She ran.
Through trees bathed in moonlight, silver dapples streaking her skin like war paint. The forest was beautiful at first, dreamlike.
However, the deeper she fled, the more it twisted into shadowed menace. Bushes thickened, clawing at her, branches lunging at her. Twigs snapped behind her.
Then came the guttural growls, pounding feet, and the stench of breath not human.
Panic surged. She sprinted harder.
Her dark hair snagged on jagged boughs, her clothes torn open by thorns and bark, blood beading where flesh was stripped raw. No matter how far or fast she raced, the sounds never left her, snarls that reeked of hunger, hatred, and rage.
She burst from the undergrowth into a clearing veiled in silver shadow. The hollow she exploded into was a grass and bush-covered glade.
She stumbled into its center, then pain shot through her leg as her ankle twisted beneath her. She went down hard, breath knocked from her lungs, dirt filling her mouth. Crawling and scrambling were all useless.
Her limbs shook, muscles burning with spent adrenaline. The forest pulsed with menace as the strides behind her decelerated. Still hunting. She slowed, unable to flee anymore.
Her chest heaved. Her heartbeat throbbed in her ears. Still, she forced herself upright and turned to face them, if only to meet her end head-on. She sat on the cold earth and lifted her chin, defiant.
A trio of spectral, phantasmic, glowing wolves emerged from the trees, fur flickering in erratic waves of tarnished silver and blood-matted black.
Their eyes were blazing scarlet, their mouths slack and dripping with suppuration, and their teeth too long and serrated to belong to anything born of nature.
They stalked in a tight ring around her, their growls vibrating the ground. While she shuddered, her muscles locked, one sniffed her cheek. Another paced at her back.
The third sat on its haunches and howled.The others responded with a sickening stillness. Their red eyes locked onto her. They crouched, ready to leap.
Without warning, a roar shattered the night.
A massive force slammed into the pack like a violet-gilded meteor.
She gasped as it collided with the snarling beasts.
The air erupted with light and reverberation as aetheric gold exploded on contact, not blood, but radiance, tearing the wolves into motes of dissolving starlight. Talons met canines. Fangs were smashed. Skulls ripped open, ruptured into chaff.
The sound was all crackling energy and wind and unholy wrath.
She sat, frozen, her mouth parted in soft gasps as one by one, her hunters vanished into gilded dust. Their forms broken apart, scattered like luminous leaves in a storm.
Gone. All of them.
Except for him.
He stood above her, massive and glowing, still cloaked in amethyst-amber fury.
She blinked as she took him in. He was glistening.
An incandescence shimmered off his dark mauve, sable, and golden pelage, and moonlight caught in wrathful lines along his body like armor forged from vengeance and starlight.
He was a beast, so tall and muscled that his wraith-like silhouette blocked all view of the forest beyond.
He gazed down at her unbowed from the fight, his fur gleaming, not even panting. He stepped toward her.
She flinched, but his energy gave off no threat. Only warmth, safety, and security.
He lowered himself to one knee as if in supplication to her. His massive wolf head tilted as he bent close, nudging her.
An uncontrollable urge to touch him came over her, so she did. The instant her hand stroked between his ears, a wave of his aetheric force, in glowing bands of violet gold electric charge, encircled her.
Her torn skin healed. Her ankle knitted together. The pain slipped away like it had never been.
She gazed into his eyes, glowing and containing the wild, starry hues of distant galaxies, and her entire soul lurched.
He helped her to her feet, his giant paw wrapping around her slight hand. Their gazes still locked, she found the breath inside her to thank him.
‘Sante.’
He raised his chin in acknowledgment.
However, the second he released her from his grasp, she fled. Not because she was afraid of him, but because she was overwhelmed by the encounter, and needed to put space and air between them.
She tore through the forest, up the incline of the hollow’s edge, stumbling to the crest of the hill.
Breathless, she turned back, searching for him. He was still standing at the center of the glade, those glowing violet and gold eyes on her. She stared back, transfixed.
Until the world began to explode in the distance. A cascade of major detonations ripped the atmosphere. Light, seething, terrible, blinding, and hot soared from the horizon.
The earth ripped open in thunderous twists, rifts forming and rushing toward them. A storm rose from the fissures into a rolling inferno of cosmic detonation. It swept toward them, a churning tempest of scorching combustion. Burning everything in its way, devouring trees and terrain, engulfing flora and fauna alike.
‘Nada!’ she cried, hand outstretched to him. ‘Leave, now!’
He didn’t run.
Instead, he swiveled to glance at the turbulent mass of fire and then turned that beautiful, spectral, furred head to gaze back at her, calm and certain. A knight in wolf’s skin, standing proud, glimmering with aetheric energy and power.
He raised his magnificent head and howled.
With a roar and screeching blast, the blaze swallowed him whole. He imploded, becoming one with the stars he called out to.
Her scream broke into the wind as she collapsed to her knees, helpless. The churn kept rolling toward her, speeding up the rise of the hill.
Booming and spinning into a cataclysmic tornado, the inferno reached her. Her final breath caught as the conflagration lifted her, swirled into the air as her body dissolved in flames, light and gold motes.
Rising into the sky, becoming one with the celestial heavens, spiraling above a burning Earth.
