Art: Simon Walpole
A wind age, a wolf age –
before the world goes headlong.
No man will have
mercy on another.
– Völuspá, 10th century Old Norse Poem
The wolves came from the sky.
Though they yearned to howl, to shriek and stop this strange world in its tracks, they dampened their screams. Their leaders had grander plans first, and the wolves were not needed. Not yet.
They waited. The wolves prowled, sticking to the shadows throughout the world. When they could, the wolves picked off their prey, one by one, freezing them with one sharp burst of echolocation that stopped the creatures in their tracks. These puny aliens, with dull teeth, no claws, skin soft as overripe fruit. The wolves tore into meat, drank blood, crunched bones, lapping up the marrow. They waited for their next orders. On a clear night, the wolves could raise their four eyes and just barely make out the twinkle of that far away star, through the swirls of the waves of light these creatures they hunted could not see.
The world was dead and dying. The creatures’ dens no longer lit with heatless light. Their machines no longer whirred through the sky, over the sea, or along the paths they’d eked through the land.
At last, it was time. As one, the wolves lifted their muzzles and howled. The packs descended, no longer hiding in the darkness. They ate, they burrowed deep in their dens. They slept, bellies full, before they hunted again. Wolves did not dream. It was not for the wolves to question what the leader of their pack, on that faraway star, told them to.
They hunted. They feasted. They mated. They slept. It would not take long now. The wolves’ teeth were sharp.
Outgoing missive:
Location: 55.948595, -3.199913
Date: 04.01.2029
Is there anyone out there? Anyone at all?
Please answer.
Please.
– Jotunheimen National Park, Norway, 2030
Einar wasn’t sure if he was alive or not.
He lay in snow stained pink with blood. All was silent, as ever. Einar must move, but terror kept him still, his breath coming in shallow gasps. He wouldn’t hear the wolf’s footsteps through the snow, or catch the growling deep in its throat. It would be hot breath against his neck, the fetid smell of old blood, and then sharp death and darkness.
He could not freeze to death. Pushing himself up, he brushed snowflakes from his cheeks and looked around. No wolf crouched behind him.
Hating having his sense of touch dampened, Einar wriggled his fingers in his thick gloves until the blood flowed. He pressed his stiff hands against the gash in his side, slowing the sluggish bleeding. He dragged himself to his knees.
His uncle’s body sprawled before him. His torso had been ripped open, dark pink snow already piled in his gaping abdomen.
Einar’s mouth opened, his throat closed. The wind rose, biting his face. He bowed his head, and his tears froze on his eyelashes. The grief was as sharp as the gash in his side, shock numbing the edges.
His uncle. His uncle.
Einar was too weak to bring his uncle’s body back for a proper likferd. He would not be able to watch over him, even for the one night they spared rather than the traditional eight. He could not be absent from the hunt.
If Einar did not move soon, he would never make it back.
He crawled over the snow and closed his uncle’s open eyes, hands dancing as he signed both a quick prayer and the words to one of the funeral songs. Memories flashed behind his eyelids, but he forced them down.
Grieve later.
Wasting precious time, Einar found a loose fir branch and, grunting with pain, laid it over his uncle’s face. Not a proper burial, not even close, yet better than nothing at all.
The Vargrs’ dark blue blood tainted the snow. Nothing remained of the two wolves but a tuft of their ice-blue fur, the splash of indigo blood, and their tracks in the snow.
One wolf, the one with a jagged scar on its flank, had grasped him in its extra forearms, horribly human, the pointed talons digging into his shoulders. He had not heard the wolf’s keening, paralysing call; he was deaf, so he never could. The wolf’s mouth had opened wide, its fetid breath warm against his face, and Einar thought those pointed teeth would be the last thing he ever saw.
Einar’s ski bike was still stashed in the trees, right next to his uncle’s. Tears froze on his cheeks again. He went through the motions – turning on the small heater, smooth as a river stone and glowing like a coal, and sliding it into the pouch within his parka to keep him warm. He made sure the pack was tied securely to the bike.
He sat on the bike, unable to start. He crouched around the warm stone, letting out a cry that he could not hear.
The wolf named Riv watched the human cub from the trees. Saliva dripped from his mouth. He’d killed one human. The hunter that had killed Riv’s littermate. The meat had been warm and good, his first kill in almost a week. Blood and muscle, bone and marrow. He wanted to return to his den, bringing the last of the meat to share with the rest of the pack, then to sleep with his mates and cubs in a pile of fur, soft breathing, and heartbeats. He should kill the young human cub. It would be so easy. The cub was keening with loss. Riv knew that emotion, disliked that it made him pause.
