The she-wolf knew exactly the scent to follow to get back on the trail of the shadows. The stench still burned in her sinuses, even after so many days, so many other scents— for a nose like that, there was nothing that could cover it up or blur its memory, not for a long while, still. The woman walked alongside the she-wolf as the days went on, and the path was much more direct than it had been before, straighter, more focused. They were moving only in the days, only when they weren’t pausing to hunt or eat or drink or soak or rest their legs, carve fresh arrows, tend to the she-wolf’s wound closing wound— and the rest of the time they were moving only as fast as the she-wolf’s wound allowed, a respectable trot, but not nearly so fast as the woman could run with the magic of her belt.
Even so, they would catch up to the shadows. The woman was sure of it, now. It was just a matter of patience and time. It was inevitable.
For days, weeks, nearly a month, they carried on through the wilderness. They crossed rivers, passed through deep valleys between hills. They slipped silently through forests, and sauntered with determination around the edges of the ponds and lakes.
One afternoon, the she-wolf’s nose twitched— something on the air, something nearby, coming nearer. Something, something was coming. An instant later, it hit the woman’s sharp nostrils, too. It was not the sour stench of the shadows. It was something different. Salty. The smell of sweat and hair. Something wild. The woman and the she-wolf said everything to each other with a single glance, back and forth, and then silent in agreement they scattered, the woman shuffling quickly up into the treetops, her preferred perch, and the she-wolf circling around to the back of a mighty trunk. The two of them stayed still there, in their spots, waiting— the she-wolf ready to leap out and pounce with her fangs and claws, the woman ready to let loose an arrow— her bow was already off her belt, tied snugly to her wrist, already nocked, the string already pulled back tight, straining.
They waited. They waited. After a moment, they began to hear whatever thing it was that was approaching— whatever things. It was more than one, more than one set of footsteps falling on the day-dried leaves. More than one voice, chatting back and forth.
“I nearly had that one, I tell you.”
“Tell me all you like with that mouth of yours, but I was there, just the same as you were, not twenty minutes ago, and these eyes of mine tell me something entirely different. You weren’t even close.”
People?—humans? Their voices were gruff and deep. Men. Four men?— four pairs of feet, plodding the soil. But still, just two voices.
“Your eyes are liars, and you should punish them for it. Take them out with spoons. Put them in a soup— and at least then you’ll have some meat to show for all your messing about today. Call yourself a ‘hunter’ because you hunt, sure, hunters hunt, but I’d say that hunters have to actually catch things too if they want to honestly call themselves that.”
“I could drain the sea and fill it instead with all the things that you’d say and it would overflow twice-and-a-half. Want to know why you never see me catch anything? You never stop talking, never, not even once, not even for an instant, not even when I have the damned doe square in my sights, arrowhead straight for its throat, ten feet away and you’re still just talking and talking and talking, spook it off with all your telling me how badly my shot is going to miss it.”
“I could drain the sea and fill it instead with your excuses, and—“
“Anything. Anything for you to just shut up. Name it.”
Louder rustling— the voices were coming closer, closer— and then, there they were, stepping into plain view. One pair of voices. Four pairs of feet. Two centaurs.
The woman had seen centaurs before up on the mountainside when she was younger, once, three of them. Those ones had been very much like these ones, when they’d come wandering through— tall as a horse, long as a horse, with the four legs, four hooved feet, and the swishing tail of a horse, lower bodies sturdy and strong with a beautiful chestnut coat— but where a horse’s neck would be started the torso of a man— stomach, ribs, shoulders, two arms, a head. Curly black hair along the sternum. A heavy beard. The ones that had come to the mountainside had been respectful, if a bit loud. They had greeted the woman, then a girl, they had admired her moonshining hair and eyes, they had complimented her skill with the bow and marveled at the speed of her running, at her sure-footedness. They had joined her on a hunt and scored two beautiful bucks, split between the four of them. They had paid their respects to the woman, to the old she-bear, to the Half Moon above, and then they had gone on their way. They hadn’t caused any sort of trouble. The woman relaxed. She loosened the string of her bow, returned the arrow to its quiver for now. She dropped down from the trees with a smile and a wave.
“Hello!” she called. She apologized for startling them like that. She told them her name and asked for theirs.
The centaur on the left, with the darker coat and the longer hair upon his head and face, he nodded a slow nod, thoughtful. “‘Balancing the Scales’,” he murmured, the meaning of the woman’s name. “An interesting thing to be called. I am Rhoecus.”
