Once upon a time, in a deep dark wood, there lived a lone wolf and a proud old falcon.

From time to time, the falcon would land on a high branch and mock the wolf. “Can you not fly,” the falcon would ask, golden eyes bright. “Would you not like to see the earth as I do?”

“I cannot fly,” the wolf would reply, looking at the ground. “I’ll never see what you see.”

“Just so,” said the falcon, preening. “You’re a prisoner of the dirt.”

The wolf nodded, ears back, lips a half snarl. “Just so,” he echoed, sneaking a glance at the proud bird. “I am what I am, and always will be.”

A wind came up, and the falcon spread his wings, went up and up and up into the air. “Farewell,” he called down, his majesty framed by the great blue and the racing clouds.

“Farewell,” whispered the wolf as he watched, though he was sure the bird did not hear him.

Spring came and spring went, the flowers falling and the great and emerald crush of summer conquering the forest. The weeds and grass whispered in the meadows and the old gods shimmered in the distant air. Then came the rain, the dark skies and the mist of the morning and the mushrooms gray and red and white.

The wolf lay in a dark, damp hollow when the falcon found him again.

“Hello falcon,” said the wolf, his tail giving a ghost of a wag and his gaze sad. “How have you fared?”

“Well,” the falcon said, settling on a high branch as usual, far above the jaws of the wolf. “Yourself?”

“I’m alive,” the wolf answered wryly, with a wink. One ear flicked back and he smiled. “Tell me of the faraway places, tales of the sky. I’ve had such strange dreams since we spoke last. They gave me wings, too, of a sort. The mountain tops seemed small below, and the forest and the hills were just green shadows like the grass under my paws.”

The falcon nodded sagely. “It is a lot like that. There’s more though. I see the squirrels, the fox and the crow and the starling, every shadow and every silent thing. I see you too, eating the dead and slinking around. Kreee, I pity you so, my friend.”

“We are friends, aren’t we?” said the wolf languidly, the sunbeam he lay within warming his fur and making his eyes sparkle like sapphires. “You hold so much of the world in your talons, and in my jaws I have only shade and carrion,” he paused, his ears going flat against his skull. “Is there no way I can be like you?”

The falcon was silent for a while as he considered this. Finally, he said, “There is one way. It would not be easy, and you could die…yet…”

“Tell me,” the wolf insisted, eyes rapt. He was suddenly tense, couldn’t help it.

The falcon waved one brown wing in the direction of the mightiest mountain, crowned even in the sweltering summer with the white and blazing shine of a cap of snow. “Up there is one who could grant your wish if you’re strong enough to make the journey. She might not, though. Air is no friend of earth, even though they need eachother.”

“Nevertheless I shall go.”

-

It was easy at first, the wolf knew the woods like he knew himself, and even when the hills began he climbed up and up and up without getting tired, every step he took sure and true. Eventually, though, the air grew thinner and there were more and more rocks. Thick ferns and thin air and his own doubts began to slow him down.

In a clearing he rested, and through a break in the pines and the wreath of mist he finally saw with his own eyes what the falcon must have seen every day of his life. That high up the world below looked smaller, more a dream than any dream he had ever had. In some ways it was very frightening, and the view changed him.

“I have to keep going,” he said to himself, hackles up as he fought a shiver. “Even if she doesn’t give me wings I’ll never know what it was like to be that me.”

A story he’d been told by his mother, when he was a pup, came to mind then. Once upon a time one wolf had become two. A fork in a fabled road, a choice that couldn’t be taken back.

Part of the wolf cursed the falcon, for setting all of this in motion. He had been happy enough as he was, yet he knew if he didn’t chase the dream he’d never be happy again. So he pressed on.

Up and up and up, into alpine meadows that were living rainbows, cascades of wild flowers and green, wind whipped grass. Into pines where brown needles fell like rain, bristle cones and ferns and shattered trunks struck down by lightning and earthquake and time a beshadowed maze.

Up and up and up, until the trees and their lost kin and their cones thinned and thinned, giving way to nothing but shattered stones and a blue so pure and vast the wolf thought he would have lost his mind if he dared to stare for more than a moment.

“Not all voids are black,” he said to himself, his breath fogging in the cold. He felt light headed and the howl of the wind was hypnotic, stole even the sounds of his paws digging into the shale as he climbed. It was a sound eerily like silence.

Then came the snow line, a pure white unbroken and sparkling with a million little rainbows in the sun, like diamond dust or lucid dreams, crusty and hard with a skein of ice.

Crunch, crunch. Up and up and up.

He looked back, just once, saw his shadowed tracks like black tears in that alabaster ice, saw the world in its stunning vastness from the mountain’s face. “Look at me,” it seemed to say, “and see how small you are.”

After that he didn’t look back again.

The falcon landed in front of him, for once close enough that the wolf could have snapped him up if he wanted to. “You’re really going all the way, aren’t you?”

The wolf bit back a whine, forced down his hackles. He was shivering but he forced a broken smile. “For some reason I can’t turn back. I don’t know how.”

“I know,” said the falcon, the monster wind ruffling his feathers into brown and black chaos. “Some things, once you see them, can’t be unseen.”

The wolf remembered a conversation that seemed long ago. “Just so,” he whispered weakly.

“You’re close to the summit. I know you can make it. She’s waiting for you, she’s watched it all.”

The wolf laughed. “For some reason I don’t care about that anymore. Not wings or anything. Just that I make it up there…it doesn’t make any sense at all. I’m too weak to make it back, I’ll die there…still…”

“Say no more,” the falcon insisted. “Save your strength.”

He nodded, watched his friend spread his wings and rise up on cold, cold gusts.

“Goodbye,” said the wolf to the wind.

Up and up and up, until suddenly there was no more ground. The snow itself ended, before a boulder encased in ice, a fang of jagged gray that sparkled cruel and cracked, and in the long shadow that it cast was another wolf.

“Welcome,” she said, as he took his last steps. The wind died in the lee of the boulder. The quiet there was unearthly, as loud as a scream. She smiled crookedly. “You’ve come a very long way, haven’t you?”

Try as he might he couldn’t meet her eyes for long. He was tired. So tired. “A friend of mine,” he began, his voice so hoarse and soft he could barely hear it, “told me you could give me wings.”

She barked a laugh, her form liquid darkness that danced and flowed. “That fool of a falcon? He meant well, but wolves can never fly. You came up here just to die.”

His legs gave out and his heart pounded. He was so high, too high, and too cold. He had nothing to say, forced himself to look into the eyes of a goddess. The silence between them stretched, became timeless, a second a year and a minute an eon. There were nightmares too, a furless plague that twisted the entirety of the earth into a machine, of wars and mushrooms of fire and great rockets that went to the stars and never came back.

“You want wings,” she said at last, sounding so sad that it broke his heart. “Then have them.”

Everything went white.

-

Once upon a time, in a deep dark wood, there lived a lone wolf and a proud old falcon…