The cub was prey. The cub should be eaten like the others, to feed his young and his mates. The wolves would make this world their own until the leader of the pack arrived from the stars and sent them to the next world. Snow bit into the pads of his paws. He crouched down, paws cracking the ice below the snow. The wolf’s second pair of eyes saw the pulsing of blood, the warmth emanating from skin. Riv could smell the human cub. Sweat, fear, and that tantalising scent of prey.
The boy started his noisy machine and made his way up the mountain, too fast for Riv to follow. He would not waste the energy. He would take this meat to his family. His first family. His new family. His proof that he himself was no longer a cub, but a wolf.
Turning his head, his muzzle snuffled the pine and ice-scented wind, and his ears sang with the call from other members of his pack. They had finally breached the home of the humans on this mountain. They feasted and called for their brethren to join them.
Riv buried his catch, hoping to return later. For now, perhaps he could bring his cubs fresher, warmer meat.
By the time he reached Ulvefort, Einar was barely conscious. His breath hitched in his chest, the cold deep in his bones despite the heater. Soft snowflakes fell from the sky, resting on his shoulders, his hat, his eyelashes.
The metal and pine gates gaped open. Einar did not wish to enter. He knew, with every heavy step he took towards his home, that even if he could hear, there would only be silence.
The bodies were gone, taken by the wolves. Only dark red splotches showed where they had fallen. Who did they belong to? Lukas? Askel? Gull? One of those spots of blood could belong to his Mor. If he lost both his uncle and his mother in one day…
Einar’s breath misted in the cold air as he swayed on his feet. He knew he was in shock, dizzy from blood loss, frostbite nipping at his fingers. His mouth opened and he let out a low moan he felt reverberate deep within his chest.
A door to one of the barracks opened. A white, frightened face poked her head out.
“Einar!” she signed.
Einar touched the side of his nose: “Mor.”
He collapsed as soon as he crossed the threshold.
KILLER WOLVES FROM SPACE
Article for Vakten, 16 December 2029. 10.30 am.
By Dr Inge Tveit
Such a ridiculous-sounding headline. It sounds like something from one of those rags you’d buy in line at the store. Bat Boy seen. Hunters shoot an angel. Politicians and royalty are secretly robots or lizards – that always seemed more likely than the others. Yet here we are, cowering from killer wolves from outer space.
The short version is: this isn’t good. Some are calling these creatures the Vargr, after the wolves in Ragnarök. They first descended in Norway, as far as we can tell, but within a few days, they were everywhere. We are living in the end times, so many say. We don’t even know how many will still be able to access this article.
I am a zoologist, and my speciality is wolves. I also had a passing interest in cryptozoology, more out of fascination than true belief. Little did I know how completely and utterly these interests would collide.
My team managed to capture one of the wolves. We cryogenically froze it before the blood became too acidic and it decomposed at the accelerated rate of other specimens. Vakten has asked me to break it down into layman’s terms for the public.
They do, at first glance, look like wolves, though three times as large. They have fur that changes depending on their local climate. In Norway, they are ice-blue, thick and warm as a polar bear’s fur. In the deserts, they shed nearly all of their fur, leaving only a short stubble, and it turns a sandy brown. They have three rows of pointed teeth. They have four eyes, and the extra set can sense infared and therefore see in the dark. Their snouts are shorter than a wolf’s and have two extra nostrils. A wolf can smell one hundred times better than a German Shepherd. A Vargr can smell better than a wolf. They have four main limbs, but vestigial extra forearms with human-like hands, prehensile, tipped with black claws that release a paralytic.
Their main form of hunting is echolocation, far more sophisticated than bats or whales. They can hit a frequency that pierces animal ears. Anyone who has heard the call and lived – not many – have said it feels like having knives plunged into their ears.
In short, they are like something deliberately engineered to be our worst nightmare.
These Vargr are difficult to kill. Bullets slow them down, but rarely stop them. They are immune to all poisons tried so far. They breed quickly, and already there is roughly one wolf on Earth for every three humans.
I wish I could end this on a hopeful note. I don’t think I can. Like the rest of the world, I pray.
