Chapter Text
They say Nockfell is not a normal town. They say it is born on the bones of man.
They say Nockfell was once wooded, not as it is today, with green shoots side by side with the skeletal legions of golden husks, with a roof that dances with the sunlight in whispering, singing bounces, but with the hulking might of spruces and firs that grazed the clouds and dared to enter heaven and impede God with their sheer vastness, leaving the celestial sphere impaled on their boughs. They say it was a wild place, and that strange creatures grow into gargantuan skins beneath the cover of shadows. They say it was a place doomed to tear itself apart and regrow one stage at a time, a lone phoenix rather than a generational flock, for no green grew alongside the dead leaves here, and the dead were not spared the luxury of gold.
They say a man entered here. They say it was a wild man, a tame man, a man looking to grow alongside the forest, a man looking to harness it for himself, a man driven by pride, a man driven by companionship. A man looking to change. A man looking to be changed. It does not matter what they say about him. It does not matter who he was. Not to the feral eyes of the ancient things he walked amongst.
They say he danced with the Dark, and it fell in love with him, with his approachably alien ways and insurmountably mundane ambitions, and it looked upon him not as a beast of the mind and the soul, as the savage civilities of the wolves and the owls were, but as a beast of flesh and blood. They say he sung to the Light, and it grew to respect him, with his inspiringly closed mind and insignificantly limitless intellect, and it looked upon him not as a being of the subjective and the debatable, as the composed revelries of the wolves and the owls were, but as a being of skin and bones.
In truth, he probably did neither. Just walking in the woods, leaving himself exposed and alone - perhaps humans are kinder, or maybe just more insidious, but in the wild, the lack of opposition is invitation.
They say he made love to a giant owl that swooped down from amongst the shadows and the Dark, that he tasted feathers and blood and became a wild thing of the forest. They always say “made love”. The story they tell is too kind for the brutalities of the old forest and its children.
It was, in fact, most likely not an affair of savage ecstasy and of featherdown. It was a gruesome battle of blood and of skin, and the man did not win. But that is the assumption. All that is certain, within the story, is that the man, victim of natural ferocity, nameless, faceless, blank, did not survive when, a few weeks later, a woman tore her way from his living corpse, and stood, shaking but steadfast, in the shadows and the glare of the wild. She took his body into the light, beneath the sky, and she stood, beautiful, a child of man and nature. She took the body as if it had been hers all along, from the moment he chose to enter the wild, and she gave it to the wolves who emerged from the spots in her eyes as she blinked to the sun and the Light.
They say the wolves feasted, as if they had never tasted flesh, and perhaps they never had. They say the wolves took her gift, unaware of the etiquettial influence of a gift, a concept stranger to them than the shape of the meat. They say the wolves were indebted to her, and their debt could not be fulfilled while they were wild, and yet they could not leave it behind.
So, they say, a compromise. They say the wolves must abandon their wild ways, they say the wolves became human. But, they say, the woman’s proxy had strayed too far into the woods, her mother, so she belonged to them. They say an agreement was reached, that the wolves may now be men, with all the frivolous mercy and manners that accompany it, but they are men of the forest, the vast, the wild, and the hungry.
They say the wolves and the woman became family, a tribe that called themselves the Greys in honour of the pelt they shed. They say the woman’s owlish blood runs through the veins of the wolf-daughters, and their eyes adjust far better to the Dark. They say they walk between worlds and on a knife’s edge. The edge is nothing so manufactured and thin, but it remains an edge nonetheless.
They say the Greys faded with the New Frontier, the brutality of a union that nature herself shuddered, and the wild of what was to be Nockfell faded with them.
But their legacy is not gone. Corrupted, and twisted, and gnarled into a twisted tree that no longer balances balanced worlds, but favours one in a sea of the other, far removed from the honesty and integrity of its origins, but wolf-daughters still walk and the ancient things still lie waiting, beneath the concrete and the brick of modern Nockfell. Seeking equality in a world where equity is the only honesty left, as that is all it has ever done.
They say it lies waiting. They say the bones of man are rotted. They say the skin of the wild is broken. They say the balance is shifted. They say it is hungry.