As the last burning ember of the dying flame floated to the sky, his skin grew colder.
He glanced to the forest, and knew it was all there was left.
The forest, with its dark, rotting teeth made of yawning, leafless trees, shadows stretching endlessly across moonlit snow. Amongst the deafening still silence of mid-winter, he would travel straight into it, become swallowed by it, toes and feet growing as numb as the apathy inside of him.
Somewhere, deep in the forest, was where he needed to be.
His nocturnal eyes cut through the depths of the shadows, making out the details of the pine forest, fog eventually cutting his vision from traveling further. It didn’t matter if he had the eyes of a bird of prey or the eyes of a wolf, the fog settled too thickly, and it beckoned him towards what lay behind.
Long after the glowing coals of his pitiful fire extinguished, he began towards the maw. He was already surrounded by it, and it did not matter how much further he wandered. If he kept forward, he would reach the sea and be forced to change direction. He knew he could not return to what was behind him, lest he risk his life – or worse. He had made far too powerful enemies: the terrifying kind, the ones that screamed in his dreams, woke him with a fit and a start. And they were bloodthirsty for him.
It did not matter if he kept moving.
His feet were used to it, and he further walked.
His skin embraced the chill winter air like his existence called to him to fly along the snow drifts.
He looked up to the luminous clear moon above, disrupted by trees on occasion as he walked, perpetually bright and blinding. The night felt brighter to him than days before, years before, and he remembered what he knew about the night, what he understood in it, why he had been born into it.
Would there be others like them?
Or was that his last chance to fit amongst the humans?
They would not embrace him like that again, he knew. A kind man had taken him in, at first pinning his sad, starved, weak self to the leaf littered ground with arrows in the leg, in the ankle. If a kind man could do such a thing, an unkind man could do much worse. His leg began to ache at the memory.
And as he lamented the loss, his legs and feet soaking in the depths of snow, he heard a cry.
Not a human cry, but the howl of a pained, despairing wolf. As if the wolf had called to him, he began towards it.
His stomach grumbled, empty and tight and small. To forego a meal was to forfeit strength. Even shivers needed strength.
Even a wolf would do.
In time, he came across a fall trap, long since abandoned, with a dark mud-matted wolf hobbled at the bottom. It – he – stood in silence at his human-shaped presence, peering up with the same luminous, shadow-cutting eyes as gazed down upon him. An injured animal, skinny just the same, holding firm as he waited to see what would happen. The man could have eaten him, but as he came to a kneel along the side of that hole, digging his fingers into the half-frozen moistened dirt that made up the sidewalls, he could not help but feel overwhelmed by the beast before him.
It was not that long before that he had been just that same beast, wounded and terrified, held to a corner, awaiting the final killing blow.
As they held eyes, he could not look away. With the torn and broken fingernails on his hands he began to scrape into the Earth beneath him, cleaving up dirt and pushing it towards the hole. Bit by bit, the hole began to fill, and he backed his way through a channel, allowing a slope of an incline for the wolf to walk upon. The animal stared as he did, until he finished the path and backed away, sitting as he watched the wolf slowly begin to limp up and out of the hole.
Once free of the hole, the wolf stood on the rim of the trap, front paw raised. The wolf gazed behind into the woods, and to the man.
Maybe he saw that they were the same, two beasts surviving along the forest floor.
The wolf stepped, careful, cautious, tail hanging between his hind legs, towards the man, and the man found himself doing the same, drawing closer onto his hands and knees, one tiny shuffling step at a time, until they were a mere arm’s length from the man. A starving wolf could have lunged at him and bit, and the man could have clawed at the animal just the same. A thin tendril of trust had inexplicably formed between them, and they neared still, the snout of the wolf nearly touching the man’s nose.
He could feel the breath of the animal on him, small puffs of warm air from his nostrils as he sniffed, taking in where he had been, what he was. In turn, he lifted a cautious, slow hand towards the neck of the creature. When his fingers touched fur, plunging into the thick winter coat of the beast, the wolf licked at his nose and his cheek, and the two of them found some sort of kindred solace in one another’s pain.
He was not sure why he did it, but he took both hands around the wolf, knotting his fingers into the fur, and he buried his face into the shoulder of the creature, feeling himself crumple into the warmth of that creature, the fur tickling his face, his cheeks, his ears as he clutched to the large animal. He felt the warmth then of all of the things he couldn’t before when he had wandered, alone, into the forest. He felt it light inside of him, a tiny glowering coal at the pit of his belly.
The wolf licked at the top of his head.
They stayed like that for what felt like a long time, until the man’s stomach growled so loud it broke them apart, and the wolf tore away, leaving him knelt on his haunches in the snow. He watched as it stepped, quietly pressing along the snow tracks from where it had come, departing.
The man leaned forward to lay down amongst the snow.
And then the wolf stopped, turned its large head to glance over its shoulder at him, and he could hear it like words spoken into his ear: come on.
Aimee Cozza is a freelance illustrator out of New England. She graduated from the New Hampshire Institute of Art in 2012 with a bachelor’s degree in illustration. Aimee primary creates digital dark-beautiful illustrations based on the surreal and unsettling. Her most common subjects are space, extraterrestrial worlds, fantastical beings, creatures, and ominous, off-putting subjects. She explores themes such as duality, disconnection, doomed romance, perception of space and time, mental illnesses often not spoken of, trauma, and the uphill battle against stereotypes. She also is an aspiring writer and is co-author of an urban sci-fi/fantasy novel.
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