Storm Of The White Wolf

All the ideas that I had, all the memories pulsing out from my core were like a distress signal reaching for the Big Other. I had come un-tethered and was drifting out in the storm of the white wolf. The city was rubbing against my skin, demanding that I let it back in. As much as I might have wanted it, I continued to resist, caressing with one hand and slapping with the other.

Whatever I had been was gone. Seven years of cellular rejuvenation had left me sparkling and new. Food made me heavy. What I craved was sunshine, I wanted it in my darkest hungriest caves. A little bird pulled grasses from the crack in the sidewalk and flew away as I approached, adding it to her nest. I ran away down the street, wind in my face, just barely cool enough to temper the warmth of that yellow star I so yearned for.

A bicycle lay abandoned by the side of the path and a young man was seated beneath the mother tree whose roots jutted out of the embankment like long talons. He smiled as I passed. I ran. Whatever I had been was gone. Assuming that I would stop and speak, who would be speaking? The cells singing for life and sun and run, run, run? The language coiled round my mind? Some third party seeking brokerage through them both?

I had stood and looked close at the tanned muscular bodies ahead of me, had thought that I could almost feel what it was to be them, that if I reached I would become one of them and never know I had been another. Suddenly I felt my tall pale soft body and knew that it had already happened before. That I was within the most recently inhabited other. I was the stranger I longed to experience.

At the feast we dined on the larvae of some invertebrate species and drank fermented spirits from slender stemmed goblets round as grapefruits. We had been made aeons ago to travel space and time in the service of our masters the Illuri. They traveled through us without ever leaving their crystal palace at Theruex. Slowly we forgot them.

Our DNA mutated in response to the radiation of the yellow star, changing the design synthetically manufactured long ago in a system far from recollection. We had been designed to change many times, to adapt, to thrive, to snake our way through the universe on their behalf, and yet we had come to a place where origin was so distant we could no longer imagine it. Still further we would travel and change.

There had been a viral invasion at one point after which we could not remember whether we were the descendants of this infection, or whether we had descended from the yellow star, or the shadowy Illuri inhabiting our dreams. All these factors pulled us in different directions from within. We would run. Having come un-tethered we drifted in the storm of the white wolf. Whatever we had been was gone. Seven by seven had left us sparkling and new, hungry for the heat of a yellow star.