Wolf’s roar echoes through the forest. Even after she stops making the sound, even after she closes her maw and hides her fangs, the roar still echoes. Shit, Wolf thinks quietly, as she acknowledges they had already crossed some line that could not easily be uncrossed. 

Raven is flying up among the sycamore trees. He cannot remember starting to soar, making a conscious decision to, but as soon as Wolf’s voice booms, he finds himself flying, shooting up between branches, so fast Wolf could never hope to jump after him. Not that she tries anymore. At the very least, Wolf learned that chasing Raven only makes things worse, barking at him. He lands atop the nearest tree, the hidden forces in him reaching something of an equilibrium between running from and to her. Vised, he turns to look at his lover. She is frozen too, like him, looking up with guilt in her eyes for having let her frustration get the best of her again, a twin to Raven’s guilt over running away. 

Wolf watches Raven as he freezes, and something in her heart breaks, like it always breaks, seeing him afraid of her. She wonders if she could ever censor herself enough, restrain herself enough, to become something Raven isn’t afraid of. “Raven,” she apologizes, and even in her softest tone Wolf’s voice spreads easily through the woods. “Let’s get some water.”

Raven wonders if he will ever be brave enough to hear her roar without running. If that’s something that he’s even capable of, something worth trying to achieve. “Yeah,” he finally agrees. “I don’t think we’re going to make much more progress here.” Progress in what, though? He can’t even remember what they had even been fighting over… Oh, that. It seems so meaningless now, so trivial. But all of their fights are like that, starting from something trivial and turning into an explosion of primal energy. They are, after all, animals. He takes one leap towards Wolf, landing on a slightly lower branch, then another, and though he is still afraid, there is something in him that cannot leave Wolf hurting, even if the only way to ease her pain is to overcome his own. She loves him so much, he knows. She didn’t mean anything. Hell, she didn’t even do anything. And yet, as he finally lands on the earth, he does so at a distance from her. 

Wolf allows herself to soften. No, not allows, she does everything that she can to look less threatening – moving slowly, speaking in her softest voice, keeping her fangs hidden. But there is only so much she could do. She would stop being a wolf if she could. She turns to walk, knowing that it will be easier for Raven to go alongside her then towards her, at least until he relaxes. He flies, lands by her side, walks a little, flies again. 

They. In the light of the rising sun sifting through the pine trees, Wolf’s eyes search for the relief of spring flowers. Raven’s eyes look up, searching for predatory birds. 

They approach a stream, shallow enough that Wolf could pass it by walking, narrow enough that Raven could make it with one flap of his wings. Wolf reaches the water first, and lowers her mouth to drink. She plunges her tongue into the water, drinking in an unbroken rhythm of smacks and gulps.

Raven joins her by the bank, slightly closer than he was before, and drinks too; He drinks intermittently, looking around between sips. Even with Wolf’s protection, it is not something he can stop doing. He isn’t thirsty, he notices. He drinks because it is something they do, something other than fighting. He finds himself looking at the water. “Wolf,” he asks, his voice a little distant. “Do you ever see something in the water? When you’re not drinking, that is.”

Wolf stops and gives him a confused look. “Do you mean fish?”

Raven shakes his head. “No, not inside of the water. On the surface.”

Wolf claws at the surface of the water, not understanding. “I don’t see anything. “

Raven shakes his head. “No, don’t touch it. As soon as you touch the water it’s gone. Don’t you see it?”

“No.” Wolf gives up. “What do you see?”

“Here, look now; can you see that right below us? It looks like there’s another Raven in there. Who is that guy? Hey you, I’m talking to you, get out of here before I get down there and make you.”

Wolf squints, but doesn’t quite manage to see the thing that Raven is talking about. A little way from them, on the other bank, a stork coughs uncomfortably. Wolf and Raven raise their heads to look at her. 

“Raven,” Stork says. “Wolf. Not too hungry, are you?”

“We ate today, Stork,” Wolf says. “Relax.”

