Chapter 123: Chapter 123

KAIST:

I wandered aimlessly around the passageway, groping in the darkness for what seemed like an awfully long time.

I cursed at my own self in frustration. Where was Cruz? Now that I needed him the most, where was he?

I couldn’t see through the passage well. It was designed to trap Talandor’s enemies into their own deaths should they try something as absurd as taking over the castle and killing the king.

Suddenly, I heard a soft whimper inside my mind. I called over to the wolf I recognized crying.

‘Cruz, you’re finally here… Why are you crying?’

I have a hunch why, but I dared not to say it out loud myself…

‘Kaist… I’m dying,’ he grunted softly.

‘What? Why?’

‘Your magic… It’s killing me. It’s stripping away my form.’

I didn’t understand what Cruz was saying. How can he die? Don’t wolves stay alive as long as their human counterparts continue to breathe?

‘Kaist… without our spirit stone, I won’t be able to survive. It’s so painful... I will die soon,’ he began to grumble again.

“No,” I began to shout out loud. “No!”

Staying at this dark passage way for a long time was making me insane. I don’t know the difference whether I was shutting my eyes or if they still remained open.

“Cruz, don’t leave me!”

‘Kaist… It wouldn’t be this way if you could only accept it… You’ve got to accept it,’ I hear the brown wolf speak again.

“Accept what,” I shouted feverishly to the unending darkness. “What do I have to accept?”

‘Your powers… Your true form…’

Suddenly, everything was enveloped in light. Cruz had taken me back to a particular incident down on our memory lane.

It was the day my wolf was awakened.

I saw the memory as if I was an outsider. I saw my ten year old self when I had entered the Animal Spirit Wolf for the first time in my entire existence.

How did that happen? Didn’t I started shifting at twelve?...

‘Kaist, how did you get here,’ a more energetic version of Cruz started to tell me as he licked my crying face.

Was that really Cruz? Why did he have a golden stone in the middle of his head?...

‘I… I did something bad… I didn’t mean it,’ the younger me sobbed.

Did this really happen? No matter how much I wracked my brain, I just couldn’t remember this instance...

‘Tell me, what did you do, young one?’

‘I… I burned the castle.’

My heart stopped. There had been an incident when I was young of the castle walls burning in the middle of the night. The culprit was not caught, so they blamed it to the rouges. Never in my wildest dreams did I ever think that I was the one behind it…

‘Hush… Don’t cry now… You didn’t do it on purpose,’ Cruz consoled.

‘I’m sorry,’ my ten year old self continued to sob.

Suddenly, another wolf came towards us. He was a brown wolf, almost yellowish, and on his head was also a circular golden stone.

‘You don’t have to cry. The sooner you accept your powers, Kaist, the better you could be at controlling it.’

‘No, I don’t want it! I don’t want these powers! I don’t want any powers!’

‘Kaist,’ the brown wolf, growled, ‘you have to accept the truth! You have powers! It is your birthright as a Shadow Rune wolf!’

‘I-I am not a Shadow Rune wolf! I am a White Fang wolf!’

‘No, you are a Shadow wolf! You cannot escape who you are!’

‘I don’t want to! I don’t want you to be my wolf! I don’t want two wolves!’

The brown wolf was furious. He was twice my size at that age. He started to pounce at my weak and small body.

‘No,’ Cruz growled. ‘Stop it!’

Cruz attacked the brown wolf. They bit on each other until blood began to ooze out of their furs.

‘Ahh, no!’

My ten year old self began to contort in pain. Having his wolves fight each other was causing his body to be subjected to immense agony at that time.

‘This cannot be, brother,’ Cruz said, shouting at the other wolf. ‘Do you wish our human to die?’

The other wolf snarled at Cruz. He was as ferocious as he was.

He looked back at the boy rolling in pain by the ground.

‘No!... But I also don’t want to disappear like he wanted to!’

‘Then… I’ll make the sacrifice, brother…’

Cruz came over to my young self and began licking my face. It didn’t seem to help. The young version of me was still under tremendous amount of pain.

‘No, don’t do it, Cruz! You know what could happen to you! You can only exist for so long if you give up on your powers.’

‘And how about our human? If he dies, we both die! Wouldn’t it be much better if only one of us dies than all of us,’ Cruz reasoned out.

‘Then I will stay in the background… I won’t show myself to Kaist until he wills it.’

‘You do that, brother… I’ll do what I can too so that we could keep him alive…’

He licked my young face one last time before Cruz was consumed by a tremendous amount of bright yellow light.

When the light disappeared, the stone was no longer in his head.

‘Brother… Unless that child accepts the magic in his blood, you know we will die too, especially you,’ the brown wolf said.

‘I know… I know it.’

I collapsed in the darkened floor, shivering and sweating when the memory I had lost was over…

‘Cruz, you did that… for me?’

‘Not just for you… I did it for all of us,’ he said weakly. I could see the fur in his body shedding away, being taken away by the gentle wind in my minds’ eye.

‘The time has come,’ Cruz said weakly. ‘Even if your origin was full of lies, there are still people you have to cherish and protect. Live your life well, Kaist… You are what you make yourself and not what they dictate of you to be…’

‘No!’

Now the bones and skin at Cruz’s back was starting to fade away too…

‘Cruz, no! No!’

Cruz was perishing in front of me. His body was turning into ashes, and I couldn’t stop it…

I was going to lose my wolf forever just because I had chosen to abandon my real identity and heritage.