He had grown somehow.
He was not shivering in his den.
He should be dead.
He should not be able to stand against the frozen deer.
He should not be able to stand near the outsider thing.
He should be dead.
Instead, he was standing.
He was standing in service to the mountain.
For a moment, the wolf was stunned into stillness. Then he felt the outsider’s mind rumbling toward the not-man like a landslide. Trees tilting. Ground slipping like an ice flow.
Whatever else he was, the not-man was a pup and he had picked a fight with a crystal wight.
He would not fight alone.
The wolf sprang.
As he ran, he lent his thoughts to the not-man. It shouldn’t have been easy, but it was.
Easy as falling.
He closed the distance, mind and body, and the deer fled with its customary insult to physical customs of mass and motion.
But he had gotten closer this time.
Closer than ever before.
This was a change.
A chip in the stalemate.
“Well. It got away,” the not-man said.
Wonder upon wonders it was standing and speaking.
The wolf spoke back.
When was the last time he had a real conversation? When his mother was still in the shallows? When the scimitar cats told grim jokes and crimsoned the snow with their hunts?
A sound.
An ambush.
A tide of nothing.
Green and the horned wolf sat in a cool autumn nowhere and faced each other. The silence was a sheet of glass, a sonnet of smooth water, a deep pond in windless night.
Green touched the quiet first.
“I just lived your memory.”
The wolf studied the small creature. He looked shaken. He looked stubbornly awake, despite what it must be costing him.