Riv had eaten well. His belly was full. His pack curled around him, dreaming of the hunt. His new mate, Yilva, stretched next to him, exposing her belly so their sleepy pups could suckle. He should be sleeping. He should be content.
There were not many humans left in this part of the world. They would have to leave, to go further down the mountain, finding pockets of prey hidden in the crevices of the land. Riv did admire these aliens’ tenacity. They had been the hunters of this world, tamed the wilderness and the stronger creatures of the forest, the tundra, the jungle. It made the hunt all the sweeter.
He shouldn’t have let the pup escape. Even if the human cub could not hear Riv’s call, he could easily have taken the boy in his jaws. He’d stood over the young creature after he’d killed the older human.
Yilva had hurt herself in the scuffle and gone back to the den to nurse her wounds and see to their cubs. Their pack had been bigger, but the human hunters had killed several, leaving only the betas, Fiavin and Pirin, and the new alpha, Nivvag.
Instead, the wolf had watched the cub, thinking he looked so small. Wolves grew quickly – from cub to hunter in just three months. These puny humans took years before they became hunters, yet this small boy – older than Riv – had killed many wolves already.
Without knowing why, he had turned, leaving the steaming meat and the child, and watched from the trees as the boy awoke and grieved.
He’d never gone back for the meat of the other man. Instead, he had answered the call of his alpha. By the time he arrived, the fight was over, the wolves fleeing with their prey. Riv had grabbed a human in his jaws and carried it back to his den. A kill he hadn’t even made. The meat had tasted sour.
Riv stretched out, moving the fingers of his extra forearms in the darkness, waiting for sleep that did not come.
Out of a settlement of six hundred and seventeen souls, only two hundred and ninety-two remained. Most of the other hunters were lost in the fight. The Vargr must have recognised their scent, and the hunters were the first line of defence.
Ulvefort fixed the gate. They shovelled away the blood-soaked snow. They had funerals in the church for the departed. They drilled into the ground. The survivors wondered why they, too, had not been eaten. Einar’s wound healed into a scab and then the beginnings of a scar. Frostbite claimed none of his fingers or toes.
The attack was his fault. He must have been sloppy, left too many trails, and the wolves had followed him home. He kept searching the old archive logs of the internet as he often did, piecing together fragments from the past. A cry for help from Edinburgh that he could not answer. An article about the wolves’ physiology. Old Norse poems and the tales of the wolves of Ragnarök.
Einar and his uncle had been the best hunters in the settlement. Einar’s immunity to the Vargrs’ high-pitched keening howl had saved both of their lives countless times. Einar once asked his uncle what the cry sounded like, and his uncle had told him the tale of the banshee and her shrieking call.
“The sound blocks out the world. It’s like closing your eyes tight when you’re sitting close to the fire,” he’d said. ‘Everything is gone, but you know the heat and danger is lurking behind your eyelids.’
The wolves came from the sky when Einar was four years old. He didn’t know what life was like before, though his family told him stories. His Onkel Halvard especially loved to weave tales on the long, bitter nights in winter. Those memories were like shards of glass in his mind. He picked them up and the grief cut him deep.
He and his uncle used to sit outside, bundled in furs, his uncle’s voice lulling Einar into a half-sleep as they watched the stars and the Aurora Borealis glimmering overhead. Halvard told him of sprawling cities with millions of souls. Technology that was not constantly patched and failing. Einar had hearing aids as a child, but they’d broken eight years ago. Sometimes Einar thought his uncle must have exaggerated – surely humans couldn’t have once flown above the clouds in great hulking machines of metal. Surely they couldn’t have gone to the moon?
This far up the mountain was supposed to be safe. Here was where they were meant to survive the Ragnarok.
Einar shivered as the dark nights continued to pass, growing colder as winter crept closer. The sun soon never rose above the mountains, lending only a thin, pink light to the sky for a few hours before fleeing again. The snowfall turned to a blizzard, temperatures cemented well below freezing. Rations were plentiful, but only because they were meant to be feeding more mouths. Sentries patrolled the walls. Now the Vargr knew where the settlement was, Einar watched the lips of the people of Ulvefort as they whispered, it was only a matter of time before the monsters returned to finish what they started.
When the blizzard passed, Einar gathered together his hunting gear. The spear gun, dipped in a poison made from juniper berries that weakened the Vargr. His uncle and Einar had discovered this by accident. A dart gun, ammunition similarly treated. A knife. The tracker that would vibrate if it picked up the heat signature of a Vargr. His tent and sleeping roll. His personal heater. Food and water. Scent disguiser. Extra fuel for his ski bike. Night vision and normal binoculars, and the Ulvefort alarm that he hoped would never vibrate again.
