Cheza pressed herself against the wind as she trudged on. It actually seemed to support her; its power was substantial.

The weather had muted most of her emotions, but her exposed skin was raw as the frigid air slapped it. Something kept stabbing her in her left boot as she walked; Did ice fall in earlier? she wondered blankly.

Still, despite her grievances, she found her body moving. It stomped on in a most mechanical way. All she needed to do was watch in her detached state.

Something needed to be said. Can I still talk? she asked herself. She thought of the wind diving into her vocal chords and snatching her words like a precious gem. She tried, anyway.

She could just barely discern her feminine intonations above the raucous chill. She recognized her voice saying, "It will not be much longer."

Kiba, just ahead of her, slowed. "Until?"

Cheza forced the breath out of her diaphragm so she could hear herself clearly. "Until it happens. We will have to find cover then."

"Why?" He was not in opposition to her resting; she looked pale and moved without any vigor. But Kiba wanted to know more about the awakening of Rakuen. He thought he needed that motivation.

"That is how it must be. The world will be cleansed while we are hidden away. We will pray. And when we step out from this, we will be walking into Rakuen."

As he let Cheza approach the side of him, he considered asking her what Rakuen was going to be, but smiling at her for courage, he did not press her any further. In truth, he knew that she would only understand as much as he did about what could be. No one had experienced this place in its entirety. That is why it was known as being yet to be.

He had heard so many stories of the world in its beginning. He pressed on for truth because he wanted to find himself, living exactly as he was meant to. Above all, he could observe and he could reason. Love was truth. And most of the humans in the world took and took until they denied themselves.

But somehow, through a midnight storm, a lunar flower had bloomed. She had drifted from a place nothing like here. She wasn't The Lord and she wasn't Rakuen. But she belonged in Rakuen. And she was his.

As he had journeyed in the past few months, he had sought her as a reminder of what must be coming. His sign was a single bloom from an expansive field he would someday rest in. For now, it would be enough.

Tsume kept his word. He made certain the other wolves in the clan believed him.

Tsume and Toboe watched and waited away from Hige and Blue. For an extended time, they observed no one. There was only snow being pushed into their fur coats by the wind. Tsume was growing irritated, and considered calling Toboe back to return to the other two, when he finally hearkened a scraping and clanking noise, as if someone were awkwardly handling a piece of equipment as he walked.

A gun, maybe.

By the time he was finally visible to the two pack members, he had managed to secure the rather large gun into its holster. He wore a red overcoat. Despite the scruff on his face, he had approachable features.

Two boulders accentuated themselves from the ice near where Tsume stood. Toboe had noticed the strange man in red, and instead of confronting him, had retreated a short distance back to Tsume. There were occasional odd items jutting up from a frozen grave. Tsume thought that the depth of the water must not have been all uniform throughout.

He sized up the pair and decided, These will work fine. He motioned Toboe to crouch behind them. They both switched their appearance to that of a human's. Tsume climbed the top of the stone, intending to leap from it if necessary. His footing missed a place as it slipped against a patch of ice, and it jammed in the crevice between the two. Tsume emitted a startled bark before he realized he had broken character.

Toboe scrambled to the front facing boulder and scaled it partway. He extended his "hand". "Come on!" he urged.

This was how the man found the pair as he jogged over. Toboe was calling out instructions and Tsume was trying to comply. "Just move it back a little!"

"Try pulling on three," Tsume enjoined.

But Toboe whirled around. He knew he had garnered the attention of the human.

Their gazes met just as the man reached a car length's distance from Toboe. The man in red should have seemed innocent enough. His countenance looked as though it had held much warmth for others. There were a few worn creases beside his eyes. But when the man did attempt to smile at the form of the boy, his lips curled and wavered on his face as if they could not find the right position to show congeniality.

"Hey," the man simpered, "is your daddy stuck?"

Toboe placed himself protectively between the man and Tsume.

"Aw…" the man remarked. "We can pull him out of that." Toboe noticed he was reaching for his gun.

"No!" the pup shouted.

"You think you can stop me, kid?" the man in red smirked. His expression finally fit his face.

That was when Toboe reacted. In his defensive anger, he felt himself shedding his human guise. The man in red had just enough time to reveal genuine shock before the pup lunged at him.

The man was already on the move. He still tried to run closer to the jutting boulders. That proved to be a mistake. Toboe's next lunge did not miss him, and the man could not evade him quickly enough. Already visibly bleeding from an arm, he too missed his footing, and falling backward, his head made contact with rock.

Toboe did not even look on long enough to see if the guy was still moving. He rushed back to Tsume and found an angle to free his pack member's foot.

Tsume shook his foot and then put his weight upon it. He was fine. "So, we're good now?"

