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No idea where the idea for the title came from.
It was dusk, and the red sun was falling, falling, falling, toward the west. A bronze wolf, eight feet tall and scarred from head to toe, laid himself down heavily along a slight incline on the eastern side of the river, waiting to watch the sun disappear behind the empty, leafless branches of the Moaning Wood. The colors of the day were already beginning to fade, and he should be finding a place where he could sleep easy, without having to worry about potential threats, but he had caught his meal early that day, his first successful kill with his new bow, and he was pleased. Watching the sun set would be the perfect way to end a perfect day. He had woken up early, and enjoyed the morning mist during his practice. His arrow had found the chest of a hapless hare, and he had eaten well and easily for the first time in a long time. He had spent the day alone, and thought of nothing. It was a perfect day.
Night would descend on him soon, he knew. When that happened, he would go searching for a place that was hard to find, and silent enough to hear any disturbances in the underbrush around him. He would sleep there, and when he did, the dreams would come. Some were about Inferni, and the fact that his rage had hurt children. Most weren't. Most involved the monstrous Sirius cracking the bones in Xander's forearms with his bare hands, or the twisted rituals of the Shadow Priests stringing up his loved ones. Layla...he had no reason to believe she had ever encountered them, but...there, on the fields of their sacrifice...Fenrir, banish these thoughts. He shook the memories from his head. If he was to be plagued by them in sleep, he would not permit them his time during the day. It had been too long since he'd received a full night's undisturbed sleep.
Just enjoy the sunset. Silencing his thoughts, he cleared his mind as the sun fell ever lower. It really was odd how some of the most beautiful things were the most widely available. Everyone could enjoy this vision, it wasn't something any of them could jealously guard, or a commodity they could hoard. It wasn't a kingdom they could fight over. The sedate babble of the river was as a soothing balm to his troubled thoughts, and he watched on in silence.
~The lyrics are from the best song ever written.
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He had outgrown them in a way. The sunsets, and the sunrises especially, no longer invoked any particularly pleasant memories. If anything else, they stirred thoughts of an apocalypse that should have, but had never happened. This evenings dying sun was red though rather than its usual piercing yellow or vibrant orange. Red like roses and blood and his own wicked eyes, though much brighter. A fireball on a crash course towards their wretched planet filled end to end with wretched creatures living out their inevitably miserable lives. Laruku looked away from the sun and continued along the river that had been contaminated with so many dead bodies. He wondered what lands their souls haunted or if any of them ever left for good.
There was another man fast approaching on the horizon, tattered and torn like himself, and deep in a thought he could not read. A stranger, but not a newcomer to the lands; he smelt like something familiar in a way, but Laruku didn't care to think too hard about it. It didn't matter. He could have just kept walking -- continue on down the river without sparing a glance to the wolf. The hybrid had gotten accostumed to avoiding everyone and usually no one bothered to approach him either. Keep on with the status quo then and nothing would disturb anything else.
All the same, words came out of his mouth and his feet stopped a short distance away from the other. That thing will kill this planet some day, he said of the sun. His was not a particularly dark tone of voice, or even very pessimistic. It was utterly void of anything that could be read into and if he had been speaking a languauge the other didn't understand, there would have been no clue whatsoever to what he was saying. Maybe they weren't even words.
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The other canine had approached without much warning, though ever-vigilant, Skoll had been aware of his presence a short while before he came within speaking distance. Slight for a wolf, Skoll guessed that he wasn't full-blooded. Still, race had never been a hang up of his, so he wasn't bothered by this. At the hybrid's words, Skoll nodded, before turning his own amber eyes to meet the other's red ones.
"I've heard that belief before. One legend suggests that the sun will be destroyed, along with the moon, at the end of days. Another, that the sun is a god itself. Six years and a lot of traveling, you pick up that sort of thing." It was obvious that he wasn't a young wolf any longer, but he didn't feel that he had aged poorly. Good thing, too. He wanted to keep his fighting ability as long as possible. He wasn't sure what he would do when his body became too frail for battle. He tilted his head to look side-long at the sun. "In the meantime, it's a pretty sight for old eyes that have seen too much." Looking back to the other, he sat up, human pack still at his hip.
"So, stranger, I haven't seen you around, but you smell like Clouded Tears. The name is Skoll." The introduction, standard procedure. Though his name had been uncomfortably widespread in the last year, he didn't feel any need to hide it. He could take care of himself, and he had too much pride to lay low for the sake of not angering the powers that be, such as they were.
~The lyrics are from the best song ever written.
