The sun reached down to peel my lids open. My chest laid bare for the heat to course through each vein, and bring my body to its feet. The night had been long, and the journey to the border of forest and plain was great. West of the great river that stretched up into the new lands, but east of the mountains, my journey would have to carry further until the Lone Wolf could be found. How, I am uncertain, but beyond this point, the scent of the big cat would be the greatest draw to any wolf.
With little life ahead but desert and grass that waved with the wind in its blond and green hair, my feet carried further along the bumps on the Earth's flesh that swelled under the sun and cracked in the cool air of night.
Somewhere before the the peninsula that stretched under the land of the bear and Pacific, there was a tribe separate from the Mayans that had mastered the ability of the Spirit Walk, or so I had been told.
They were a tribe you would not find by searching. There was no man or woman that could travel land or sea to find them for their spirits were in the very Earth itself. Rocks, trees, every blade of grass held the spirit of their ancestors and whispered to the wolves that protected them when threats were near, but would they call to them now that I seek the wolf out?
When night fell for what seemed like the twentieth time, my ears had deceived me with the sound of a howl off in the northern distance of this long strength of dried Earth. The moon was full above and behind me, but the world ahead was dark and unknown. The New Land, as it were, only travelled by the Northern Clans to viking the world around them, but this deep? No one knew what it truly held, save for the stories the southern tribes told.
At the deepest part of the night, where the moon was at its highest, I felt my knees swell and then, like a flood, burst to toward the ground to soak it in sweat and exhaustion. My hands reached for anything it could grab, but the land was dead. The energy absorbed from the sun, now lost to the ghost light of the moon.
My eyes began to wander, the water swelled within them and blurred as my body turned onto its back and fell to gaze up at the lights above. The spirits watched this pitiful sight. The eyes of ancestors I had never seen before. Judgmental, curious, cautious.
The sound of the wind brushed through the thin hair of the Earth ceased at the dead of night, and all my ears to could trace were the sounds of the cracked skin of the land being pressed and kneaded by pads that stepped closer and closer like a great shadow.
Before the darkness came, the shadow caught my gaze on the horizon. A great black wolf in the night with eyes that reflected the whites of the moonlight. It's fangs bared, but its distance kept.
Then darkness came.
The ocean threatened to seize me and carry this weary body out into the depths of nothingness. It pulled my body down and the surface, like gentle hands slapped my face and shoulders. Once my eyes opened, the shoreline was a forest, and my body laid still in a shallow river.
"You must cleanse yourself of the bad spirits you bring with you." A voice echoed through the silent maw of a woman that stood at the cusp of land and water.
Her voice echoed the caverns of my mind even though our languages were different, the spirits demanded we communicate. If our lips could not, then our intentions must.
The paint that had covered my flesh flowed like dust down the river bend. My skin bare, my flesh slowly awakened by the cold water, and all the pain and suffered joints and aches from this journey washed away as though the spirits of his ancestors cleansed me of my past. There would be no journey forward until the spirits of this land were appeased.
Once awakened, I could get a better look of the female at shore, and she stood tall at the shoulders on all fours. Black fur and eyes that cut through my flesh right to the heart. Her spirit was that of the great wolf, and it reflected in her eyes like it were her own body. Her human form, not far in appearance to myself, though shaped differently by the plains of the new land. Her eyes stared through mine as though she would not acknowledge my desires until the ancestors were done with their cleanse. Down her form, she had a stomach that swelled with a hand that caressed at the bottom, undoubtedly carrying a wolf pup inside.
This was not what I had expected out of the Lone Wolf, the beast they called Nightwolf.
"You must follow now." She spoke to me through the wind, her voice never to etch itself through the air like a dagger that would break this spiritual peace.
The spirits pulled me from the river, nude, clean, and ready to submit to the will of the wolves. We kept apart, never too close to one another, for the big cat does not walk alongside the wolf. She had no loss in step and could have easily cleared any distance to leave me to the bad spirits that yearned for my sterile soul. As night fell and the second full moon rose, she faded from sight, and I had believed the cause lost, that she had rejected my plight, only to find hours later, the great black wolf had taken her place to guide us through the scars of this land.
The wolf was tall, and carried a full belly as she had. Nightwolf, as she was called by my people, and perhaps hers, moved slower this time. We were close to the tribe.
"You will not be welcomed." She turned and glanced back at me with cold eyes. The moon's harsh judgement reflected in them. "You must find what you are looking for and leave."
"I am looking for a Spirit Walker. To take me to the Nether Realm." My voice carried through the cold night wind.
The wolf stopped and turned fully toward me. The trees that grew behind her in the shadows of night were illuminated by the spirts of fires and eyes of other wolves. Her tribe had come to greet me with fangs bared and intent to kill. The Big Cat would never be welcomed within the tribe of the Wolf.
"You seek the aid of Ussen, of the Nide." Nightwolf approached, her wolf form nearly reached the height of my shoulders, and her fangs glistened in the moonlight with the fire that burned behind her.
"How do I seek Ussen?"
"You cannot in this form." Nightwolf gestured with muzzle toward the flesh of my flesh, my entirety, then stepped back and sat on her haunches, chin raised with a cold glance in her eyes. "No man, no woman can speak to the creator, only the spirits, only our true selves can know Ussen."
The pack snarled behind shadowed trees, the orange flicker of flames and the beat of drums in the background beckoned me toward danger, but the cold expanse of the plains behind me swelled with safer intent. Should I step forward, they would shred me from flesh to bone, but if I were truly intent to return Jade to the land of the living, then my body and soul must submit to them with greater respect than that toward my own Osh-Tekk.
"You are not a man." Nightwolf echoed, "you are the big cat. Black in fur, fangs, feet that have travelled this land before many of our own ancestors. I can see your soul, caged within you. You do not believe."
If my hands could release the claws of the cat within, they would have, instead, my body dropped to its knees, beneath the gaze of the great wolf and the let the moon scar my flesh.
"The wolf lives beneath the light of the moon, but the Big Cat is a creature of light." My words carved the air and the wolves snarled, but she stood still.
"No man may pass. Only if Ussen agrees to speak with you will your true form be pulled from shallow flesh."
"How?"
"I will sing, we will beat our drums, and we will pray for you, but if it fails, my wolves will gift you to the ancestors instead." Nightwolf pulled herself from her haunches and turned her back, the great wolf joined the pack at the tree line as my body fell to the ground, exhausted, unable to go forward.
As the drums bellowed like thunder, and the shrill screams of the singing wolves howled through the broken cage of my being, the night overtook me.
"Listen, Ko'atal." Jade's voice washed down my body to my hands that tried to grasp her hair, her flesh, her soul.