Lotus

The forest at night was not the forest she knew.

With her new body, Lotus could still see fine in the dark, but just because she could see did not mean she understood what she saw. Without the glory of the sun, the forest shed its familiar shape, donning a dark cloak of homogeneity. Lotus used to be proud of how quietly she moved, but with the chatter of birds and insects dying down, each step felt like she was announcing her presence to everything within the vicinity. 

The pack moved at a trot, single file, threading between trees in silence. The alpha allowed the rest of the pack to overtake it, holding a position at the end of the line next to Lotus, its massive shoulders rolling with each step. Lotus expected its brushes against the surrounding trees to make noise as it did earlier, but instead its coat seemed to merge with the shadows around it, slipping through the foliage without a sound. She matched the pack’s rhythm as best she could, watching the way each wolf stepped with no wasted movement.

Every so often the pack would slow without any visible signal, spreading out laterally across the ground, ears angling in different directions. Noses went down, then up, then swept sideways. The animals were reading something that Lotus couldn't even perceive, an entire layer of information she had no access to.

The alpha paused with them and waited, and Lotus waited beside it.

Then the pack would draw together and move again. They did this four or five times over the course of what felt like an hour. The wolves were listening to not just the ground, but the forest itself.

On the sixth stop, something changed.

A wolf near the middle of the pack, a lean grey wolf with a notch in her left ear, had its nose at ground level, moving in short incremental sweeps. Then it stopped and lifted its head, holding it at an angle facing east, into a section of forest where the trees grew close together and the undergrowth thickened.

One by one, the rest of the pack copied its movements, including the giant wolf and Lotus.

Under the lead of the scarred ear wolf, the pack began moving east, the single file fanning out into a broad front. Their trot became a careful walk, and Lotus finally caught a glimpse of their prey.

A young buck stood in a gap between two large oaks, grazing at something along the ground. His antlers were just beginning to come in, still soft and uneven. He hadn't registered anything yet. His tail flicked once.

The lead wolf went still at the treeline, with the other wolves forming a loose crescent around their target before stopping.

The only movement in the whole forest was the buck's jaw, working side to side.

Lotus felt herself go still too, holding the breath in her chest.

Then the lead wolf exploded out of the trees.

The pack poured after her from three sides at once, a black surge through the ferns. The buck launched sideways, almost vertical, and bolted north with his legs fully extended, covering ground at a pace that should have been impossible for something that startled a moment ago. The wolves chased in a loose, stretched cluster, the fastest ones pulling ahead.

The alpha followed from behind, not participating in the hunt.

Lotus jogged alongside it, watching the pursuit disappear into the dark. The sounds faded and grew and faded again, a chaotic percussion of paws against earth and the snap of undergrowth that moved in one direction and then went quiet.

By the time they arrived, it was already over.

The wolves were spread around the carcass in the small clearing where it had gone down. Lotus’ steps faltered when she approached the buck on its side, its throat savagely torn out.

She saw flashbacks to Rose and the other children lying lifeless in the mud, a scene she had forcefully suppressed since she woke up on the riverbank. She tried to control her breathing, but it inevitably quickened. 

She sat down hard in the grass, arms wrapped around her knees, teeth pressing together until her jaw ached. She squeezed her eyes shut and focused on the feel of the cold ground under her palms, trying to stay in the present and keep the dark memories at bay.

Something warm pressed against the side of her face.

The alpha had lowered its head and rested its muzzle against her cheek, whiskers tickling her hair. Then the wolf nudged her, not roughly, pointing her in the direction of the carcass.

Lotus shook her head.

The wolf lay down behind her. Lotus turned around to look at it, then scooted backwards to lean into its fur. It felt like falling into a thick blanket, mildly rough but extremely warm. The wolf tacitly allowed it, letting out a quiet snort. Its breathing was very slow, a deep rhythmic movement that she could feel against her back, a steadiness that could anchor her to the present. 

She mimicked the breathing patterns of the alpha while listening to the wolves eating in the dark. They were just fulfilling their role as part of the Heavenly Dao. There was nothing wrong with the scene before her, but she didn’t want to acknowledge it. She didn’t want to acknowledge that brutal scenes like the one before her were part of the cycle that she placed all of her hopes on. But wolves have a right to eat, just like anything else. Deep down, she knew that tomorrow she would most likely have to be a perpetrator of that scene if she wanted to live.

When she finally looked up, the clearing was quieter. Most of the wolves were finishing up, licking their paws or milling at the edges of the clearing. In the time she spent laying in the giant wolf’s coat, the pack had carved the buck into a lone white sculpture with budding horns.

Lotus let out a long, unsteady breath, and slowly walked over to the bony remains of the buck.

“We r-return a life to the earth, to be preserved until the I-Immortals return.”

She tried to stutter as little as possible, her eyes only stopping on the carcass for a brief moment. She ran back and jumped at the giant wolf, latching into the fur on its side like a baby possum, refusing to let go.

The wolf glanced back at her, as if deliberating, but in the end it let out a humph. It signaled for the pack to depart, then leapt into the night.

Lotus peeked her head out of the alpha’s fur as it began to slow down, seeing a massive cave up ahead. The cave was built into the base of a slope where the rock face jutted out of the earth at a low angle. The entrance was tall and wide enough for the alpha to pass through without ducking, surrounded by brush that had been packed against the stone over a long time, worn into a threshold more than a camouflage. The cave beyond it went back further than the dark allowed her to see.

As they entered, she heard small sounds halfway between whines and grunts, the sounds of small animals demanding things from a world that hadn't yet taught them how cold it could be. When the wolves began filtering in, the sounds grew louder, then turned into frenzied shuffling and small bodies tumbling over each other.

There were seven pups, varying shades of grey and brown and one very round black one that looked like it was mostly fur. They swarmed the returning adults, shoving their noses under chins and batting at tails. Several of the adult wolves crouched and allowed their pups to feed, mouths open, giving back what they had taken in the forest.

Lotus watched this as the alpha walked past, settling down at the far end of the cave. It curled inward slowly until Lotus was tucked inside the curve of it, surrounded by black fur that smelled of pine. 

Lotus kept thinking of the wolves feeding the pups. It reminded her of her father coming home with meat for her and Rose, each day carrying the promise of something new. She wanted to become someone as dependable as her father, but what did that look like? She had thought she knew the answer, but now she wasn’t so sure.

When her father hunted, he tried to keep the prey in as little pain as possible and paid his respects to the fallen creature. Lotus didn’t understand the importance of this until later that day, seeing the tortured corpses of the village children. The wolves didn’t care about such rituals. They tore out the buck’s throat the first chance they got, causing it to die a painful death. 

But what else could they do?

Wolves didn’t have a choice in their way of life. From the moment they were born, if they didn’t become hunters, the pack would most likely abandon them and they would die alone in the wild. The savage scene she saw earlier may have inflicted pain on the buck, but for the wolves it was a desperate fight for their own survival. Lotus now understood that it was part of their Dao.

But what was her own Dao? As something more than human but not quite Immortal, she existed outside of the Heavenly Dao, but she still needed a way of life. Was she able to adopt the Dao of another species? 

Lotus snuggled deeper into the alpha’s coat, quietly turning these thoughts over in her head. At least for today, she could find comfort in the shadow of the wolf.