A/N: See also Coil's Are You Shivering? ("Are you shivering? Are you cold? Are you bathed in silver or drowned in gold?")
And birds are glittering in the trees like copper bells, like shards of stars caught and held in the upper branches; and their voices are stitched to the rushing of wind through endless midnight valleys, red strings of remembering, frayed but unbreakable. Below them, the dark earth. Beneath that, the black loam and the roots swollen up with power and the rich autumn rot dusting ancient ghosts with gold. Moro watches the sky, gentles the earth with her steps and feels the world alive; she hears it again and always, the fearsome cry, the promise:
we are going to live forever, you and i.
This cannot be so and she knows it; but still, the forest never lies.
Moro is the white goddess and the forest pays tribute. Her sons are well-fed, her daughter is beloved; and birds are glittering in the trees like copper bells, their voices stretching a memory across the dark bowl of the sky, gathering dawn. Moro does not take prey within the domain of the trees, because the land is not hers. She knows the unspoken names of all the rocks and riversides and patterns of shadows that lie against her flanks in the morning dew, and the forest pays tribute. But none of it belongs to her.
there are those who will remain behind. it is too sad. i will not speak of it.
If it was her right, she would choose an heir to succeed her, and it would be San. The visions of the consequences are frightening and spectacular; woodland wedded to human ambition, all the city's weapons dismembered and rebuilt as vengeful organisms, the forest impenetrable. Black branches like fists clenched for combat. Leaves like fire. Spectacular.
San would be ashamed to make such a thing of such a place, however, and the task will not fall to her in the end. It is only the bitter fantasy of a wolf, after all. Wolves are cruel but never insincere. Moro would not wish that future on her.
i know her future. it is too sad. i will not speak of it.
San is an orphan. She loves her mother, not-her-mother, and she splits her enemies open with her bone-knives and nails, the better to eat them alive.
There are lantern flowers that wrap around the great bulk of the oldest tree she has ever found like a chain of glittering birds. At twilight, when she climbs the waterworn bark running soft as her own flesh in her hands and sits in a cleft between the mighty boughs like a kit in its den, they lift their heads sleepily to her, though the sun is gone. They know her very well, and listen to her stories well into the night.
"Mother brought a dead man back from the lake today. She said he was outside the walls alone. He still had soot on his face. She dragged him over moss and put him in the water, but it wouldn't come off. The trees must write on people as they burn. A message. I didn't understand it if that's what it was. Mother said I shouldn't eat him because he was my own kind. That was why I wanted to; because he isn't. I stole a piece of him later. I hope his spirit was watching. I hope it remembers that forever."
In the blue light, the flowers make pinched faces at her with their velvet petals. This, they seem to say, is not a good story.
San laughs a little and curls back into the musky warmth of not-her-sister's pelt, sinking down and away, searching for the consciousness of a true wolf in the back of her mind. "Mother says I should look after the river valley myself next season. I think she wants to keep me away from the people, the town. I don't even know if the river valley likes me. Has it ever seen a human before?" She sighs. Whorls of pollen swirl against her throat and shoulders like a second shroud. "I'm not sure what will happen. Maybe it doesn't matter. Even if no one knows what it is, there's always a still-to-come."
A soft breeze makes the flowers shiver, like tiny birds, like bells.
Moro is a mother to a child who is not her child, and the deeper ironies are not lost on her. She has raised many cubs and unleashed them on the far reaches of the world, the lands beyond the lands she knows, where they hunt and bay at the moon as it spills through the darkness and eventually die. In a way, it is her responsibility to give them all life simply so that she can see them all dead.
She remembers: San was a white smear on the path, squealing between Moro's great paws, and the gloom thrown down by the unforgiving trees licked at her soft feet and round belly like a scavenger. Like a wolf in the wintertime.
there are those who will remain behind.
It was her responsibility to give them all life, even then.
The forest is a liar, but a good one.
When Moro lies in the ground and decomposes, it pushes sparkling white ghostflowers up through the ashes of its own body in her memory, new flesh spread out over a bed of incense, an offering to a god.
it is too sad, the past.
Familiar steps gentle the shadows on her flanks with tiny strides and feet far softer than the callused paws of a wolf; and the sky glitters with birdsong strung between a thousand wings, far beyond her reach. Forever is too much for her to remember.
it is too sad.
They do not speak of it again.
And San settles into the sighing meadow as stars swirl across the night sky, uncaged; and white wildflowers lower their heads to her as the distant voices of wolves rise from the dark earth, red strings of remembering, frayed but unbreakable.