Otherwheres...

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

The Aetherial was colder than Andraste remembered. The air was thin and tore at her lungs, and the wind seemed to cry like the banshee. Her claws, which had been sharp when she set out, were broken in places, and now scratched pathetically along the path that she walked.

The old wolf ached.

She was growing old, she realized. This summer she had seen one of her children die; an old wolf, with a life well lived. She kept going. Her body did not seem overly old. Her fur was still rich and black. Her body seemed supple and strong, but inside she was old. She had seen more than a wolf should, and yet there was no rest for her.

The wind kept tearing at Andraste. Now there were sharp and bitter flakes of snow in it, harsher by far up above the Penumbra. The Aetherial Realm was never a friendly place, and since the fall of Rorg it was harsher than she ever could have imagined.

But she kept going.

Behind her was nothing she cared to go back to.

She had taken part in the attack on Fort William. Her Alpha had commanded her, and Andraste had never disobeyed an order from her Alpha. She had fought in the streets, and torn apart the small and pink monkey creatures that had flapped about between her claws. She had participated in the rituals which had followed.

She had not expected the nightmares that had followed.

"Too old...too human..." she grumbled to herself as she walked. "Stupid monkey worries..."

The monkey worries, however, would not leave her. The lupus way was simple - purge, cleanse, purify. The monkey worries in her brain kept nagging at her.

Something in this was wrong. The visions, the signs, the portents...

The wind screamed its threats in Andraste's ears. She kept going.

She knew her prophecy. Something had changed. It had changed first when the creature Tolly came back from Flux. He had come back bright with the light of the sun in his eyes, carrying a shard of Helios Himself inside him. For the first time since the legends were made, Helios had stepped on the Earth, and the Earth had shuddered.

Something more had changed then as well, although Andraste was not sure what it was. A shift beneath her feet, perhaps? A change in a balance of power too big for her to comprehend? But it had changed.

Still, the matter had been resolved. Tolly had gone to Helios himself, and been cast out as a human kinfolk, no more.

Or had it been?

"If the time has come for Sun-God - Sun Himself - to walk on Earth, why did we think we could say "no thank you?"" Andraste muttered to herself. "Stupid, arrogant Garou! So what if Tolly doesn't want to be His representative? He wants to walk on the Earth. Doesn't know, or doesn't care that he will burn us..."

She hunched her shoulders up, and forced herself on.

"Thaddeus," she snarled.

She had felt his presence as well, and then there had been that strange and chilling night, when she had dreamed of a thousand mirrors breaking to the sound of a Goddess screaming in rage. She had woken with cuts across her body, and a horrible sense of cold.

Something had changed again.

She had heard whispers from Edinburgh of other and stranger things happening there. One who had been a vampire once, and she remembered the sense of unearthly cold that had swept across her. One who had once been Khara-Cat.

She did not know how this all came together. She only knew that she had heard Luna screaming in the night, and then they had come.

Were they the children of Luna? Was this how she tried to defend her Earth against the heavy stepping children of Helios? Why did they take these strange forms?

Andraste had tried to ask these questions on earth. Visions and dreams had come to her.

She had seen the world, held aloft in a cat's cradle. She had seen the hands which held the strings - cold, warm, bright, crystal and ichorous. Five hands. She had seen the hands shifting, moving, and the earth trembling.

She did not know what this meant.

She did not know what any of it meant.

And she needed to find out.

So she was on the road, walking on bleeding paws, and she would not come home until she had some answers. Behind her was only blood and chaos. She was not afraid of dying anymore. She was an old wolf and had lived many years more than should rightfully have been hers. She had had cubs, and some of them had Changed. She had gained the rank of Elder. She had accomplished almost everything she had wanted.

Almost everything.

She had never met her goddess.

"I will have answers," she said, grimly, and kept walking on into the rising storm.