The questions sat on his mind, as if his brain refused to let the questions be registered as something needing to be answered. William concentrated on those questions. Who am I? It was a question that he had often asked himself back when he still lived in the world of the civilized. His mind arched across time to when he had tried to walk among people. Their attitudes and their place in the world were so secure. Even though he could see the pain and misery that those people felt and made others feel on a daily basis. People didn’t seem to care that their actions affected those around them. The girls of his high school walked around in bubbles that were almost visible to him. The bubbles kept them safe from any responsibility they may have had to the people around them.
He remembered the funeral for Seth Donovan. He had liked Seth. Not that he had known the kid very well. They had run together on the track team but other than that he knew pretty much nothing of him. The kid had committed suicide by putting a bullet in his head with a .38 caliber handgun, a ‘38 special’ is what people had called it. Apparently, he had bought it at a pawn shop two days before he shot himself.
William remembered hearing something about him being gay a few weeks before it had happened. He didn’t put much thought into it. He remembered thinking, so what, if he is, he is. If not, who cares what people think? Apparently, Seth cared. He remembered feeling really pissed off at that funeral. Of all those people there, how many of them had actually known Seth? How many of them had helped spread that rumor which he had become more and more certain was the cause for Seth taking his own life. He could see Christine sitting among her friends without a single tear in her eyes. In fact, she was looking at some other girl’s cell phone and trying not to laugh at what she found there. Hadn’t it been her that he had overheard saying that Seth was gay?
The remembered anger that he felt standing in his room in front of Ares was so strong his muscles tensed, and his fists clenched. He realized that his jaw was clenched and he had to forcibly unlock his teeth and relax his facial muscles.
I hate people.
The thought was so clear and so profound that he blinked in the cold honesty of that statement to himself. He could find no fault in that statement though. He did hate people. He hated the way they acted toward each other. He hated how selfish people were. He hated the flimsy excuses people made to justify their actions and how they treated members of the opposite sex. He hated people. Isn’t that why he had left in the first place, to go live in his forest with nature? Testing himself against the cold and uncaring world of nature was a far better way to spend his time than to fight the uphill battle that was trying to live with people. Nature didn’t care about you one way or another. People were always clawing at him to pull him down, to marginalize his achievements and drag him down to the lowest possible level.
He looked at Ares. The werewolf made no attempt to move or say anything. Ares was waiting for something. William knew what it was. He’s waiting for me to change or attack him. The black and white of the situation was calming to William. Just like in nature, live, or die, fight or starve, prepare or freeze, nature was so much more honest about its intentions. He only wished that people could learn how to be a little more like that.
Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there.
But even as he thought this he was reminded of the underground cathedral. The massive cavern walkway, carved out from the rock of the earth. It’s long winding trail that led to the heart of that sacred place. The memory of the smiling goddess and god looking down on him from their sacred alcove was so fresh that he could recall every detail, down to their painted fingers. The statue of Apollo sharing the same house with gods and goddesses he didn’t even recognize, but their place in that holy cathedral was no more or less than all the gods and goddess that were housed there.
People could never understand such a place. He could see the results of such a place on the face of the earth. Muslim terrorist tapes being broadcast over the nightly news swearing vengeance on the infidels that dared to house a representation of Mohammad in the same house where Jesus stood. He could see protests of fanatical Christians demanding that Jesus be removed from such a place that displayed statues of the Greek gods and goddesses on an equal level with God. The Jewish people would rant that Jehovah was not the same as the god that supposedly was the father of Jesus and that it was sacrilege to place the two in the same building. The intolerance and closed mindedness of people was so clear and predictable to him that it was maddening.
William looked down at his claws. These claws are not the hands I was born with. He had used those tools for survival, and in surviving he had caused death. He had killed in the name of survival, playing by nature’s rules. But they were not hands. The scents he could sense from the room around him, the musk of Ares, the sweet oil from Ansuya, the sweat from his furs were not things that he could sense with his human nose, the nose he had been born with.
His mind worked and fell silent. A single thought repeating itself over and over, ringing through his mind and body.
I was born human.
He had chosen nature over humanity. He had wrapped himself in nature’s cold black and white. That is where he belonged, but he couldn’t change the fact that he had been born human. As much as that was despised by him, he ultimately couldn’t escape who he was.
He looked up at Ares who was still standing in the center of the room. He closed his eyes and inhaled once more. He held the breath for long moments and then parting his lips he let it out. The darkness enveloped him so completely that for a moment he was sure that he had fallen asleep.
“No, William you’re not asleep. But I can’t help you this time.”
William was floating in that familiar void. Only this time there was no substance, to himself or anything else. He was a floating consciousness with no form. There was no light, only the sound of the voice that wasn’t his, spoke to him.
“You can’t escape who you are. Your human side will always be here. Maybe I’m your human side?”
There was a laugh and then silence. William knew, with surprising clarity, that he had been fighting what he was. He did hate people. But he couldn’t escape the fact that he was a person first. The thought triggered a response from somewhere very far away that he registered as pain. But it was like a light on a switchboard needing no more attention than a tripped circuit breaker. William let the void of darkness dissipate around him, and he opened his eyes.