Our lives were full, our conversations invigorating, our relationship as deep as the ravines that shaped the world.
In the years that followed, I did my best to explain my pantheon, but she had no need for categorizing enemies and adversaries. My kingdom and its wars were a far-off nothing, irrelevant given that not even the ghostly shape of my legion had laid its smoke upon the ice. She didn’t need warding or protection from succubi and heavenly hosts out here.
I was from elsewhere, I was other, and that was all that mattered.
We spoke of time and soul and death.
I told her stories that she said were decidedly magical and fantastical. And we looked at the stars.Fuck, did we look at the stars.
She knew the Qawiaraq names for every constellation and recited the rich, passionate tales behind them. We’d wander as far from the village as we could so everyone would perceive a wolf and a woman—never the man he’d become—as they spent their nights on the ice as unlikely companions who stared at the stars.
And life went on.
Gods above and below, it was alife.
I experienced true, profound joy.
There was music. There was dancing and art and community, the likes of which I’d never truly experienced. I felt the days—trulyfelt them. The sun rose, it set, and sometimes in the long months, it would stay up all night or stay gone for months. My explanations of rocks and their tilts were boring, and rejected on the grounds of being uninteresting, which I found utterly delightful.
I loved her more now than I had in her bed in Greece, as if each day with her was more wonderful, more beautiful, more absurdly precious than anything the immortal realms might deign to craft, despite the ice and snow and winters.
This was what it meant to be alive.
Her bones began to creak, her hair turned silver, her skin sagged. No matter what I did to ensure she never knew pain, I felt the mortal clock ticking with every second that passed.
While few made it to her age in the wandering tribes on the ice, Yuka had no aches, no qualms, nothing that might trouble a human.
The woman and her wolf wrote their story until age eighty, one hundred, and by one hundred and twelve, my healing touch no longer sufficed.
I had no god to pray to as I watched the inevitable approach. There was no one to beg. I’d known loss before, but I was less prepared than ever.
Her cells wore off more quickly than I could fix. Her muscles fought me at every step. She kept her hand on my snout all day and I remained a wolf at night so she might lean against me, never bothered with the presence of a man unless we had sat for intentional conversation.
“What did you call me?” she asked one night. “In the other lives, that is.”
I was the age I’d been the night I emerged from the neck of her tent. Holding my perfect, elderly human against the bed of furs, I hadn’t aged while time had weathered her face. I stroked her hair, kissing her scalp as I breathed in the fresh scent of her soul.
“You were Shala in the first life,” I said quietly, as if telling her a bedtime story. “You were Eleni in the next. And that’s when you asked me not to call you by your mortal names.”
The cavernous lines around Yuka’s face deepened. Her eyes closed. “What were you to call me instead?”
It was the fourth time I experienced the situation in my endless existence: I wanted to cry.
“We didn’t get the chance to pick a name, though there’s only one that makes sense to me.”
Her breathing slowed as she began to drift to sleep. “Mmm?”
“No matter who, or where, or what, you are my only human. To me, you are Love.”
The late summer sun had set on her one-hundred and thirteenth birthday before she’d turned to ask me a question. She didn’thave time to ask before I saw the slip of her spirit. I was in a man’s body in an instant, catching her, holding her body and soul as I begged her with silent, determined eyes to stay on this earth.
“Not yet,” I insisted. “We have another summer. Give me one more year.”
“My wolf, my star…”
I blinked back the threat of tears.
“Yuka, please?—”