His mother watched him pack it all, her face creased in anxiety.
“Don’t do this,” she signed after tapping him on the shoulder for his attention. “The ice has been too thick. They won’t return until spring. That gives us time for a plan.”
“We don’t know they’ll wait until spring. That gives them time to formulate a plan too,” he signed back.
She bowed her head. He touched her gently below the chin, forcing her to look at him.
“I have to do this, Mor. I can’t sit here, knowing that if I had been stronger that day, I could have saved Onkel Halvard. The wolves wouldn’t have found you.”
“Think of all the attacks you prevented over the years.”
“Not enough. Mor.” His signs grew more agitated. “Let me do this. I have to do it for Onkel, for everyone we lost. For me.”
“I can’t lose you, too.”
There was nothing to say. Feeling so much older than seventeen, he rested his forehead against hers before pulling back and turning away.
“Unidentified flying object, do you read? This is the United States Air Force. You are in a no-fly zone. Do you copy?”
[transcriber note: static]
“I repeat, do you copy?”
[more static]
“General, what is our course of action?”
“Open fire.”
[sound of gunfire and illegible shouting]
“General, the craft is absorbing all our weaponry. Course of action?”
[more gunfire]
“Pray.”
– Transcript of audio from Cannon Air Force Base, New Mexico, the first place of attack in the United States, 06.19.2028, 20:50 hours.
The pups sickened first. They turned away from their mothers’ dugs. They grew hot with fever. The adults exchanged worried whirrs and clicks.
Riv had thought they had more time.
The Désir, the leaders of all the wolf packs, had programmed the wolves to hunt. For each new planet, they would tinker with the formula, make them ideal killers in their new environments against their myriad prey. They would be reborn into new bodies. They weren’t meant to remember what happened before and what would happen again. Riv remembered.
When the native creatures of a world were nearly destroyed, the wolves sickened. Riv had found the logs in their craft, spending years learning Désir script. It had not been a surprise. Deep in their half-formed ancestral memories, all wolves knew that when they reached the end of the hunt, it was the end for them as well.
They thought they had more time.
Riv watched his pups die. His mates. All members of his pack. They staggered out into the cold, one by one, to find their own cairns of snow. Riv waited for his own body to sicken, to weaken, to burn. By default, he became the alpha of a pack of one. Feverishly, he used the last of his time to learn, tearing through the logs, desperation fuelling him even though it felt worthless.
Each day could be his last. He went out and caught smaller prey. Rabbits, deer. Easy prey, boring meat. Sustenance but little else.
Sometimes he wondered if he should go out into the snow, lie down and let the cold take him before the sickness could.
Yet he was a hunter. A warrior. Even if his pack was only himself now, he could not betray it.
He hunted. He waited. He turned his head to look up the mountain, to the small, stubborn settlement of humans. The wolf’s lips pulled back in a snarl.
It was never easy to track the Vargr in the snow.
Einar threaded his way through the forest, leaving his ski bike behind as soon as he reached the trees.
The fir forest was dark, the branches almost black against the pale snow. The air was so cold it seemed a heavy presence in his lungs. All smelled of pine, ice, and the slow and slumbering earth.
It took three days before he found signs of Vargr – tracks in the snow, tufts of pale fur caught in the tree bark. He came across a corpse, frozen solid, too cold for the acid in their blood to break the body down.
Einar shot the corpse. It felt good.
Einar passed the spot where his uncle had died. There was no evidence of the body. No likferd for his kin. He signed another prayer, then carried on.
When his uncle and Einar had been attacked, they had been searching for the den. If the wolves were all killed at once, the mountain would be safe. Einar had a good guess where the den would be. Finally, he found it. A small cave in a jagged outcrop of the mountain, half-hidden by the pines.
Einar camped in a tree that night, climbing up as far as he dared. He slept curled around his heater, his face bundled so only his eyes showed. He wedged the spear gun between his body and the tree trunk, gripping the heat tracker in his hand. He slept fitfully, jerking awake every few minutes, certain he’d felt the tracker vibrate only to find it quiet in his hand.
Hunting was lonely without his uncle. He kept looking for him as he trekked through the snow, a half-smile freezing on his face like an icicle when he realised his uncle was not there, and would never hunt with him again.
