Chapter 21 A Change on the Wind
In the autumn of the present, a year after Green went through the Hole in Nothing, a mile beneath the forest, Catskill smelled a shift in the world. It was an air thing. A tree matter. A ripple from far, far above.
May it wait until the spring?
He posed the question to the mountain.
The responding silence said no.
He licked at nothing in frustration.
An under-saint was on the move, assembling itself, roaming near the borders of the lower webworks.
It was flirting with the idea of entering Catskill’s territory to hunt for warm blood.
He could feel the compressed sediment of the creature’s mind growing a fault line, building up tension. A quake was imminent.
Perhaps it was not a proper wish, but he wanted it to come. He was grateful for the wholesomeness of the task. His duty was clear. It was deliciously straightforward.
The surface call bit his snout, the idea of leaving his cat and mouse game with the giant blasphemy, climbing back up to the bedrock, the sandstone, the aquifers that smelled of air and seas, the too-soft clay and soil.
The year had been odd.
Last autumn gripped his thoughts with unusual ferocity, constantly drawing his mind away from the now, which was the seat of his power.
The outsider. The glass fawn. The not-man Green. Sudden kin. Here and gone like bloodroot in April.
It was a unique victory and a unique defeat.
And somehow, impossibly distant, he could still feel his lost packmate. The feeling came and went. Each time, he reached for the sensation, offering a piece of himself, but couldn’t quite hold it steady. In a way, the uncertainty of it was more galling than an outright loss.
Far above, autumn had returned to the mountains. He had hoped to stay down deep for the whole season. Let the surface have its seasons. He did not need them.
In winter and spring, he visited Green’s old den.
He spoke to Green’s seedling oak. The tiny tree wore his scent.
He brought good earth to her roots and gave her his blessing.
Now, he wanted to hunt, to be washed clean of memory by the weight of the mountains, to be a stranger to the sky until the snows fell again.
The dark precipice at the deepest point of his universe called to him whenever his mind turned toward mourning. That call was dangerous. He wanted to drink in the silence of stone and let it heal him.
It didn’t matter what he wanted.
Most of all, like his mother before him, he wanted to serve the mountains.
He felt the under-saint’s tendrils lazily brushing the stone beneath his paws. He had angled for the perfect ambush for a month.
A careful trap. Wasted.
He growled and felt the saint convulse and slip back into smoke and hideous potential, retreating into abstraction like a groundhog diving for its burrow.
It would return. It had something to prove.
Let it try.
The wolf bared his teeth, then swung the plane of his perception vertically, beginning the journey skyward, running through stone that welcomed his passing.
During his ascent, he tried to focus on the new smell.
What was the change he sensed?
The mountain distrusted unexpected shifts.
So did he.
Yet, the scent did not register as anger.
Not hunger.
Not panic.
Not an invader.
Not an injury.
It was the vibration of an approaching…what?
A parallel world. A mirror place. A point of intersection thinning to permeability.
It was a prickle on his skin, the mountain’s skin.
Such sensations could presage an unwelcome coming. A threat to solve.
A flux worm or the Fickle Seamstress.
So why did this feel different?
Up through the stone, the hollows, the stacked slate, the clear water, the root thickets, the living soil.
He rose from the earth into the heartwood of autumn, crisp and electric.
The world of air and light stood on the border of sleep, where stubborn wakefulness feels the fullness of its power.
Creatures that rejected the dormancy of the cold, the dead months, walked the world like orphans left behind by the living warmth.
The sun was setting and the wind swam with a million spent leaves on their pilgrimage back to becoming soil. Catskill stood and raised his muzzle, the red horizon muddying the pale bone of his skull. The smell was clearer here.
A change.
An arrival.
Something was coming, then it was there.
Recognition sprouted ears on his head and stood them at attention.
A latch clicked in the wolf’s mind and he tensed.
He was not alone.
A voice spoke inside him.
A voice familiar, yet different.