The shaman, a mendicant dreamer who survived on a diet of psychoactive fungi, arrived with a guttural chant. He was dressed in the dark robe of ceremony, ready to sing the songs of sorrow. Music to weep the defeat of the Wolf Tribe, melodies unheard in a generation. The children wept when he began beating the sad drum of the fallen, and when the fiddlers joined in, the children began to weep harder in an ululating chorus. The melody evoked the sad feeling when you lose someone dear, the younglings never lost somebody until then.
Oh, let the deeds of our fathers speak before, for we are but the repeating dreams of the Ol’father. We are all his children, mere wisps of his thought, cried the shaman and he beat the drum with power, trying to summon the spirits that he was raving about. The congregation of the last of the Wolf Tribe gathered before him underneath the rising sun. They let their rusty rifles fall onto the cold caked mud. With a raspy voice the shaman spoke without any power or authority, his speech far from the form or any form and only remotely linked with the stuff of fables.
The earth is scorched, yet it still sings of the great deeds of the Skyson performed to save our Ol’father. For he is the creator of all, having started existence by planting his seed in the Void Mother. She was killed when the Cosmos exploded out of her womb. After his murderous birth, Cosmos met with the Ol’father and swore fealty onto him. And the two built the ever-growing universe out of the Void Mother’s bones.
Finally, when all of creation was set in motion, they built an altar on a planet of sand, underneath two setting suns on a dusty, azure horizon. They put the Void Mother’s head upon it. And they prayed to her for the good of her offspring growing all around them. The two then washed their hands of her dark, shining blood. After a few uncertain cycles, life sprung, with it, hope. And soon came death, followed by despair.
Across the Milky Way life grew smart and strong on many planets. It had to grow in a world that was mostly dead, thus it became fearful and mean. Intelligence bred wickedness, beings that were capable of understanding mercy were the first to be cruel. Our world followed these terrible rules.
Terra, green and blue, enticed the Ol’father with beautiful bipedal beings that lived in trees and were beginning to hunt as the Wulf do now. The great creator visited us, for he wanted to walk alongside its creation as it took its very first steps towards godhood. The mastering of land. Seeing their cunning, he gave these beings souls fashioned from the dreams and hopes of the Void Mother so that they could understand and love him. Thus, the first humans were born.
Twelve he created and he sired three children with each. Out of this bloodline were created the behemoths, the giants and heroes of old, zmei as they were called in elder tongues, the ones that killed the beasts, cut the woods, and planted the first crops. Their kind slowly died out, killed by degeneracy and vice. A new breed of men rose, twice the weaker, but ten times more cunning. Some of them even had the Ol’father’s blood running through their veins.
These were the builders of empires, the makers of innovation, they created both freedom and greed, both compassion and oppression. Eventually, they gave all the equality to fail, while a chosen few had the kill switch for our world. The Ol’father came in the early days of the corporation and he fell in love with their twisted technology, siring schizoid children whom alongside he grew demented.
Eventually, he began merging with the machines that were all around him. His brood followed suit, growing into metal monsters that plundered each other for sport. They were half-gods that could have conquered the stars. Yet, they chose to destroy the earth, turning it into a concrete tomb. Glass towers covered the sun, and heavy rains began to fall. The seas rose, but our ancestors built platforms over it.
The Void Mother’s Ghost noticed the empty cosmic throne. She wept tears into the Forever Well, forming an egg. A soul wandering through the universe entered it. Out of this fusion, the Skyson was born to save our planet from perdition. He was trained in the arts of godhood by Cosmos, who sat on the empty throne. He could forge the emptiness of space into weapons of life. He commanded a legion of archdemons and even a squadron of arch-angels. Morpheus and Pride made a pact with him, the duties and obligations are unknowable to us.
In glory, the Skyson arrived on Earth. He came from behind the stars on a white four-winged bird. That day had two suns shining over the wicked world. The feeble things that were men of those days, half a body riddled with diseases, half machines that stopped working, died, nation by nation in mere season. The ones left quickly surrendered.
Yet, they were cockroaches and he ignored them, crushing any that bothered him. So, the half-man grew angry and asked the dark spirit technology, beginning the eternal Luciferian pursuit that fools our monkey brains. The Ol’father had been there for centuries, the inventions of man changed him. In those days, he was the Dark Machine.
Before he went after the giant steel Leviathan, the conglomerate of the remnants of the last corporations, The Skyson went hunting through the last forest, a small patch of green on a grey world.