Stork folds her wings, finding a delicate balance on one long leg, somewhat assured they meant her no harm. “I met a monkey once,” she says, matter-of-fact-ly. “Far, far away from here, in a place that is nothing like this place. And the monkey said that when you look into the quiet water, you see something that is called ‘the self’, though, for the life of me, I couldn’t understand what he meant. The monkey tried to explain, went on and on, but the more he spoke, the less I understood.”

Raven had never seen a monkey, though he had always wanted to. “Monkeys are like humans, aren’t they?” The latter were another source of fascination for him.

The stork points her bill towards Raven, happy to answer. “No no, monkeys aren’t any danger, not really, as long as you keep a safe distance and don’t listen to them talking for too long, huh! And they will tell you the wildest things, the most crazy nonsense that you will not even belie-“

A flash of red bursts from the bushes, so quick Stork barely spreads her wings before it latches on to her neck. All teeth and ears and tail, Fox puts Stork’s neck against the ground. 

“Um, I’d really rather you didn’t-” Stork manages to say before Fox wrings her neck between his jaws, leaving her head lulling. 

Raven gives out a terrified cry, and again Wolf’s heart clenches. “Fox! I’ll bite your face off!”

“Ok, ok, I’m leaving,” Fox said with a mouthful of neck. “Nice to meet you too, Wolf,” he lets out a high pitched giggle, and winks. “Raven.”

Wolf can’t help but bare her teeth, stand her fur on end. “Faces and fangs, Fox. Watch it.”

Raven is, of course, more afraid of Wolf then he is of Fox. He knows that Wolf will protect him from Fox, but who will protect him from Wolf?

Wolf lets her eyes off Fox as he drags Stork into the bushes, and as she turns to look at Raven she sees him further away now, ready to take flight. “Sorry,” she says.

“It’s fine.”

“Are you ok?”

“Yeah, just give me a minute. Are we ok?”

Wolf nods. “Yes. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry too.” Raven takes a hop towards Wolf, and Wolf becomes more still, turning her head away, making it a little easier for Raven.

The sun inches up the sky, and as the wind moves the pine trees, rays the color of egg yolk brush Wolf’s brown fur. “I have to go,” she says sadly. “See you tonight?

“I hope so,” Raven answers quickly. “Where are you off to?”

“Meeting Bear. He’s visiting today.”

“Oh, Bear, I haven’t seen him in a long time. What are you going to do?”

“We’ll see.” Wolf looks at the cliff a little way away and above them. It is the edge of an elevated plateau, where a stream turns into a waterfall, turning to a smaller stream leading all the way to Wolf and Raven’s feet. “Climb, probably.” 

“You’ve been talking about it for a while,” Raven says as he looks at the cliff. Raven can’t climb – he can easily fly up the cliff, though, and doesn’t really understand what the big deal is about going about it the slow way. Perhaps Wolf just wanted to be alone with Bear and talk about predator things. No point being jealous about it. 

Wolf sees Raven’s face turn, only a tiny fraction of an angle. She wants to say something, but she doesn’t find anything good. “Yeah,” she exhales finally. “What about you?”

“I’m going to see Hoopoe.”

“Oh, have fun,” Wolf says. Hoopoe had always made her opinion clear on Wolf as a partner for Raven. Wolf hadn’t held a grudge… but she didn’t like her either. 

Raven takes a little hop towards Wolf, and as he does she turns her head to nudge him with her nose, startling him and making him flap his wings and take two hurried flaps away. Nothing left to be said, they both leave.

#

Raven flies swiftly up the hills, staying low as he always does when he’s afraid. Hoopoe would find him for herself, obviously – there was no reason to go looking for a bird. In the meantime, Raven flies. There is something left in him, after the fight. Something refuses to let go of him, no matter how quickly he runs, how far away from the danger he gets. Not that Wolf herself is the danger, of course. What is the danger, then?

“Raven!” Hoopoe chirps from above. “Found you!”

Raven does a quick barrel, looking up to find the black, white and orange pattern of his friend’s wings, and lands on an oak’s branch. “Hello, Hoopoe.”

Hoopoe lands in the tall grass, her mohawk spreads and folds quickly as looks at Raven up close. “Oh, Raven, what happened? Have you been fighting again?”