The wolves hadn’t returned to their den. He wanted to see their ice-blue pelts, to pick up the spear-gun and shoot them right between the eyes. He would kill them all, from the smallest pup to that mean bastard with the scar on his flank.
Einar shifted in the branches, his leg muscles aching. From his perch, he could barely make out the dim opening to the den. He wondered what lay inside. The gnawed bones of his friends and family. Horrible pups that would grow into killers. A place of nightmares and death.
The pale winter sunlight fled as night closed on the forest. The Vargr saw better than Einar did in the dark, and their call also served as crude echolocation. Wolves mixed with bats with creepy human arms. Living nightmares.
Einar tried to make himself comfortable, nibbling on reindeer jerky from his backpack. He spread more scent protection on himself. Even if he was downwind, he should be safe. He gripped his gun, fighting exhaustion.
The heat tracker vibrated in his hand. For a second, all Einar could do was look at it and know there was no turning back. He would kill the wolves or die trying. He hefted his spear gun.
There.
The wolf appeared like a shadow, cresting the hill. At the creature’s approach, the entrance to the den glowed a brighter blue. Einar aimed the gun.
His first shot missed, burying deep in the trunk of a tree. The wolf slunk through the trees, smooth as water in a stream. Einar slotted another spear into the gun, aiming again.
The Vargr opened its jaws, releasing its paralysing howl that Einar could not hear. He shot again, narrowly missing the wolf.
Einar re-loaded, his heart hammering in his chest. His uncle had told him the howl of the wolf was so loud that other Vargr from miles away could hear and come running at impossible speeds. He could be surrounded within minutes.
The wolf turned to face him, glowing blue eyes staring into Einar’s brown ones. Einar hesitated, hating himself for doing so. It was the wolf with the scarred side, the one who had given Einar a scar of his own but left him alive.
Einar let the spear fly and the wolf dodged again, the bolt lost in the snow banks. The wolf didn’t howl again, as if he knew it wouldn’t work. Einar loaded again, his half-frozen fingers fumbling in the dark.
The Vargr came closer, ducking his head and barrelling into the tree. The branches shook and Einar had to reach out and clasp the trunk or fall into the snow and the wolf’s waiting jaws. His spear gun tumbled from his hands, catching on the alarm around his wrist. Both fell into the white below.
Einar could not warn Ulvefort. He cursed himself for a fool. He should have sounded the alarm as soon as he saw the wolf. Björg and Gjurd, the remaining hunters, would have come for him. He knew why he hadn’t – he didn’t want anyone else to risk themselves.
The Vargr fell upon the spear gun, using its humanoid hands to unload it and throw the spears into the woods and then using its strong jaws to crush the barrel. Einar’s jaw slackened in dismay. While reaching for his pack and hoping to grab his dart gun, the Vargr rammed the tree again. Each time he tried to hold a weapon, the alien would shake the tree until Einar was certain the branches below him would break.
He would grow weak long before the wolf would begin to feel hunger and cold. Even with his small heater, he would soon freeze.
Einar had lost.
He rested his forehead against the tree, the bark rough against his skin. The inevitability of his death fell upon him like a snøskred. The wolf that had let him live the day half of the people he knew in the world died would now finish the task. Those sharp teeth would tear him apart, piece by piece, just like his uncle. Just like his father, only two years after they came to this frozen mountain. Just like so, so many others.
The wolf stepped back, a paw rising delicately above the snow. Einar gazed down at his killer, gripping the tree trunk tighter in preparation for the next attack. The branch he perched on had creaked ominously. It would not hold out much longer.
The wolf sat back on its hind legs. Einar frowned. He didn’t question the oddness, but used the respite to reach in his pack for his dart gun.
The Vargr raised its furred, human-like arms with long fingers of pale blue skin and black claws. The hands hesitated in mid-air before unmistakably signing: “Stop.”
Einar’s hand froze at the opening of his bag.
The wolf made the gesture again. “Stop.”
The Street Preacher
February 14, 2026
Hey guys! Sorry for the gap in blogging – internet’s been touch and go. My parents saved up for this trip for years, and it’s just the three of us against the world. Still can’t believe we don’t go back home to Sausalito for a year!
