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No one truly understood what it was like to guard the Wolf Door until it was their turn.
The dark, dank cave a mile below the palace was as cut off as a ship out at sea and a steady drip of water echoed around the cavern like the tick of a clock, drip,drip, dripping rhythmically against the stone. There were no other sounds.
When Jun had stood at the bottom of the staircase, his father at his shoulder, the silence was the first thing he noticed. He had heard the stories of those guarding the Wolf Door. Some were fine, served their six months and exited with little fanfare despite the mark of honor guarding the Wolf Door bestowed upon them. Some were driven mad by the solitude and the silence other than the drip, drip, drip into that pool of cave water. They came out disgraced, understood that their minds were too weak to withstand the cold loneliness, shattered to reflect pieces of themselves they didn’t recognize and would speak to in their desperation for a companion in conversation. It was always apparent who hadn’t made it immediately upon entering the room. Always muttering to themselves, almost dead to the outside world, the soldiers they had served with and had been respected by biting their tongues and grief staining their hearts as they could only watch the mad ravings of a comrade or captain long gone.
My captain was the bravest man I knew and I believed he would come back to us, victorious. I never thought I would see him in such a pitiful state.
It could happen to anyone who guarded the Door. They knew the risk and took it anyway, for the honor far outweighed the consequence. Recognition from the Smiling Son himself was a blessing from the heavens, no station barred and nowhere one couldn’t go and no one who could look down upon a previous guard of the Wolf Door.
The risk was no risk at all in Jun’s young mind. His mind couldn’t be broken by such a menial task. He was the favored son of the First Terror, a Red Peacock who had taken his first kill by the tender age of eight. His father’s love had nurtured him into a monster he reveled in, trained him to be the right hand of the First Terror, honed him into a cold-blooded killer and the proof tattooed into his skin. The red peacock feather graced on the cheekbones of a man struck fear into any who encountered them. The Red Peacocks were known for their utter devastation and few who met them would pass judgement and survive.
So when it was Jun’s turn to guard the Door, he had no worries, no fears in his heart. It was six months in a cave for a lifetime of accolades and honor, how hard could it truly be compared to the trials he faced at his father’s side? He promised his father he would be alright and they would celebrate in six months’ time when Jun would emerge unchanged.
The whispers started only a month in.
They were screams by two.
The once arrogant young prince had entered a fool and would return a lunatic.
The resentful dead had not slipped into the Sleeping Sea for they had unfinished business with the prince of the Red Peacocks who had cut their lives short and in this space, they would not be ignored.
I had cried out, desperately, “Please, don’t hurt my baby!” I begged even as my own lungs filled with blood, dribbling from my lips. My baby was my everything.
Jun remembered her and had felt nothing slicing through the soft, little thing. Nothing when he slipped his blade across her throat, cutting off her pathetic pleas for good, a few stray droplets staining his wrist.
I had screamed with everything I had left, “I’ll kill you!” This monster had taken everything from me and I would make him pay.
He hadn’t, there wasn’t a peasant soul who could even lay a hand on him. Jun remembered the acrid tang of smoke and the smoldering heap of burnt wood and burnt bodies. There was no remorse laying the farmer out next to the corpses of his family before running his chest through with a blade. He didn’t even blink as the blood spurted upwards, coating his bare hands and splattering his face.
The little boy who had no words, only stuttered breaths and heaving pants. He had been running, barefoot, as fast his little legs could take him. Where he thought he could go to hide wasn’t any of Jun’s concern. One quick aim and the boy was on the ground, screaming, an arrow with blood red fletching sticking straight from his back. It hurts! It hurts! Jun liked to be as prepared as possible for any fight, which meant conserving arrows where he could. He was unrepentant and unthinking, pulling the arrow out and shoving it back in through the boy’s heart until his screams died out. It went back into the quiver, a trickle of blood slipping down through his fingers.
The old man who had begged for his life. There was blood on Jun’s hands.
The twin sisters who had been hiding under an empty boat. There was blood on Jun’s hands.
The one-armed disgraced soldier who quietly fell to his knees.
There was blood on Jun’s hands.
He could see it now, his hands were red, were dripping with the lives he had taken. Hundreds upon thousands of lives had stained his hands so thoroughly, no matter how often he would sit at the cave pool and scrub his hands raw. All the while, they all came back, reminding him of every story, of how they had screamed and begged for mercy, haunting his fraught dreams when he finally crashed after days of not sleeping.
They screamed at all hours of the days and nights in that cave, calling for his death, tormenting him for every woe he dared have, picking and pulling at every weakened point in Jun’s mind. By month three, Jun knew he was on the verge of madness, could feel every fissure growing wider by the day, the gaps in his memory growing as he would lay in the dark and in the silence and just accept the vitriol from his ghosts.
It was only when he would hold fast to the hilt of his sword, staring at the blade in some degree of horror at this object that felt so right in his hands, that he would think about listening. About dragging the fine, sharpened edges of the blades across his own throat. Stabbing his through the bones in his hand and pinning it to the dirty floor of the cave. Tracing the lines of his ribs and carving out his ribcage piece by piece. Slicing the meat off of his muscled calves. Biting through the flesh on his arms. Cutting open his abdomen to see if his insides were as monstrous as the outsides.
It was then when he heard her.
She told him he wasn’t all lost. That Jun could repent, could help a cause larger than himself that would benefit the people of the land. He would never see the light, but he could work towards forgiveness.