Raven pouts. He hoped it wasn’t that obvious. “It wasn’t a fight, not really.”

Hoopoe makes a leap with a small flap of her wings, the contrast of her wings flashing again as she lands on a fallen branch. “Looks like one to me,” she says, and there is a trace of admonishment in her little black eyes.

“Maybe,” Raven admits. “How are you doing, though?”

“Not too bad,” she says, and the feathers on top of her head unfold again, spanning from the back to the front of her head. “Heard a lot of things, said a lot of things. A lot of birds pass through these parts, bringing gossip and news.”

Raven is happy to hear that, and his ears prop up. “Made a lot of friends?” 

“Hardly,” Hoopoe laughs. “You know I don’t play nice with others.”

“Well, I’m glad to have you here.”

“Thanks, Raven, I’m glad to be here. Now will you tell me what’s up?”

“Nothing’s ‘up’. It’s Wolf… We just seem to find ourselves in these uncomfortable spots.”

“That’s not new, is it?”

“No, but it gets worse. At the time, it used to be that every time we had a fight,we’d just let it cool off and get back to normal. But now, it seems like the fight itself adds to the weight of the initial problem. Every time something starts, it just gets worse and worse.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, when Wolf gets angry at something, there’s an anger in her that you just can’t compare to. Even when she tries to be quiet and gentle she’s, well, still a Wolf. It’s not something you can just stand next to. It’s intense.”

“And is that before or after it spirals?”

“That’s before. After she gets angry, I just have to get away from her. At first it was no big deal, but now it seems to only make her angrier. Our fights are not even about the thing itself, but about the anger, about how I run away from her, and it’s somehow always my fault for leaving her angry.”

“That sounds terrible,” Hoopoe says, tilting her head to the side. “I’m sorry.”

“Thanks. I just… I don’t understand why it’s that big of a deal. When I fly, I just fly.”

“And what does she do when you do?”

“Well, she stopped jumping after me.”

Hoopoe hides her long beak under her wing for a moment. In embarrassment, but not without sympathy. “She just really doesn’t get it, does she?”

“Yeah! I mean, why does she think I’m running from her?”

“Well, why are you running from her?” Hoopoe makes it clear that she has a very clear answer in mind. 

“You’re not being fair, Hoopoe.”

Hoopoe hops off the branch, flies in a little circle in little bursts of flapping, then folds her wings to herself and lands on the same branch where Raven sits. “Why not?”

“Because it’s not Wolf’s fault that she is a hundred times my weight. That she chases when she sees something getting away. She’s a canine.”

“You’re not wrong…” Hoopoe let the hidden meanings of the statement hang. 

“I love her, Hoopoe. You only hear about our fights, you don’t know what it’s like to just… be beside her.”

“I’m not saying you don’t love. I believe that you do. I just think, if you loved someone that wasn’t one bad day away fro-“

Raven’s wings, as if on their own, take him away from there. Hoopoe flies behind him, not exactly taking chase, but not letting him leave either. “Raven, wait!”

#

Wolf is walking alongside the river, towards the cliff, when she catches a whiff of Bear’s smell. A pleasant coincidence, that Bear got here at the same time as Wolf? Probably not. Bear has a tendency to lazily arrive exactly where it would serve him best. 

Wolf follows the scent until she finally finds Bear, scratching himself against a rock in a clearing, enjoying the sunlight, his eyes closed with pleasure. Wolf approaches. “Bear! What’s up?”

Bear’s head turns a single degree, taking a long whiff through his nose. “Wolf. It’s good to see you,” he says, but his eyes don’t open. They rarely do – Bear doesn’t often bring his full attention to any particular thing. 

“I’ve been well. You?”

“Yeah, I’m doing well.” Bear tilts his head another degree, rotating his gaze, and Wolf feels his intense attention on her. “Something’s wrong, though,” he isn’t asking. 

Wolf admits with a grunt, but says nothing further. “How about you, Bear. What have you been up to?”