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Just as suddenly as he had decided to stop and speak, he decided to sit and found himself a seat right where he had been standing. Despite his best intentions, goals to pay more attention to everything he was responsible for were half-hearted at best; motivation was hard to find anyway, and most of him figured that if things had been going on as long as they have already and nothing too horrible had exploded in his face, then maybe not doing anything at all wasn't a bad way to keep things. Then again, that could very well just be a convineint and self-serving excuse. The usual denial was still there, comfortable and easy to reach for, but he could never tell whether or not he was holding it or not.
Science says the sun will burn out and we'll all freeze to death, he replied matter-of-factly, Or else it'll start to implode and pull us all into a gravitational apocalypse. He shrugged. His days of rummaging through libraries were long since past and the curiosity of his youth had been eclipsed by the disinterest of an uncaring cynic. Whatever ended up happening, he would be dead long before it happened, so even look into it or dwell on it? And even if he were to live long enough to see the day, there would be nothing he could do about it (like everything else), so that didn't much matter either. But was the sun beautiful in the meantime? He used to think so.
Phoenix told me about you, he continued instead, not really caring to rebuttal any claims of beauty. Inferni's a load of trouble, hm. It was an unenthused claim, just like everything else he said, but Laruku had no desire on elaborating on his own complicated issues and past with the coyotes. Better to talk about the literal apocalypse than the many, many figurative ones. Laruku, he introduced for himself. Maybe the other would recognize it as the wayward alpha's name. Maybe not. He didn't think that really mattered either.
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Science was a concept that Skoll had little understanding of. While the big werewolf wasn't dumb or of sub-par intelligence, neither was he of unusual acuity or curiosity. His only indication that most myths were not true came from his vast knowledge of just how many there were, and how not all of them could possibly be accurate. In a human society, he might have become a police officer or a fireman, a construction worker or perhaps have joined the army. Old human beliefs held no more weight than any of the wolfish ones he'd learned. What more could be expected of someone with his upbringing? Humans had destroyed themselves, after all, so despite their marvels, he didn't regard them as particularly wise.
"Well, that's odd," he was surprised by Laruku's fore-knowledge of him. He knew that his name had been spread around a bit after his fight with the Lykois, but certainly not in any favorable light. What reason would Phoenix have had for bringing him up? "Well, not so bad if people would keep their children in tow. Still, they've orchestrated an invasion once, with absolutely no repercussions that I've heard tell of, so a load of trouble is an apt surmisal." He didn't know if this wolf had any connection to the little white-furred girl he'd fought to protect, nor if he even knew of her. He didn't even know if Clouded Tears had been made aware of the incident by the little girl.
"Well, Laruku, if he told you about that, it'd be best for me to tell you that I'm not much in that business any more. I can't help but try to stop something evil from happening right in front of me, but I don't see a reason to go out of my way for the people of Bleeding Souls any longer. Despite the children they've murdered and the land they've stolen, there are still people here perfectly happy to live beside Inferni, even defending their actions. I would help if I had the power...but you can't save people from themselves." There was bitterness in his voice. He didn't know why he felt the need to say this to the wolf.
"Tell me, Phoenix must have had a reason to tell you about me. Who are you? A relative of Iskata's?" It was the best guess he could muster. Iskata had told Skoll that he'd saved her daughter, so it followed that the family might hear about him through Iskata or her mate.
~The lyrics are from the best song ever written.
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Science, despite his waning interest in it, was one of the few things he believed in, if not the only thing. It had been ambition that had destroyed the humans after all and he no longer really faulted them on that -- it was not stupidity or even ignorance really, just a want and need to become better than nature had made them. Maybe it had been a silly and selfish want, but everyone wanted to be better, right? There was no shame in not being satisfied with what you drew out of the lottery. And so he believed in the words that spoke of years of research and a quest for knowledge, that need once again, to know more than what they were given to start with. Wolves had become too much like the humans now and he believed that it would be the same ambition that would kill them in the end, if the sun didn't beat them to it.
Laruku didn't know much about Inferni's beef with Syemv; he didn't know much about whatever agreement Segodi had made with their original leader, but it was predictable that Kaena disagreed with it and understandable to some extent that she would want to take back her beach. But it was more or less a moot point now that Syemv had dwindled away to nothing; any reprecussions that might have come had the pack remained strong were out of the question now. None of the other packs wanted to start a fight over something that didn't matter anymore.
The hybrid was also inclined to disagree with, or even laugh at, the implication that there was anything really "evil" in the world. Despicable things, maybe, less-than-saintly things, maybe, but evil carried too absolute of a definition for him to invest much in it anymore. Just as he had once not thought much of shades of grey, he had turned to not believe much in the blacks or whites. But the scarred male only shrugged; nothing worked him up much anymore and he didn't want an argument.