“And I am Hylaios,” said the other, with the finer tail and the leaner forelegs, the younger face. He studied her carefully.
The she-wolf had not yet emerged from behind her tree-trunk. She stayed back, out of sight, cautious and quiet until the woman called her out. “There is nothing to fear!” she called to the she-wolf. “I have met others of their kind before, and they were nothing but friendly! Come out, let yourself be seen, and see for yourself that all is well!”
“Your hair… your eyes…” continued Hylaios, “…indeed, others of our kind have met you before, up on the side of the highest mountain in these parts, I remember. They have spoken stories of you. You are the Half Moon’s daughter.”
Rhoecus shifted slightly on his back hooves, hearing this, and realizing that yes, Hylaios was right, this was her— he had heard stories, too, of a young girl with hair and eyes of pure moonlight, who could run as fast as a moonbeam and aim a bow just as well as the Goddess of the Hunt Herself. Surely, it could be no other than this woman now before him. He could tell just as well by the way she spoke. She spoke as the Half Moon spoke.
She scowled, hearing herself and the Half Moon linked like that— that cord between them was broken, now, as if it had never been at all— it was like calling a fish the daughter of a badger. “Things have changed,” she told the centaurs, and it was true, they had. She had changed them herself. She’d had to. Things couldn’t have stayed as they’d been. “I am the daughter of the old she-bear, scattered across the heavens. She is my mother, and I am her daughter, a daughter of the stars.”
It came out truer than she meant it, and when she heard it, she realized for herself, all at once, how true it really was. She was a daughter of the dead stars. The living tree of death planted inside her sated itself on blood and starlight.
The centaurs exchanged a glance. They had heard other stories about the woman as well, lately. News was murmuring all around about the Half Moon and Her daughter and the shadow passing through— what the woman had done that night, turning and drawing her bow on the same mother who had gifted it to her. All the creatures of that mountainside had borne witness, after all, all of them had been called to stop her vengeance-maddened charge after the shadow hunter, and so all of them had seen what she had done. It was a shocking thing, she had done. It was a chilling thing, and not a single one of them would ever forget seeing it, and each and every last one of them had been spreading the news of it to everyone they’d met who hadn’t been there, who hadn’t seen it happen for themselves. It was desperate, they way they’d been telling it, they’d been desperate to tell it, each and every last one of them, as though telling what they had witnessed would somehow take the awful scene out of them and put it somewhere else, where they wouldn’t have to carry it around anymore.
“You are the daughter of the stars, sure enough,” said Rhoecus, finally, coming to a wordless decision with his companion. “That much is plain and clear.”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
It pleased the woman to hear it. She noticed that the she-wolf still hadn’t come out, she was still waiting, cautious, behind the tree-trunk, and so she called again to her friend to come out, don’t be so stubborn. The she-wolf hesitated a moment, trembling the soul of the world, and then she did as she’d been told, stepping out from behind the tree-trunk into open view. She walked gradually, almost in resentment of her own footsteps. She sidled around the sunbeams cutting between the trees, she stuck to the shade however she could. She was still shy, it seemed, still feeling an eerie discontent from her wound, in spite of how well it was healing. But out she came, just as the woman had told her. “Isn’t she beautiful? With her death-black tail, and her silver fur?” Insisted the woman. “She has become a very dear friend of mine, and it has been nice traveling alongside her.”
The centaurs agreed that travel and so many other things are always better with companions— and the both of them agreed that even with the other as a companion, this was still true.
“He can’t shut his mouth,” said Rhoecus.
“He never listens anyways,” said Hylaios. He explained that the centaurs had been taking time apart from their herd, as centaurs often do in small groups— they were out wandering these woods, hunting and living and being and talking.
“And talking, and talking.”
“And not listening.”