“The same as every winter, a long dream of blood and sunlight and honey; nothing of import. Let’s walk together, Wolf,” Bear says, dropping his body forward and hitting the soft soil with his front paws, his eyes finally open. His nostrils flutter as he takes in a breath, as if taking the entire forest into himself. “Do you still want to climb the cliff?”

“That’s what I said last time, didn’t I?” Wolf’s voice comes out as a snarl.

“Very well.” Bear either ignores the aggression, or genuinely doesn’t notice it, lifting into the sunlight a muzzle so heavy it is not a muzzle at all. “You talk to Raven that way, too?”

“You know I don’t.”

“And why is that?”

Wolf is at a loss of words for a moment. They start walking, and Wolf finds the words, the mood to speak them. “The thing about Raven, is that he eats plants, you know?”

“I eat plants, too.”

“It’s not the same.”

Bear lets the question hang in the air, but he might as well have asked aloud. 

“The first time I met you you took my kill, saying that you would throw me off a cliff if I didn’t give it up.”

Bear smiles at the memory. “A fawn, wasn’t it? I took it because I could, just as ravens tear rats to shreds when they find them. What do you mean to say, Wolf?”

“I mean that I’m a wolf. When I get angry, I snarl and bark. And every time I do, Raven can’t handle it. He just… goes away. Not just physically.”

“He’s afraid of you,” Bear says plainly.

“No, he knows that I love him. It’s just there’s this instinct in him, one he can’t control.”

“Yes, and that instinct has a name.”

Wolf raises a lip, exposing a fang. “Ok, clever-fangs.”

Bear tilts his head, the closest thing to an apology he is capable of. “Go on.”

“When I was a cub, that’s how my siblings and I worked things out. We’d snarl, we’d bite and thrash. It wasn’t even considered a fight until somebody bled.”

Bear gives the words a moment to ring as they keep walking. In front of them, the cliff grows nearer with every step, growing taller. “What was Raven’s family like? How do you think they worked things out?”

“I don’t know. I guess they just cawed at each other from a distance. They don’t even have teeth to threaten each other with.”

“So, what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know, Bear. What’s on your mind?”

“When I dreamed, Wolf, and I saw many things. Many animals, with many different problems.”

“Hm?”

“And I saw that animals solve things by letting them happen. We roar when we want to roar, we hug when we want to hug. Many different problems, many different instincts. But that’s the thing about animals.”

“What do you mean?” Wolf said, her voice slightly lower. 

“You have never seen a human, have you, Wolf?” Bear asks, and Wolf doesn’t even finish shaking her head before he continues. “Terrifying things, they are,” Bear says in a quiet voice Wolf had never heard from him before. “Just the sight of them…”

“Have you seen one? I didn’t know you traveled away from these woods.”

“I didn’t.” There is sadness in Bear’s voice, a rejection of Wolf’s admiration. “My mother wasn’t born in this forest. She migrated here, as strange as it sounds, and when I was a little cub she told me about humans. The only time I’ve seen her scared. It has a way of appearing out of nowhere, she said, cutting through the flow of things. You can’t prepare for it. By the time you smell it, it’s already there. If it comes, it comes, and that’s that.”

“Are we still talking about Raven?” Wolf says, and stops at the bottom of the rock wall. 

“I’m saying we shouldn’t go about this like humans. I have a feeling… We should climb, and let things happen as they do.” Then, Bear places a single clawed paw on the first step of the cliff, and something changes in his demeanor. A certainty. They are going to climb, that’s for sure. 

#

Raven flies deeper into the forest, even arriving at the same ravine that Wolf and him drank from in the morning, a little way down-stream. He swoops low over it, catches a glimpse of the thing in the water, and makes a series of turns among the tree. That would have slowed almost any predator down – but hoopoe is not a predator, Raven remembers. He lands on a branch and Hoopoe, flying as she does in little bursts and drops, joins him by his side.

“Sorry,” Raven says as he stops, panting.

“It’s alright,” Hoopoe says, as she lands on a small rock. “I understand.”

“Thanks,” Raven says, not sure if there was an implication in those words.

“It’s not that big of a deal,” Hoopoe says. “If you don’t want to be somewhere, just don’t be there.”