Phoenix just mentioned he almost started a war with Inferni s'all, he answered simply, There isn't much to help though. What would you do, anyway? No matter how you spin it, any action taken against them would just be more reason for them to hate wolves. Laruku hadn't heard Inferni's side of the story, mostly because he wasn't welcomed to ask, but he imagined that they had justifications for all of their actions, just like everyone else. Those were opinions and beliefs that no amount of arguing could change and no matter how right any one person believed they were, their opponent would think the same of themselves.
Iskata's my cousin, he continued, My mother was her father's sister. Though from what Ceres had told him, they hadn't gotten along at all, which was just as well, because he doubted that there had ever really been a pleasant moment between Phoenix's mate and himself. But if Skoll assumed that that was the only reason Phoenix had to come to him, then it was obvious that the loner didn't know he was an unfortunate leader. He found he preferred it that way.
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No idea what Laruku's gonna think. Skoll's opinionated?
The bronze wolf gave the alpha of Clouded Tears a sidelong look in response to his question. What would he do? He thought that was obvious...what does anyone do when a group of people proves too volatile to live beside? They pick up and move, or they take whatever action necessary to stop the aggression. That was how he saw it, anyway. What to do about people slaughtering children on other people's territory was very obvious, in his view. While this was certainly how some of the coyotes viewed him, he understood his own motivations, and despite all they'd said, he hadn't sparked the violence that day. There was not an actual dividing line drawn through the sand either, he could arguably have been on their land, or just outside it. The fact was, it sounded better to claim that their violence was sanctioned by laws of the land, even if they readily broke those laws themselves.
"Take them," he shrugged. "If the wolves want the unprovoked violence to stop, tell Inferni that it's lands are being taken. Those that stay to fight are the loyal ones, which you then slaughter or drive into the sea. It's brutal, but those are the rules they want to play by, force rather than diplomacy, so I say play by them. They'll hate wolves all they want, playing nice won't stop them from that, it didn't before, and the blood of innocents was the price for harboring their presence." He shook his head, remembering Luka and Segodi, Layla, and now Matrix.
"The clan has included some, possibly many, that do not deserve such a fate, but in the end, each alpha is responsible for his own people first and foremost, the fate of the innocent Infernians should only be considered after the threat their clan poses is removed. There are wolves enough in the land to crush Inferni, or at least the Lykoi regime that encourages this bloodthirsty behavior. Because they choose not to, it is largely their own fault that they have suffered at the pleasures of the coyotes. Inferni has gotten away with that which the wolves have allowed to happen. Bleeding Souls has had the ability to stop them, and chooses not to. If no one here is willing to do something, there's no reason for me to get in the way of this twisted balance."
He looked off into the sunset. No one here really understood war, it seemed to him. There were a few who were willing to fight for what they believed in, for the lives of their friends and loved ones, but not many, no where near enough. They had forgotten quickly the travesty of the coyote queen whetting her thirst with the blood of Aremys puppies. What had happened in this part of the world that the coyotes had so much more spirit to fight for what they believed than the wolves did? The idea of a band of coyotes going head to head with a group of wolves on four legs was laughable everywhere else he had been. Wolves were significantly larger, even than the hybrids, it was suicide. Yet here...the wolves were so docile, that it had not only become feasible, it had become reality. Inferni's bloodlust, though not constant, was the law of the land.
"Maybe I'm just in the wrong part of the world, Laruku. Maybe I've seen too much in my years to tolerate those who are unwilling to fight." Certainly he did not expect to be understood by this wolf. For all he knew, he would be horrified by what he had just heard. It wouldn't be the first time.
~The lyrics are from the best song ever written.
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lol, Laruku is too much of a nihlist to care! 
Laruku did not believe in ideals. As such, there were no lines dividing what was acceptable and what wasn't. The world was made entirely of grey areas that people carved out and judged on their own. Everything was subjective. No one was ever right because someone would always think different. There was no ultimate truth to decide things and unanimous agreement was impossible. By that philosophy, there was no universally agreed definition of "too volatie" or "unprovoked." It was impossible also, to guess what rules they wanted to play by, because forcing reality to conform to thoughts only added to the hypocricy and repetitiveness of their conflict and not even the telepaths among them could read minds accurately enough to find a solution.
The value of innocent lives was also up for scrutiny -- how could anyone say when they should be considered at all? Why was one scenario more important than another? He found it laughable in many aspects, the rigidness of morals and how some people preached them so as long as it was convenient. Violence could always be justified and as long as they were "right," it was okay; it, of course, didn't matter that anyone they fought against could also be "right" and thus, none deserved any more or less than the other. Each believed in themselves and nothing would ever be aligned and seen on the same level. It was all meaningless on the grand scale. They fought over and because of abstract concepts that only meant anything to the person thinking them. It was funny.