She was the Moon Goddess, held within the chamber beyond the Wolf Door, imprisoned by a moon rock trap, dimming, suppressing her power. If Jun helped her, brought her to the eastern sea to reunite with the Ocean, she could return to the sky and the nights would be bathed in her light once again, driving away the monsters that held the night captive now. If he helped her, he could repent for the lives he had taken.
Once planted in his mind, this idea took root and spread throughout his very being. He had done so much wrong, had walked a path bathed in blood, but even if there was no good ending for him, he could still do good. He vowed that he would never kill another soul and she found it cute at the moment, how he believed he could hold to a promise like that with the journey ahead of him.
Jun knew with certainty that a trip like this meant death for the Moon Goddess who was the coveted prisoner of the palace could not just walk out of this cave without the whole palace coming down upon them. He knew the chances of outrunning, outsmarting his own father were slim. Especially if the woman he was smuggling away was his Mother, Jun’s grandmother. Having the Moon Goddess as a Mother meant power. She was the Mother of all the Ossa Emperors and Mother to the First and Second Terrors. They had all received her gift at birth, power to control the world around them, physical and corporeal, making the Emperor the most powerful man alive for six generations.
For the seventh generation, however, the Moon Goddess, who had been rebelling at every turn and searching for a way out, had decided to change things up. When the bowl of the Emperor’s seed had come down to her prison, what was returned this time were two children in the bowl where there should have only been one. The twin Terrors, Saam and Luubu Ossa, had their power diminished more than any Emperor’s son before them. Saam, the First Terror, had power over the physical elements, wind, water and earth. Luubu, the Second, had power of the mind. His word was law over everyone, but his brother and father.
In the confusion and chaos, no one noticed when she kept a third of that power to myself. She would need it for her escape. And here, she was finally presented with the perfect attendant who hadn’t completely lost his mind to her touch or entirely unaffected. If they had any chance of reaching the Ocean, he would need to be stronger and faster than her sons. But first, she needed to be unchained.
The moon rock trap behind the Wolf Door was unlike the ones used by the fishermen and not so easily dismantled. It was a complex web of carefully placed moon rock suspended above the ground, keeping her down. Jun, who did not have powers and was unaffected by the moon trap was the easy solution. She only had to convince him to open the door and step inside.
It was month four of his service, when she was finally able to convince him of her plan and in the end, it was as easy as she told him it would be. The moon rocks came crashing down from the nets and the pressure she had grown so used to had lifted and she could breathe again.
Jun turned towards her body and she saw her grandson with her own old eyes for the first time outside of his dreams and visions of himself. He wore a red demon mask covering his face, but she knew his expression was one of reverence, they usually were. She was not as young as she used to be in this body, but her power could be felt in the air around them and she could see in his trembling frame that he could feel it. “Grandmother.”
Her throat was too old to work properly anymore and saving her strength was her first priority so she spoke to him through his mind. “Grandson.” She then grabbed him, yanking him towards her, a bleeding wound opening on her wrist. Knocking the mask out of the way, she held it to his lips and forced him to drink. He struggled, sputtering and pushing away at me, but she had neither the strength nor patience to deal with him fighting against me.
“Calm, boy. Drink. If we want any chance against your father and uncle, you have to be strong, you have to drink.”
His now revealed eyes widened and he obediently went slack and drank from her blood. She could hear his mind running with the idea, excitement and terror that she was giving him power that could rival his father, worry over her wellbeing, whether this was a drain she could afford. He was right about that, of course, she could only give him what she kept from his father and uncle and it would leave her weak, but it was a gamble she thought was worth it. Jun’s strength would get her home.
After he drank, she sent him back out of the prison to continue the facade while she recuperated what she had left. And the power took hold as he slept, she had no idea what shape they would take.
Jun fell asleep almost instantly just before the door, his ghosts strangely absent. His sleep was still fitful, not for the nightmares that usually plagued him, but from the discomfort of her blood settling within his veins. For twelve hours, he slept, longer than he ever had down in this dark cave, left to his own peaceful mind and rid of the ghosts for the longest time since they had appeared.
He awoke with a sniff, the dank scents of the cave filling his senses, invading in a way they never had before. With one deep breath, Jun could smell the dewy water, the damp moss that grew along the edges of the cave, the distant breeze of outside air creeping in from the staircase. The dripping noise was louder than ever and he could hear a beetle scuttling behind a rock, ears twitching at the noise. Everything was off, but in a bright way unlike how the world felt when he caught the occasional cold. Something was off, wrong.
Jun opened his eyes finally and blinked a few times, wondering what he was looking at. A sniffing, quivering nose at the end of a fur-covered muzzle, which looked like it was coming out of his own face. For a moment, he thought it might have been a piece of one of the wolf statues from inside the Wolf Door, but it was moving and it looked so real. He reached out with his hand to touch it and flinched when he felt the pressure of his own fingers where the bridge of his nose was. Should have been. He sat up abruptly with a yelp as the muzzle followed. He wrapped it with both hands and moved his hands up to his face with mounting horror. The fur was soft under his fingertips as he covered his eyes and moved up, up, up and hit his ears, sticking straight up out from his head. They twitched and he jumped. What the fuck.
Jun half-crawled, half-stumbled over to the pool and in the dim light.
A wolf stared back at him.