“But I do want to be there, Hoopoe. It’s just… That I don’t feel like she lets me. She’s not making it easy, most of the time.”

“And have you told her that?”

“Of course I told her that.”

“And she hasn’t changed?”

“It’s not that easy to change.”

“Isn’t it? I used to be an egg,” Hoopoe says. “And look at me now. Do I look like an egg?”

“That’s not the same thing.” 

“We can all change, if we want to enough, it’s just a matter of –“

Hoopoe is interrupted by a tremor in the ground, a shake so violent the branch they stand on almost throws them over, and Hoopoe lets herself fall off, spreading her wings. Raven bends his knee, preparing to flee again, but he doesn’t know where to.

“I’m going to see what it is,” Hoopoe says, and shoots upwards.

#

The climbing starts easy, the incline shallow, and Wolf doesn’t even have to use her claws to hold on. She looks for a stepping stone, climbs to it, then looks for the next one. Though they are both slowly going upwards, Wolf’s and Bear’s motion are completely different things – Bear seems to just walk up, as if the inclined wall is nothing more than a rocky ground.

They soon get into a rhythm, a pace. They say nothing more as they go. Both have a lot to think about. Or maybe it’s just Wolf. Maybe Bear isn’t thinking about anything at all. Who knows.

They are halfway to the top of the cliff when Wolf’s nostrils catch a whiff of an unfamiliar scent. Something she had never smelled before. Something indescribable, like an animal but not like an animal, like a mineral, but not like a mineral. The foreignness of the thing is enough to make Wolf shiver – but she cannot turn her head. Her predatory eyes are focused forward, and with the way she is climbing on the cliff, practically standing on two legs, she cannot turn her head from the wall. “Bear!” She calls.

“Yes?” Bear says, his intonation seemingly tranquil, but there is something wrong in the way it rings. He is frozen a little way above her, standing firmly on nearly nothing but the meagerest stone step, looking at the clearing below them, behind Wolf. 

“What do you see?”

But Bear doesn’t answer. He looks at the thing behind Wolf, and his lower lip trembles. 

#

Hoopoe flies up and as soon as she is above the trees, she makes a sound that Raven had never heard her make before. A frightened clicking sound, so loud it hurts Raven’s ears. 

“What is it?” Raven asks, his own voice surprising him in its shrillness.

“I don’t know,” she says as she looks down at Raven, flapping her wings to stay still. “But I don’t like it.”

“What is it?” Raven finds himself asking again. “An animal?”

“I don’t know,” Hoopoe now flies in circles, confused, then dives back under the cover of the trees, landing near Raven. “I don’t think so.”

“Tell me something!” Raven screams.

Hoopoe shakes her head from side to side, panicked. “It’s moving.”

“Here?” The ground shakes, as if something large beyond belief is crawling out of it. Through the trees, Raven sees, but does not recognize, a skyscraper erecting, reaching for the sky.

“No, towards the cliff.”

“Are you sure?” 

She flies up again and quick bursts, and dives quickly back to safety. “Yes, it’s moving right to it.”

The ground shakes again, so violently it makes Raven hop. “Hoopoe, what if that’s a human? If a human reaches the cliff, it will destroy it completely.”

“Do you think so? There’s no one up there but birds, and we can take care of ourselves.”

Raven Freezes in horror. He’s afraid of saying the words aloud – as long as he doesn’t say it, there is a way that they remain unreal. But this no time to be a coward. “Wolf and Bear! Wolf said they might go climb! What if it catches them when they are on the wall?”

“Raven, you don’t know if that’s-”

“Can you see them from here?”

“No, my eyes can only see up close. Listen, they might have not even started to climb-“

“I’m not leaving this up to chance.” Raven’s voice is resolute, surprising him.

“What do you mean?” Hoopoe asks, worried.

But instead of answering, he starts flying. Still low, taking cover among the trees, but in a direction that will eventually take him out of the woods, towards the cliff – an interception trajectory of the human. He flies, as fast as always, but he isn’t flying away. 

Hoopoe screams after him as she goes. “Raven! Raven, have you lost it? That thing is a human!”

