When The Wolf Spoke

Prologue:

Snow whispered as it fell, a hush that seemed to swallow even the grief clinging to Manya’s chest. She sat close to the fire, its weak orange glow fighting back the endless blue of the Siberian night, flickering against the hollow cave they hunkered down in. Shadows stretched long and strange along the jagged walls, twisting itself like smoke into faces half-remembered by time. Her daughter curled in her lap, raven hair tangled mimicking threads of smoke, small fingers curls in the edge of Manya’s fur cloak.

Tira just turned five—equivalent in human years, though their species aged differently—old enough to remember the tribe’s laughter, young enough that those memories already frayed at the edges. She sometimes asked where the voices had gone, why the drumbeats no longer echoed in the caves, why the men who smelled of wild pine, sweet metallic and wolf musk never returned. Manya never answered fully. Some truths were rapacious creatures, stalking too close to a child’s dreams. Manya’s eyes locked on the fire’s glow against the cave wall, her mind drifted to the flames that had swallowed her tribe—thought to be by human hands, the smoke coiling before disappearing into the night sky like the hands of spirits clawing for release. She remembered leading the last of her people further up their mountain home, up to the jagged Koryak peaks for safety, hearts heavy with loss, only weeks later witnessing the final slaughter—the last of her kin torn from life by a hunter who sought not them, but one child. Since then, she had fled down the mountain range—child in hand; leaving her territory, leaving the echoes of her ancestors behind… until a storm had caught her and forced her into this cave—the wind hushed at first, began screaming outside like the howl of some vengeful spirit.

Two dire wolves lingered at the cave’s entrance, their eyes glowing faintly in the firelight, silent sentinels watching the raging snow storm. Tira whimpered softly from the wind’s rage. Instead of dwelling on the grief, Manya pressed her cheek to Tira’s hair and hummed the old songs. Songs of the first wolves, eldr-born, who had walked out of the ice in Scandinavian lands—of gods who bound flesh and spirit together. Her hums growing into quiet singing, her dense bushy tail swaying against the ground as if it was a metronome keeping time. The words told were ancient, in a old dead language, a deep-throat-ed rhythm that made the fire lean and sway. Tira listened, her eyes heavy, though she caught fragments of old stories and new: wolves running across frozen seas, a mother carrying her child through storms, emerald eyes who always watched from the dark.

“Mama,” Tira whispered, sleep tugging at her voice, “are the hunters close?”

Manya stilled. Her daughter’s fingers tightened on the cloak in response to her sudden stillness. She wanted to say no— to tell her daughter the truth— That it wasn’t humans who hunted them but a hunter. A hunter who was nothing more than a passing dream, But the koshak’s shadow stretched across worlds, patient as frost.

“No, Dochen’ka,” Manya sucked in a subtle breath, hoping not to give her daughter more than she could handle, and murmured at last, soft but firm, as if saying it could bind the truth. “…Not while I still breathe.”

The fire cracked. Outside, the snow fell heavier, blanketing the earth in silence, the wind wailing loudly as if spirits of her lost tribe were calling out within the storm. Manya lifted her hetero-chromatic gaze to the horizon, where the stars shimmered through the flurry of snow like tiny shards of ice. Soon she would have to take Tira away, far from their native land in Siberia, far from the ashes of their tribe—even further from the remnants of their primal ancestry. Japan’s mountains ghosted her heart, a light brush of ink on paper, calling her to where wolf-spirits still walked in secret. For now, she held her daughter close, her voice a steady murmur against the howl of the storm outside. At the cave’s mouth, two pair of eyes glimmered, unmoving, unblinking, shadows folded into shadow—silent sentinels of the threshold, against a cold veil between safety and the wild. Even in their watchfulness, they were a warning: the world beyond never slept, and no refuge was absolute, even as the night carried the scent of something hunting, waiting, just beyond the snow.

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If you like what you read please continue here and read the 1st chapter on my website! Thank you for the support!

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Book blurb below👇🏽✨

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“When the wolf spoke… his voice shook the night sky.”

That voice belongs, once, to a dying world. Manya is the last of a Norse-bred Volkolak tribe driven east into Siberia, carrying in her blood the memories of a homeland and the weight of a vanished people. At her side are Storm and Shadow—two ancient dire wolves, white and black, living echoes of Sköll and Hati whose presence is the only unbroken thread to the old rites. They have chased the sky in legend; now they chase survival at Manya’s heels.

She flees fire and human cruelty, seduced and betrayed by a feline stranger from beyond the stars whose experiments scar her body and twist her child. The daughter, Tira, is born at the ragged edge of two worlds—wolf and alien, myth and mutation—and the wolves bind themselves anew to protect her. “Plumes of clouds danced and swirled as he howled into the void.” In every howl, the past answers; in every silence, the future waits.

Tira must learn the old pack’s discipline and the ruthless cunning seeded into her bones. Storm teaches restraint and the slow gravity of protection; Shadow teaches the clean, terrible necessity of the strike. Between them she inherits more than guardianship—she inherits an inheritance: the last living myth, carried into a world that would rather name it monster than savior. “And when the wolf spoke.. the stars bowed.” The celestial chase is not only story but omen: as darkness gathers, the old songs begin to stir, and eclipse-shadows fall across both sky and conscience.

Bold, lyrical, and uncompromising, When the Wolf Spoke is a tale of mothers and monsters, of sacrifice and survival, and of a child who must teach a dying myth how to live again. It asks: when the last of a people becomes a story, who keeps the story true—and at what price?

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This story was inspired by my original poem: When the Wolf Spoke