There he met the Wolf, the last of the predators, more of a mangy mutt than a war dog, yet the beast knew the path of prey, together they hunted through the final skinny creatures. When they were fed and ready for battle, the Dark Machine murdered the wolf in his sleep. By then it was too late for this gesture to stop the motions of the Skyson for he was strong and wise enough to commune with the Spirit, summoning it onto the deadening earth.
In the last forest, he summoned the Spirit, giving it the skin of his fallen hunting brother, the wolf. And the Spirit became a giant wolf, the size of a city, taller than the tallest tower. Freethinkers and rebel spirits were inspired by it and joined the Skyson in his fight. The skull of that wolf he gave to our ancestors, the people of the caves and fallout shelters.
When the waters rose and the sky was a campfire, our people retreated with the wolves and thus we became like them. We became the Wolf. After three decades of hiding from the burning world, they left their caves in the Carp mountains. We left after the Skyson visited us in the hour of reckoning and revelation. Oh, he harrowed our lost souls in straight eternal lines. And thus to this day we grow strong even underneath the sickly rays of our pale sun.
They spliced their genes with that of the wolf, they salvaged both races. Their new breed called itself the Wolf, the new man for the modern age. As soon as our ancestor readied their nation for battle, the savior taught them his mighty plan. He told them how he had to destroy the world to open the skies and let the sun burn the world. They rose to battle the Dark Machine and his kind.
Alongside the Skyson they overcome, but only after many bloody defeats, generations of young men offered as a sacrifice for the cause. Fighting for freedom, they were enslaved in battle, a millennium of war, lifetimes spent entirely in trenches. We are a proud breed of warriors who eventually took down the Dark Machine. Out of the steel sarcophagus rose the Ol’father, pure again as he was before.
Evolution does not take prisoners: you either adapt or you die. The Wulf is a violent breed for a bloody age. We cannot afford the loneliness of our ancestors. What we have is what we scrap from the old world. Our legacy is salvage. Our future is what we reap from the waste. Every day is a battle, and every day is a fight. Yet we carry on for this day is all there is.
The Skyson blessed us with the four laws that must be observed if one is to depart for the place behind the stars where the Ol’father and Cosmos and our savior are waiting for us. Thus, I say unto thee, and it has been said before and it will be said until the end of days, my Wulf: Be brave! Be strong! Be in control! But above all else, be honorable!
Then, we went to the fields below our home of yore, fifty hundred men, armed to the teeth for our forefathers knew the first campaign would come one day. And then the shaman’s voice began to break, for he was tired, not in the body, nor the mind, but in the soul. For his soul was weary of war. More tired than it ever was. So, the tribe continued this liturgy in a broken choir.
For I am not some God that must be appeased with an offering of fire,
I bring you the fire.
Nor am I here to hold judgment over you or save you from your sins,
I am the Skyson,
and I am here to hunt and fight alongside you.
Ye Wolves are my brothers, the howl is our mother tongue.
I have arrived from the place behind the stars to kill my father
Who went mad, polluted by the demons of Industry and Coin.
I came here making no promises,
For the only thing that is promised is death.
This is the way of this world,
In the beginning, there was a void
And all things crave to return to that void.
This is what the Ol’father told me in our Hall of Silver
After we returned from hunting in the place behind the stars.
For we are dogs barking at thunder,
Howling at lighting.
The roar of thy tribe shall be heard across the ages,
Both those that will come and those that were before it.
For it is one song, connected to the world,
True and mighty, like the heart of a son of war.
All the lost souls of the many possible realities may rest knowing
That Wolf Tribe is out there.
All the shamans know its tales, and they sing this same song in many tongues.
Be it the future, be it the past, be it somewhere that never will be,
The Wolf Tribe is out there, howling with glory.
And we shall expand to bless the world with the Sky’s Song.
For we are humans, and we are coming.
Those who know me, know our quest,
Alongside your fathers, I have marched against mine.
Now, ye must keep vigil over these lands,
Ensure that they remain wild and free
True beauty lies only where there is danger.
We must keep the fire of the human heart burning,
A vigil to spite the void that slowly sucks away existence.
In the blackness that was before us,
And the one that will come after,
The flame will be forgotten, but it burned nevertheless.
And their voices trailed off into bitter cacophony. The speech gave way to lamentation. Most of the warriors were sleeping, some of them standing still. The shaman was kneeling in front of them.