“You. Don’t. Have. To. Come,” Raven shoots. His entire body is compressed with each powerful flapping, his breath restricted by the rhythmic contortion of his entire torso. 

“What the hell are you going to do?” 

Raven has to admit that it is a good question. He has no idea.

#

“A human,” Bear finally says, his voice quiet and so horrified she’d expect his legs to shake. But Bear’s legs never shake. 

“Is it coming towards our direction? For the cliff?”

“Yes.”

Wolf’s fur rustles, puffs. Her body bends in ways, ready to pounce, but there is nowhere to pounce, nothing to attack there on the wall. “I’m going to get back down. I’m going to fight it.”

“No, you’re not,” Bear says in a mix of authority and shock.

“Then, what the hell do we do?”

“We climb. Run away from it.”

“No,” Wolf’s voice is defiant. “I’m going back. I’m going to kill that thing.”

Bear seems shaken out of his shock as he looks down at Wolf. “Wolf, you can’t beat it.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Wolf roars, looking at the thing. “I’ll give it something to think about, if it likes thinking so much.” She speaks the words, and she knows them to be true. She will fight that thing even if she doesn’t know whether she will win, Wolf thinks as she looks down in search of flat points to step on, and there is no regret in her heart.

“Fine,” Bear says, and his voice softens. “What do you want me to tell Raven?”

Wolf looks up, her expression tormented. “You’re not helping, Bear. What am I supposed to do?”

“Don’t fight it. Run. Just this once. For him.”

Wolf grinds her teeth, clenches her claws, and then, with great effort, finds the next flat point above her and prepares to leap towards it. She starts running away.

#

“Raven, do you have any idea what you’re doing?” Hoopoe chirps.

“I’m figuring it out.” Am I? He wonders.

Hoopoe flies above Raven and chirps higher and higher “Are you crazy? Do you have a brain worm or something?”

“I need your help, Hoopoe. I need to think.”

“Think? What is there to think about?”

“How to scare away a human.”

Raven leaves the safety of the trees as he reaches the meadow, his line of sight to the human no longer interrupted, though Raven wishes it had been.

It is an awesome thing, silver and reflecting the rays of the mid-morning sun, naked of fur or feathers, slick, standing tall, taller than the tallest trees on its two shaky legs. Around it, a whirlwind of transformation takes place – trees turning into telephone poles, resting boulders disintegrating and re-integrating into squat suburban houses or towering skyscrapers. Railways sprout around it in unnatural, straight angles, leading from a coal mine to a power plant, which sprouts power cables that snake all the way towards the houses and skyscrapers, making a city grow around it as it walks. Not that Raven can understand any of that. He just watches in horror as it walks, and unnatural things grow around it.

And as it walks, its shoulder slams against one of the shiny, tall buildings that was unlucky enough to sprout right ahead of it, breaking a chunk of it, showring the ground with a rain of glass. 

How could it not see it? Raven wonders. Was it not looking? Raven flies towards the human, closer and closer, over train tracks, between a museum and a Starbucks, stops when he reaches the field of glass shards, most of them bigger than he is. He stares at the unnatural material, seeing the other Raven more clearly than he ever had before. “Do you know what I should do?” They ask each other. Raven hates that guy so much.

But there is no time for that – he has to direct the human away from Wolf. He doesn’t know how – he can’t come any closer, and for now the human doesn’t notice him, looking ahead of itself, turning a patch of forest into an Ikea store with an adjacent parking lot.

“Hey Human. Human! I’m here!” Raven calls. It does not react. 

Hoopoe lands next to Raven. “Great. Now what?” She asks bitterly. Still, Raven finds himself emboldened, knowing that she stuck with him through this. And to save Wolf, no less.

Raven spreads his wings, crows so hard his ribs hurt. “We’re here, human! Look at us, look at us!”

Hoopoe grunts, but joins in the effort, flying into the path of the human, right in front of its head. It is a magnificent, unnatural thing, shining in the sunlight, the eyes staring unblinkingly forward. “Ayy, I’m flying here!” Hoopoe calls at the top of her tiny lungs, turns mid air, and blasts the human’s head with foul smelling liquid.