Like in Stockholm, I wandered through the city with my voice recorder, taping conversations that I could translate afterwards. I think I’m getting really fluent! Here’s my latest conversation, translated from a street preacher I saw by the Royal Palace. He was pretty intense and looked at me without blinking. I learned a lot of religious vocab from this speech:
Well do I know that many dates of the apocalypse have come and gone. Each time, so many were so certain, so convinced of the end of the world. I know I stand here, on my pulpit of a wooden pallet. You pass, and your eyes slide away from me. I am dirty. I am dishevelled. I am someone else to be ignored, even as you feel a little guilty, a little uncharitable, for how you turn from me. You do not want to believe I might be right.
That this time, it’s truly the end.
They are coming. I feel them – each day they grow nearer. The skies are darkening. Earth will have a reckoning for its sins.
Ah, at the mention of sins you turn away even more deliberately. Ignore the truth. Shy away from it if you must. It will not save you, in the end.
You have ignored so many signs over the years. The crashes of our economy. The fracturing of our faith. Our turning away from God and scripture and what is Right. Apathy to antipathy to our One Lord, letting His light dim in your hearts. He reaches out to you but your ears are closed to His Holy Voice.
And yes, there will be a reckoning, my friends. The Earth will be razed to the ground. Only the true Believers shall be spared. The rest will perish, and it will be God’s justice.
His justice is harsh. His justice has teeth.
The movements felt strange and awkward in Riv’s hands.
The cub stared at him.
Riv gazed back, spreading his hands wide in a gesture of supplication. He hated showing any sign of subservience to such a weakling. He was an alpha now, and it felt as wrong as tucking his tail and drawing back ears to one of his own pups. He’d learned these gestures by watching the boy and his uncle from the trees, then searching for more on the old, broken archive of the world’s information system. So many times he should have killed this cub, but instead he’d been curious about the creature that did not stop at his call. Curiosity was a weakness. Yet perhaps this would work to Riv’s advantage.
The human cub did not move. Neither did the wolf.
“Don’t kill,” Riv signed. “Come. Follow.”
With that, the wolf turned his back on the cub, his fur standing on end. At the entrance to the cave, he turned back. Waited.
The cub clutched the tree, stupefied. The wolf could imagine what the creature must think. That is it a trap. A lure to bring him to ground level so he could kill him.
The wolf blinked his four eyes.
Half an hour later, the cub’s little heater ran out. The wolf could sense the boy’s body growing colder. His gums itched to close around the boy, to eat the meat, the blood sweet on his tongue.
He waited.
The cub carefully began to climb down the tree, hand on its small weapon – a dart gun, the cub’s elder had called it. The cub’s legs were crouched, ready to run. If the boy did, Riv would not be able to resist chasing and bringing him down.
One foot in front of the other, the cub crept closer to the cavern. It reached the blue glow, its eyes widening when it noticed the metal of the craft within. The thing probably thought wolves were as dumb as the other animals on this planet. All the more reason they had been so easy to hunt.
Riv had not moved throughout the cub’s slow progress, even as all his instincts urged him to take this easy prey.
Riv held up his hands, signing “no weapons.”
The boy hesitated, holding his small gun. After an aching moment, he threw it into the snow.
The wolf led the human cub inside.
The first thing Einar noticed was how warm it was. His freezing muscles loosened, and he shivered until his teeth rattled. The second thing he noticed was the smell of animal musk, dark and smoky.
Einar was still trying to come to terms with the idea that alien wolves lived in starships and were smart enough to learn signs. Around him were screens and strange buttons that worked for wolf paws as well as their spindly, clawed fingers. Nests made of some soft material were tucked into a corner, and the metal floor was littered with ice blue wolf fur. There were no other aliens. No needle-toothed cubs. No human bones.
Einar shook. How had humans never realized how much they had underestimated their enemy?
The Vargr watched Einar take it all in, eyes glowing with unveiled intelligence. The wolf went to a screen. The sight of what he thought was a feral, bloodthirsty monster working mechanical controls was too much for Einar on top of everything else.
I’m hallucinating, he thought. I’ve gone cold crazy and I fell off the tree and my body is freezing to death, and these are lingering images in my dying mind.
He pinched the skin on the back of his wrist. It hurt.
The wolf brought up a message on the screen. The letters were strange and blocky, but legible Norwegian:
We are not your true enemies.
Einar wanted to laugh. These were creatures that had destroyed his world.
