aroma of the land that surrounds me. The highlands were full of life, and brought energy to my Lycan, rooted it in its inheritance and culture, made it one with Mother Nature.

We were a kind of earth, gaining strength from the moon, power of our environment. And so I comforted myself as I did during the last two and a half centuries and ran free. This feeling was only second to which I knew I would feel when I found my partner and experienced that linked connection.

I thought things could be worse, but turning those words in my head like a mantra did nothing to relieve pain in my soul.

I let myself run for so long that I will join. My bones hurt; My muscles protested. But I didn't care. I ran until I could run anymore, until I limited and dragged my body spent back to my cabin before collapsed and sleep. Because only then my dream would be without dreams, my mind and my body too exhausted to think, much less feel.

I caught his aroma before seeing it. I made a subtle change in my trajectory to go to the other Lycan. The more I was approaching, the more his aroma was clarified, as a firm recorded on his skin, a tattoo that would always let a world knows who it was.