"I'm sorry," Toboe confessed.

"He was going to kill us." Tsume scanned the horizon as he spoke. All was still. "You did what you had to do." He stretched. They'd been surveying the land for long enough, and it seemed fairly clear that their aggressor had come alone. He turned, and again, seemed to be addressing the air as he said, "I'm going to tell the others about your bravery."

Toboe shrugged, his gesture unseen, and jogged to keep pace with his elder. "They're not gonna believe you."

At that, Tsume halted and finally faced the pup. "They know I don't make stuff up. I'm not a dog in a court. I don't flatter. I only give people what they earn."

Toboe considered this.

Tsume noticed the quiet musing of Toboe. That pup's gotta think through everything, the elder remarked silently to himself. "Come on."

The darkness did come.

For his own part, Kiba greeted it with almost a sense of relief. He himself could only push on for so long, and Cheza needed respite. The cold had not relented.

Neither one of them was happy for the dark itself. Kiba tried not to think of those who would be lost to it. Still, images of the proud, the deceitful, and the good he had seen in the passing months flashed before him. He knew his place was not to judge. Cheza said to pray.

In the final days, there were few people left to evade. It was not all that surprising to either of them therefore when they happened upon a small abandoned house a quarter of a mile in from a major road. While they had retreated from the frozen wave, they were stepping through at least six inches of snow at a time. Though not dug out, the ramshackle building was visible enough to the two of them. With chipped day-glow blue shutters against a muddied white frame, it reminded Cheza of an old Easter egg.

She remembered Easter eggs.

Cheza had asked Kiba to recall the location of that unworthy pile of cement and glass as they moved on. Now that the hour approached, and they had not moved far against the snow, Cheza brought up the house again.

"There?"

"Yes," was her decisive reply.

Still, it was a house, and all Cheza could think of was how Kiba felt too dignified as a wolf to sojourn in a place meant for humans. Grateful to have something to give to the ever-compliant Cheza, Kiba lifted her and carried her over the threshold.

"I am sorry," he heard her murmur.

"Hush." It did not matter where he was. None of it mattered. He just knew he could not leave her, not like this.

After she had rested, she pulled the blinds, hunted for and successfully found candles and matches, lit the wicks, and waited. In the meantime, Kiba had sniffed out cans of food. The two of them argued over who needed the greater portion, each arguing in favor of the other.

The front door of this temporary home opened to a kitchen. The floor was of cracked linoleum and the appliances stood against the graying light in mustard yellow. A wobbly table stood in the center with a plastic-sheen tablecloth draped over it. Past a swinging door was a den of sorts with a worn but comfortable wrap around couch. The carpet color ranged from cloudy to midnight gray depending upon what indiscernible stain had settled into it.

Kiba was surprised, but Cheza felt at ease in this homey, lived-in atmosphere. The outmoded style reminded her vaguely of the house she grew up in, from what little she could recall. Kiba was fine with the arrangement himself. He had chosen to remain in worse spots before.

What he recalled the most was rhythm. He had learned when he was young that the rush of the wind, the flow of the streams, and the song of the birds all met each other with perfect accord. He had faith that Rakuen understood harmony.

After he had rolled a can of peas into the den, Kiba froze, his ears flattened to the sides of his head, as though he were straining to hear something. Cheza waited uncertainly.

"What?" she finally said.

"It's here," he explained simply.

No sooner had the words left his mouth than the gray light began to darken. It was a descent into night in fast forward. Cheza instinctively looked to the two candles on the coffee table. Their flickering glow stood out against the blackness all the more as the hour descended and the black all but enveloped them.

Cheza said what Kiba was thinking, "Blue's Pops has been preparing her for this day. She will know what to do for the pack."

"Thank goodness." It came out as a murmur. Kiba's front paw rested on the top of her head. "We really are taken care of, aren't we?"

"Always," Cheza concurred. She drifted into prayers. She thought to press them upon the lap of her Mother. Maybe She could tell Cheza where the red-headed woman and the old lady were now.

The wind slammed against the door. It did not simply suggest the likeness of human voices; both Cheza and Kiba heard familiar voices through the nothingness.

"Cheza? Hey, is that you? If you're there, why don't you let me in?" There was a pause, and then the voice came as more of a sob. "Ah, just don't leave me in this. Please!"

Kiba lifted his head. Cheza gently squeezed his paw. She finally recognized the voice as belonging to a girl from one of the prison camps. She could not even remember her name. "It is not really her," Cheza explained to Kiba. Even if she had survived, the Flower Maiden wondered how she could have wandered through the same set of perils to arrive at a little house like this one. No; it was a deceit of some sort.