You probably are, the hybrid shrugged simply. I don't know what kind of ideal place you've come from though. Nothing follows any sort of rule here. You kill them all and they'll crawl out of the crevices like ants, their children will. Do people stay dead where you're from? They don't stay dead here. Idle hands picked up a clump of snow and passed it back and forth between one another, packing it together. But yeah, obviously the people here aren't bothered enough to do anything, so I don't really see why you're worked up by it. Why're you here anyway, if this place disagrees with you so much?
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The bronze wolf frowned at the other wolf's words. If any true wars had taken place in Bleeding Souls, he had never heard of them. There were skirmishes, and Inferni had invaded another pack once, but nothing on the scale of a war had ever really taken place. Cradle murders, solitary muggings and murders of individuals perhaps, but the problems of this place emerged because it seemed too civilized. No one was willing to get worked up enough to do anything en masse. Enough dying had not taken place to support Laruku's claim that killing didn't work, at least in his mind. The other wolf may have heard stories that he was unaware of, though. Skoll had only been here three years, but all of his lore of this place claim from personal experience and the year or two before his appearance as described by VoidFane.
"I doubt you'd think it was ideal if you lived there," he said flatly. "We had to work hard to feed ourselves, packs couldn't be more than six to eight members strong for fear of extinguishing prey populations. Six to eight wolves aren't hard to kill with a few determined people." He went silent for a few moments.
"As for larger groups, I've seen that, too. They're usually driven by one or two ambitious individuals, who you kill in battle to break the back of the group. The rest aren't dead, but their threat falls significantly. If you get rid of all of the volatile ones, the followers in the group end up attached to someone who isn't so bad, and you can leave them alone at that point. Supposing they've still got some fire, they're usually smart enough to weigh their chances and back off. After all, you killed the strongest and fiercest in their group, the ones they respected enough to be their leaders. If you go head to head with someone they regard as more formidable than themselves and win, they have no confidence that they can win, and their group leaves your group alone." He continued looking off into the sunset.
"Now, sometimes you get someone who can step into the pawprints of the old leader. That's not too rare. What is rare is for that person to decide that they can succeed where their predecessor failed, and convince everyone else of the same thing. If that happens, you crush them again, and slaughter them to the last." His eyes had grown hard through his explanation, though he was still looking out, rather than at Laruku. Explaining war and death was something he had done before, but the alpha's second question was not something he had ever thought he'd need to answer to anyone other than himself.
"As to your other question...I'm not sure. I traveled for so long, I thought that I would wander throughout my life. My great grandfather lived in the pack called Storm, and he felt that he owed them a debt, which he asked me to repay. I have done so, but I do not want to leave. In my years of repayment, I've grown attached to this place."
~The lyrics are from the best song ever written.
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Maybe he was the zombie idealist in him that scoffed at the other's words -- the pretentious and self-justified solution that said killing could be stopped with more killing. The inevitable failure of a strategy said to just kill everyone who disagreed and then there would be no one left, right? But there would always be more. Always. Even if the angry children of the slaughtered were to join their parents in the grave, the winning side would schism. There would always be someone who disagreed with how things had been carried out, the pacifist that said that what they had done was wrong. They would dissent and then what? Stir trouble, maybe, and maybe that would get them killed. Always, always, kill the nonbeliever. But then a friend of the recently deceased would start to think again and so on.
Survival of the most violent it would become. Dissent! Be killed! Be killed! Can't have the likes of you, believing something else, believing that you have a right to kill -- you can't believe that because only I have that right and I shall use it to kill you! Useless, circular, self-serving logic. Only one person is right; only I am right. Years ago, Laruku would have been happy to argue the point and he would have been bold and tactless enough to laugh in the other's face for their conflicting beliefs and philosophies. Years ago, and yet. The biting sarcasm found itself on the tip of his tongue and the quiet arrogance in the back of his mind once again.
He wanted to say, And that works, does it? Kill them all off and how long does that peace last? Am I to assume you've only been in one war then? Because certainly, if it works to just kill off the opposition, then everything would be wonderful for the rest of forever, right? He wanted to challenge the idea and crush it to the ground. He wanted to start a fight over the concept of the fight itself. But just as quickly as the impulse came, it was gone again and the headache set in from the crevices of his skull where the laughter echoed and he reminded himself that ultimately, it didn't matter here because whatever Skoll's beliefs were, he was only one wolf here, and unless he infected a good number of others with the same idea, then nothing would change. And it didn't matter.