The woman asked them if they knew at all of the shadows that had come recently to menace this place— the great lumbering shadow with caustic poison for saliva, unnumberable burning-red eyes and heads and teeth, an unfixable shape for its body, and the smaller shadow that was something like a man— the one putting the stars in the sky. The centaurs had heard the stories of this, of course— these stories were the same as the story of the woman turning her bow on her mother, the one part couldn’t happen without the other, and even before that story, murmurs of the shadows had been crossing the world— since the moment all those years ago when the stars had first started appearing in the sky, there had been murmurs. More questions than answers, by far, every pair of eyes wondering what those lights were, where they’d been coming from. “There are some pieces of the puzzle to be heard more rarely than others, to be heard by fewer ears, passed along by fewer mouths. I can tell you one of them, at least,” said Rhoecus, and what he knew was this: that it wasn’t anything about the smaller shadow himself that was putting the stars in the sky. It was something he had, some magic or tool— more than that, though, he could not quite say. “The story I had heard told of him killing a great beast of the far, far, south, past the sea and the great deserts past that— an enormous grey beast of leather and tusks and strange, grasping protrusions. The story is that the shadow killed it with his bare hands and the corpse stayed right where it fell. It did not wind up in the sky as a new constellation. His bare hands are not enough to work his strange miracle, it seems.”
“If the story is true,” cut in Hylaios.
“It would be a strange lie to invent,” countered Rhoecus, “bolstering no one’s glory, saving no one from blame or disgrace. A lie, a false story just to make the world a little wronger?”
“Strange you would find it confusing, you who say double the wrong things for half the reason— for any reason at all, even? Who can know for sure?”
“The stories I’ve heard tell that the shadow is methodical and deliberate. When he comes to a place, it is for the hunting of one thing, and nothing else. There is an order to be kept, to be followed. Whatever else he might stumble across as he travels, unless it stands in his way and makes a threat or a great nuisance of itself, he will ignore it entirely until he reaches its place on his list, and then he will come back for it.”
The woman frowned— “His list?”
“Come,” said Rhoecus. “Walk with us. Hunt with us. We have stayed standing in one place for much too long already, the day passes us by. Hunt with us, and as we hunt, we will tell you all the rest of what we know.”
“I will tell you all the rest of what I know,” said Hylaios. “Rhoecus will tell you whatever pointless droplets he can’t keep from spilling out of his mouth, whether they are true or not, interesting or not, actual words or not.”
The woman was eager to learn everything she could about that shadow, of course she was— every advantage was an advantage, and every advantage was welcome— so she agreed to join the centaurs on their hunt. Today was her own day of hunting anyways, it was the third day since she’d last made a kill, and so surely the chore would go faster and be more fruitful with help.
The she-wolf was hesitant, though. She wavered for a moment before following the woman and the centaurs onwards through the forest. She was shy of strangers, perhaps, or she was shy of something else. But soon enough, even she had relaxed. There was still soreness in her leg, and her belly was empty, and an easier hunt with a group seemed like a lovely break. She was missing her old pack, perhaps, or she was missing something else. As they walked, the centaurs continued to tell the woman all the stories they had heard about the shadow— some were more believable than others. Some stories told that he had set his mind to killing every last living thing down on this Earth, that he had them all on a list, that he was traveling tirelessly, place to place, putting an end to things one by one, to become a hunter of such legend that none could ever hope to surpass. Some stories told that he had been born a creature of pure shadow, that it was just the substance of him, what he was, his skin and his self. Other stories told that it was the cloak of the very Goddess of the Night Herself that he wore, given to him as a gift for some unknowable reason. Some stories told that the shadow wreathing him was a separate creature entirely, feeding on the light and the air, that he had wrapped himself in its thickless body like a second skin. Some stories told that the hunter killed his prey with a spear stolen from the Sea, and that that was what put the stars in the sky. Some stories told that the greater shadow traveling with him, tracking for him, he had raised it from a puppy, hatched from an egg taken from the inside of a great fiery mountain. Other stories told that it was a beast he had met full-grown down in the pits of Tartarus, he had faced it and killed it, but it had just kept on living afterwards, so he had killed it again and again, and still, on and on it went— and so he had decided to tame it instead, and use it to finish out the rest of his list until he came up with a way to kill it properly, to keep it properly killed. Some stories told that even just its glare was so vicious and withering that anywhere it gazed for more than a moment would dry away and burst into flames.
“They call it ‘Cerberus’,” said Hylaios.
“They call it ‘Hydra’,” said Rhoecus.
“They say that it is not just animals on his list, beasts and birds and fish, or greater monsters of the deep— no, there are humans to be hunted as well, each and every last one of them…”
“Somewhere on his list is you.”
“…giants, harpies… Gods, even,” murmured Hylaios.
“Centaurs, probably,” added Rhoecus. “Hylaios and I, our parents, all our cousins and friends— each and every one of us has a spot on his list. Who can say when he will come for us?”