“Where are the others?” he signed, unsure if the wolf would understand him. If he’d learned from his uncle and Einar, the wolf’s vocabulary would be limited unless he’d watched his Onkel sign stories beneath the stars. The thought of a wolf, crouched in the shadows, watching and learning, was terrifying. More words appeared on the screen:
They are dead.
So this was the last wolf on the mountain. He was alone. Einar’s fingers itched for his knife.
“How did they die?” he signed.
An engineered disease. Our time on this planet is almost done. Your kind are nearly extinct.
Einar swallowed at that. “How many are left?”
A pause as the wolf looked something up on his screen.
11,586.
Out of more than eight billion. Einar had known they were isolated up on this hunk of rock and ice, and like the others, he’d still held out hope that somehow more had survived the wolves. Humanity was almost gone.
He closed his eyes, willing himself not to cry. When he opened them, the wolf still watched him with glowing, unblinking eyes.
“Why bring me here then? Why aren’t you killing me?”
This is bigger than my pack or your pack.
The Vargr seemed fluent in Norwegian and understood his signs. It was no wonder they were so perfect at hunting humans – they had gone to the trouble of studying them, learning them. Einar’s skin prickled; he had been very stupid to step into this cave.
His rucksack was open at his feet, the top gaping. He had a knife in there, dipped in poison. If he was quick enough, he could grab it.
“What do you want from me?” he signed, hoping the creature could not smell the fear that seeped from his every pore.
We were created by the beings you call the Désir centuries ago. We are used as weapons across several worlds. This world, your Earth, is far from the Désir’s home planet. A minor holding. Their grip on our minds has weakened – they are not our my alpha – but even so, when the prey grow low, we weaken. Another crop of wolves will be grown and sent to the next planet. The Désir will populate your lands.
Einar sensed anger from the wolf.
“I ask you again: what do you want from me?”
You are a hunter. With your knowledge of this world, combined with my knowledge of our enemy and my strength, we can hunt them.
“Why would you think I would trust you?”
Do not act like weak prey. I understand this fear. But I ask this of you just the same. Will you hunt?
Einar stood before the wolf, at a loss. This was his life, a seventeen-year-old who had killed so many aliens and suffered so much loss he had to not think about it or he’d never function. This was an alien wolf, his sworn enemy, who had not killed him, but saved him, and now offered him a chance to join with the Vargr against a greater threat. Was the enemy of his enemy actually a friend? Would the wolves actually leave if they could somehow join together? Or was death always inevitable?
Hatred was easy. Killing was easy. Trusting was harder.
He could take out that knife and plunge it into the wolf. Self-preservation would mean the scarred wolf would bite him. They would both go down into the darkness. Neither of them would have to witness the ends of their races, see the Desír win and claim another planet for their collection. That was also easier.
Einar took out the knife, hefting it in his hands. Then he met the wolf’s eyes and flung the knife behind him, where it hit the metal wall of the spaceship with a twang before falling to the floor.
“Okay,” he signed, and then, to be extra clear, stuck up his thumb.
The wolf knew that sign. He bowed his head. Tentatively, not believing he dared, Einar rested his hand on the wolf’s furred muzzle. Beneath, those lips that cover the sharp teeth that had killed the people he loved opened into something almost resembling a smile.
The wolf let the cub touch his snout, though his fur prickled. It would not be easy to avoid killing the cub and his scant remaining brethren. It would mean dull hunts and duller meat. It would mean working with prey to sever the connection to the leaders of the pack.
Once this planet was free, the wolves could breed again. It is the best planet Riv can remember hunting. The tundra, the forest, the jungle. Other wolves out there must be immune to the sickness, like he was. He should be dead now, but his heart beat strong and his teeth were sharp. Riv would have pups, mates, and fellow warriors again. Their engineered sickness would not wither the muscles and dull the minds of the next generation. He would be able to look up at the night sky and howl, free from those beings on far away stars that sought to control the wolves’ packs. They would be their own leaders.
The human numbers would build up again. Slowly – this cub before him will grow into a man – but this prey, humans, are designed to spread across the planet like a plague. One day, these creatures will be plentiful once more.
Wolves would hunt again.
* * *
L.R. Lam was first Californian and now Scottish. Lam is the Sunday Times Bestselling and award-winning author of Dragonfall (the Dragon Scales trilogy), the Seven Devils duology (co-written with Elizabeth May), Goldilocks, the Pacifica novels False Hearts and Shattered Minds, and the Micah Grey trilogy, which begins with Pantomime.