So Laruku shrugged his scarred shoulders and pulled a cigarette and match out of seemingly no where. He lit up and crushed the flame between his fingers before tossing the stick away. At some point, you become just them. You kill because you feel threatened. They probably kill for the same reason. Who's really right in the end? The one who comes out alive, right? A rhetorical question. He didn't really want an answer because he already knew what he thought. He exhaled a stream of smoke and obscured for a moment the setting sun. I used to want to leave here, he continued, But I don't have anywhere else to go and don't really care that much anymore.
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Another reply or two, maybe, and we wrap it up?
Skoll would have chuckled at the other wolf's outrage, if only half-heartedly. He had no idea what was going on in the other wolf's head, but he'd been confronted by those who thought similarly. The wolf pack that had villified him and his comrades for ridding them of the wolf-sacrificing cult next door, a cult that had taken their own members as sacrifices, were the same way. He knew that it was a flaw of the very intelligent. Give a wolf higher-than-average intelligence, and he or she will become arrogant, and think that said intelligence will save the world. Most of those who fit that description had hailed from one pack in particular that he'd met long ago, who did their best to pass human knowledge to their children through books and reading. They didn't believe that conventional wisdom held any validity, that their own intelligence was superior to tradition they didn't agree with in every way.
Skoll knew war, but only in the wolven sense. He had participated in three wars, but none of them could have involved more than one to three hundred combatants, and most of the battles and skirmishes he'd participated in or heard about had been far smaller than that. It would have made him curious to know that Laruku would have been right about human war: when there are tens of thousands, or even millions, of angry individuals involved, the chance of a violent cycle is almost imminent. Yet even human history was filled with small groups being consumed or devastated by larger ones, and never getting any sort of retribution, never achieving anything in their dissention other than bearing a grudge that would last a few generations, and then probably dissipate, or manifest itself far longer as a lingering resentment or hatred, but never amount to anything for the group's lack of power.
It was good, when considering this, that Skoll did not dare to hope of an ideal world. One could not stop the self-interest and imbalance in wolven society. When someone made a habit of murdering for fun, when one began sacrificing other people for their beliefs, when one began pushing people off of food sources for their own gain, people needed to take action, or they needed to run away from the situation. Skoll had done his best so that good wolves, those who did not make a habit of killing off their neighbors, didn't have to leave everytime a more aggressive group moved in next door.
"Not entirely, but there is certainly a danger," he said heavily. "I have seen power corrupt individuals with frightening speed, and it's true that many warriors like myself just become bullies for the powers that be, taking the easy way out instead of standing up for anything. They are shameful, but I do not think I have fallen so far, and hope never to do so." He shook his head slowly. "Perhaps they are threatened, but if they slaughtered your children for doing nothing at all, would you sit still and let it happen, rationalize a reason why your child deserved it so that you could sit back and ignore the problem?" The question was rhetorical, he imagined that Laruku wouldn't take it sitting down, and if he would, well...Skoll wasn't sure he wanted to know that.
"The one Gabriel's brother attacked had barely just approached the border when he came after her, no words or threats, just flashing teeth." He paused after that, taking in the sunset's dying light as it inched nearer and nearer to being completely eclipsed by the horizon. He leaned forward and rose, bracing his hands on his knees as he did so. "The sun is almost down, and I need to find a place to sleep tonight. Big problem with being a loner, no idea where I'm going to decide to lay down most nights. I imagine that you probably need to be headed back to Clouded Tears, yourself?"
~The lyrics are from the best song ever written.
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I say done? Sorry this is so darn short.
They were impossible topics. Good and evil. The "right" side of war, of killing. It didn't matter. In the long run, very little changed and it was all they could do to save themselves. Be selfish because it kept you alive. If it wasn't in the wolves' personal interest to oust Inferni, then there was nothing to be done. Those that the coyotes had wronged had either already moved on or scattered to other reaches of the planet, so what was the point of fighting them now? Laruku didn't believe in superheroes or prime examples of good in the world because every little thing was subjective. He didn't believe in an absolute, or even universally accepted, guideline for how someone should act. Laws would affect those they governed, but no laws governed them all. Morals were only what each individual came up for themselves. They were an anarchy and they would live like they were.
If they killed my kid, it'd be my problem. If they kill someone else's kid, their problem. No point in being a hero in this place, Skoll, but you already know that. Laruku shrugged, having already accepted their differing views and the fact that it was unlikely that either would be persuaded to change. So he rose also, tossed the cigarette into the river, and turned. Yeah. See y'round. Nothing ever changed and nothing ever would. At least, not until the day the sun imploded or exploded or whatever it would do that would kill them all.
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