Just when Raven is about to give up, something happens. The human turns its head towards hoopoe, the excrement flowing down beside its ear. Slowly, so slowly, like its head is filled with thoughts so densely packed that it weighs it down, so dense nothing can get its attention. But in the end, they do. The Human grunts, a low, mechanical sound, like the grinding of a thousand gears, the thumping of a thousand engines, the simultaneous connection of a thousand 90’s modem routers, and Raven regrets.  He Regrets having ever called this thing’s attention, ever thinking that he would be the one to save Wolf. Regrets dragging Hoopoe into this. He clacks his beak. It is too late to run away, now. “We are here,” he says finally.

Raven chooses a piece of glass, almost as large as he is, that pierces the ground like a huge claw and remains standing. The idea is already fully formed, realized without having been thought through. He takes it in his beak and soars, laboring with each beating of his wings flies up, avoiding the glacially flailing  

“Look at me!” Raven yells through the beakful of glass, a thin, shrill sound, but with the quality of a roar. The Human’s eyes, shining orbs, are again set forward, towards the cliff, but it doesn’t matter. Raven flies right in front of them, and turns glass so that The Human couldn’t help but see the other Human on the other side. “Look at yourself!” Raven calls.

The human looks, and its face distorts with horrible disgust as it sees its own reflection. The crystalline mouth opens at an ugly angle, and it cries, an anguished, dissonant sound. Its cry is even worse than its roar. The sound echoes throughout the forest, rocking the trees and coming back from the mountains. Raven doesn’t turn away.

Then The Human explodes.

It is a final burst of transformation – The gust of wind that bursts from it and turns the glass shards into sand castles, the museums into open greenhouses, the Ikea branch into a massive treehouse. The skyscrapers transform into colorful slides coming down all the way from the cliff, one of them channeling the little waterfall into a waterslide. At the top of the water slide, Bear and Wolf stand, looking down at Raven.

“Raven!” Wolf calls, her voice carrying over the clearing. She paws the slide carefully, then places herself inside, slips, and slides down with the water.

“Wolf!” Raven shouts, and runs to the bottom end of the slide, to intercept her, avoiding the new pool of water that is forming there.

Wolf splashes into the pool of mud, and Raven leaps to her as soon as she does. Wolf catches him in a hug, carrying him out of the pool just in time to avoid Bear, who slides down the water slide, laughing, and splashes as he falls ass first into the mud.

Wolf holds Raven in her paws, not letting go, and Raven lets himself submerge in her fur, feeling as safe as ever.

Hoopoe lands. “Long time no see, sleepyhead,” she greets him.

“Long time indeed,” he answers. “Well, that was something.”

“It certainly was,” Hoopoe answers as stands up. “But it’s over now.”

#

Raven and Wolf are alone in the forest again, what’s left of it. Wolf strides with her nose to the ground, following the day-old tracks of an elk with mild interest, while Raven is up at the trees, looking for abandoned nests.

“Raven,” Wolf says suddenly. “How did you kill The Human, back then?”

He lifts his head, looks at her. It’s not that Raven doesn’t remember, it’s more that he can’t hold on to that idea, that shining glimpse of… something else, neither animal, mineral or human. He shakes his head. “I don’t know. Humans are weird.”

What does it matter, anyway, Wolf thinks, and lays down in a sunny patch. “Ok. Could you scratch between my shoulder blades? I got a wicked itch back there.”

“Sure.” Raven hops down, stopping with a flap, and starts combing Wolf’s fur until he finds what he was looking for. “Oh my. That’s a juicy tick if I ever saw one. This one’s going to hurt, so don’t snarl at me again.”

“I won’t.” And she doesn’t. Not this time. She clenches her teeth as he rips the parasite away. “I’m grateful.” She is. Not just for the tick, but for being close together in the spring sun, for trusting each other.

“Pleasure’s all mine,” Raven says after gulping the fat tick down, and he too, means more. 

Raven and Wolf enjoy the silence together. There will be more disasters to save each other from, more fights to resolve, but that’s in the future. Right now, they love each other very much, and they live happily ever after.