“He’ll be coming for me last,” supposed Hylaios, “or near to last. After he’s worked his way through all the easier kills.”
“Then wouldn’t he be coming for you first?”
It hot afternoon, a tiring daylight to be out walking in— the heat that saps a person away. And not much of a breeze today to cool a person off, either— or to carry scents. After walking for the better part of an hour, the little hunting-party had not managed to find more than a small rabbit and a few mice, hardly worth the effort of trapping to feed so many mouths. Even the she-wolf’s sharpest nose, tracing carefully along the dirt, had nothing to report. The woman’s sharpest eyes caught none of the usual paw prints or snapped twigs, tiniest tufts of fur left on the tree-bark. Neither of the centaurs were spying much of anything, either.
Neither of the centaurs was really looking all that hard. Most of their focus was on their new companion.
She was bewitching to them, truly she was. Rhoecus, especially. He was captivated by the shine of her hair and eyes, the light of the mother she claimed to have forsaken, the mother Whose protection she had now surely stepped out from under with her disgraceful scorn. He was captivated by her lovely night-dark skin. He was captivated by her figure, the bloom of her hips, the acrobatic slendt of her waist. The breasts that had come into their own— she was a woman, now, full-grown like the death inside her, full of death and able to create life, curses and blessings, blessings and curses. It corrupted the eyes to lust after her, but the eyes of Hylaios and especially Rhoecus were corrupted already.
They had all been hunting together for a little over two hours when, by unspoken agreement, the moment came. It was natural between the two of them that this was going to be a competition. First, everything was a competition between the two of them, that was simply their way with each other. Second, and maybe more so, there would be no bitterness between them if a competition, fair and level, determined which of them would be the one to take the woman for his own. By unspoken agreement, Rhoecus was the one to speak.
“We have been wandering now for some time, and found nothing,” he sighed. “It grows draining— and more than that, it grows dreary. This is no way to waste an afternoon. There are enough of us for a game.”
“Three of us, easily enough for a game,” Hylaios agreed.
“Four of us,” the woman corrected, with a nudge of her neck towards the she-wolf, plodding along quietly beside them.
“Yes, four of us. Yes.”
“Let us decide upon a game to play for some time, some fun to be had, and then afterwards we can carry on our hunting with fresher spirits.”
“A game…” the woman repeated. When was the last time she had played a game? Not for many years, not since she could have been reasonably called a girl, and it was even longer before then. She knew games, of course, she had played them with her mothers, her most beloved mother and her most despised mother alike. She knew hide-and-go-seek. She knew guessing games, a few. She knew throwing games and catching games. She knew jumping and landing games. With the Moon, she had played speaking games and singing games. Games of archery, as well, mounting challenges sent down to her from above, harder and harder things to hit— without looking, without moving to get a better angle, without even a clear shot. “We can play an archery game, perhaps,” she suggested to the centaurs. It was a good way to keep sharp. “Although… those are games that only three of us could play.”— she glanced another glance at the she-wolf, only paws to play with, and she changed her mind, shook her head. Something else, then.
“A race,” suggested Hylaios, by unspoken agreement, making a point to seem like he’d only just now thought of it.
The woman couldn’t stop herself from laughing— challenging her to a race! Perhaps the centaurs didn’t know of her enchanted belt, perhaps they’d never heard those parts of the stories, or perhaps they’d forgotten. A race with her would hardly be fair if she kept it on, and what would be the fun of that?
A race with her would hardly have been fair if she’d taken it off, either. The centaurs had the tightly muscled lower-legs of horses, after all. It wouldn’t be anything close to a contest. “Naturally, a contest of speed or distance would be meaningless. Your running skills are as spoken of as the light of your hair and eyes. Perhaps a truly interesting race between us would be a race of time.”
The woman tilted her head. She was not sure what the centaur meant.
“Instead of testing us against one another for how fast we can run, or how far, let us discover who can run for the longest stretch without stopping. Let us all run and run and run until we cannot run any more, and the last one running shall be the winner.”
“And the winner, as a prize, shall have their bidding over each of the losers, one command upon each who has faltered before them.”
This challenge caught the woman’s interest. She had no need of the centaurs, the won favors were meaningless to her, but she had never played a game such as this one before, a game of endurance. It was something new. It was something to discover about herself. What was she capable of? How long could she last? “I am happy to try,” she said. And so it was set.
Rhoecus counted them down, and together, all four of them began to run.