And Kiba's moment came, as well. A voice from the outside swirling black called him. "Kiba?" She was also young and female, to Cheza's surprise. "I know it's you. You know, you were wrong. It's wonderful out here!" She laughed, "Come on, join me!" After a beat, she showed disappointment, but not resignation. "You're not going to come? All right, but I'll be wait-ing!"

"A ghost," Kiba finally spoke into the darkness. "The tempter stole the voice of a ghost. He should just let her rest."

Without the candles, the two would have been engulfed in an all-consuming darkness. There were no stars, no moon or moonlight, and the sun did not arrive when it was meant to mitigate their limited vision.

It was challenging monitoring time without light to mark the passing of the days or electricity to push the clocks along. They ate, they slept, and they prayed. With a candle in hand, they occasionally made use of the little adjoining powder room to freshen up.

At one point after she had awakened from what she considered her nightly sleep, she knew she had to speak. From the sound of the pace of his breathing, she knew Kiba was already awake, as well. "Kiba."

"Yes, Cheza."
"We have one more obstacle to go, and then we shall be in Rakuen. The red-headed woman in my dream said that."

Kiba looked away. "There is always another obstacle, another enemy, another hill to climb before Rakuen."

"She did not say what it was," mused Cheza aloud. "Are you coming? We are meant to find this together."

"I ache for it to happen now." He draped his paw across his muzzle.

While true daylight still eluded them, Kiba's figure was slowly growing visible to Cheza. "Then now must almost be here," she reasoned.

It was in this muted, pre-morning light that the two cautiously emerged from the house. The environment outside proved no different except for its total stillness. It was white and expecting. The Flower Maiden knew that they were premature for the change, but that they were supposed to be out and waiting.

Kiba saw the expectation. It was like soil that needed to be watered and tilled before the plants emerged. It was enough to renew hope in him. He put on a brave smile and asked, "Where do we go from here, Flower?"

She walked listlessly though she knew how oddly at peace she was as she carried on through the open plain. Her body could no longer match her spirit in enthusiasm. And while they finally passed a hill, Cheza glanced over in curiosity, and halted nearly in mid-step.

A set of eyes flashed before her. It took her a moment to register that the two glowing orbs were, in fact, eyes. They did not match each other in the slightest; one was a wide, heated yellow, while the other was a smaller, muddled ice blue.

Cheza thought they seemed suspended in midair. And they did look faceless, as if existing only to stare outward.

Kiba had spotted him, too. Glared. Waited.

Cheza finally spoke. "It's the noble from my dream," she confided to Kiba in a whisper.

His figure did finally emerge. Cheza caught the sturdy-yet-sleek frame of another wolf. She could not conceal her surprise and confusion. This was not the man in fine robes who had sought to place her as a gear in his finely constructed plans. The froth from his jowls dripped to the frozen ground; his daggered teeth were bared.

She strove to find some intellect behind the hulking mass of muscle before her. In flashes as she had journeyed with the pack, more had been revealed to her. "What would Harmona say to this?" she challenged. But nothing registered on his menacing face.

It was easier now for Cheza to discern this massive figure. There was nothing spiritually strong, noble, or proud about him, as her companions had been. He had shed the tools that God had given him, as if he found them to be inferior to what he could take. He was not true wolf. He was no longer man. He was a self-made creature.

His emergence at the end of her and Kiba's time of traveling and waiting struck Cheza as ridiculous. Is he here for revenge? What does it matter now?

Her blithe thoughts must have offset her opponent, for his muscles twitched as if struck. Kiba silently moved in front of Cheza.

Her interior monologue continued, Does he not know that I am nothing? Any plans for a Rakuen of his design had found her too late. She felt strengthened as she realized what little he had left.

Emboldened, she called out, "What is it you want? You have taken our family, our friends, our freedom, and even our names. If you want my life, then try and take it. But I have nothing left to give."

Darcia snorted. His teeth were revealed to her in a near smirk. He, too, seemed to be appraising her. You're wrong, he said without making a sound.

Kiba squeezed her hand. He knew Darcia wanted a fight.

After a beat, Darcia said it. Standing perfectly still, he said without moving his mouth, Do you want to know how your parents died?

Kiba snarled. His torso appeared to elongate and he sunk to the ground as he took on his true form. He would not let Dacia toy with his treasured flower.

Delightedly taking the gesture as a challenge, Darcia dove toward Kiba like a thunderstorm enclosing the moonlight. Cheza bowed her head and silently asked God and Mary for goodness to prevail in all things.

Kiba inflicted the first blow. He aimed to tear at Darcia's jugular, but Darcia's reflexes were quick. He pulled away in time for Kiba to land and bite just underneath his rib cage. Once he had gripped abdominal muscle, Kiba would not let go. Darcia shook his opponent, and then swung him again. Finally, exerting his whole self into the act, he snapped Kiba back from him.

Kiba landed on his back, momentarily dazed but unharmed. Seemingly incognizant of his bleeding, Darcia charged again. Kiba gripped below his abdomen, but Darcia broke free and snapped at Kiba's chest. Cheza cried out as if the monster had bitten her.

Suddenly, Darcia halted. He turned to Cheza, panting in a crazed, ravenous way. As her vision blurred and her face became damp, she realized that she was weeping. She stood before him with her hands to her side, her palms facing outward in a gesture of humility. For you, she silently commended to God, and also to remind herself.

Darcia's front legs stepped confidently toward her while his hind legs shuffled. The impact of Kiba's blows was beginning to show on him. Kiba, for his own part, found that only one of his paws would move for him. He gazed across the distance at Cheza, as if to toss her the last of his strength.

Cheza and Kiba heard a clap of thunder. Even as she glanced above, Cheza knew the sky to be clear.

The former Lord Darcia took one more step toward his new prey. Then, a white-hot light crashed on top of him; quickly seeping through him. Cheza realized he had been struck by lightning. She turned her head. The smell was horrific. It was the odor of rotting flesh and charred hair that had unfurled toward her.

When the crackling noise stopped, Cheza looked back. Darcia was not there. Instead, a pile of ash about a foot high stood where he had been. The yellow-sick eyeball that was once the center of her nightmares capped the odd summit of debris.

Presently, a crow swooped down from an exposed tree. With frozen water underneath them, the growth appeared as little more than a very large bush. The crow cawed, plucked the eye from the refuse, and sailed past them to the East.

Cheza did not hesitate to run to Kiba. His pure white fur was coated in thick scarlet liquid. It had coursed down to the hardened snow; an oval stain blooming just beneath him.

Cheza couldn't breathe. She was afraid to touch him, thinking that any motion from her would worsen his pain. Still somehow, Kiba appeared before her as a young man again; his pullover jacket torn and shredded like a hula skirt. He held his arms outward to draw her to himself.

His stronger hand was stroking her hair. "You have to keep going."

"This one-I will carry you."

"No. You keep going."

"Not without you."

"I'm not greater than the Love that made us both. So go. Finish what He put in your hands."

"I will come back for you." As he released her, Cheza still leaned forward long enough to kiss his mouth. Lightheaded from the contact, she found her feet tramping faster than she thought they could through the impacted snow.

After her adrenaline rush, she found fatigue quickly taking over. Her thoughts only came to her in incoherent jumbles. Kiba's blood had stained her cloak, but she did not notice. It occurred to her that she might be in shock.

Even her prayers no longer seemed to know what to say or how to be said.

Is this what You wanted?

Kiba, did you not know that the sacrifice was not needed? We already have One whose Blood opened Paradise…

Finally, to God she confessed, Take it all…all I have. It is all for You…

She had entered a land razed flat. It seemed unremarkable if she had had the power to observe, but above the discord, a word had appeared firm in her mind: Here.

She sunk to her knees. Fatigue was taking over. But she thought something was stirring…

A melodious sound struck. Cheza could not define it. It was alert as a bell or a piano being struck forcefully, but it carried with it order and grace.

The sound tolled again. It resonated throughout the land. It filled her emptiness.

There was dampness across her face. It had started to rain. She wondered about the many feet of ice beneath, but the ground gave way, revealing fresh, plush grass.

She had not seen dawn because of the clouds, but now these formations in the sky wove themselves into gorgeous creations. Their white had a self-contained radiance and the grey spun into sleek silver thread.

They were angels' wings, flapping in rhythm with the sounds around her.

The sky finally cleared. Life was rich and abundant around her in the morning sunlight. She had no point of comparison for this. She lifted her head and watched as a flock of red birds flew past her. She had never seen birds like that before. They had a broad wingspan like a swan's.

In the middle of the East Coast of a certain land lies a valued Kingdom of God. At its center is a tower of white marble and crystal. The people there claim God Himself constructed it. The land is surrounded by cliffs; the base of the region has fertile soil for its people.

Though perhaps the most extraordinary feature of this kingdom from that of its neighbors is the alliance and close bond the people share with wolves. Most of the animals reside in the woods, but come and go through the town as they please. The people are gracious to the wolves, and the wolves respect the people.

By the base of the tower, however, one would often find a white wolf seated, waiting. This one reports on all the land tells him. He greets foreigners before anyone else does; and leads them to the young woman who has organized the land.

The spot where he had once bled is a most interesting sight. Silver-white flowers bloom there at night. They can not be found anywhere else. The locals call them lunar flowers.