When The Wolf Spoke (Chapter Snippet)

💫🕸️ Months after leaving their Homeland of Siberia & traveled the Sea—Manya and her now six year old daughter, Tira, had been living amongst a tribe of Wolf-yókai within the Hokkaidō forest of Japan. Having shared Wolf blood, Osamu the leader of the Wolf tribe allows Manya and her small pack refuge within his territory. In this chapter, you'll dive into the morning after the tribe fights spider yókai called Tsuchigumo, they begin a ritual to bury their dead, giving Manya a glimpse of the other side of their shared bloodline. 👇🏽

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The next morning the tribe moved in a single, sorrowful wave. They wrapped the dead with simple linen—untreated, torn cloth pressed over mouths as if to keep the last howl from slipping out of the world—and carried them along the ridge-trail toward the grove where the earth was soft and the larch roots ran deep. The wind that rolled across Hokkaidō carried a melancholic breath: old blood, wet soil, and the sweet tang of the incense from last night. It was kinder than the northern gales that had raised Manya, yet it bit at her skin all the same—foreign, heavy with unseen things. Her bare feet sank into leaf-litter and moss as she followed the narrow line of mourners through mountains that borders a shared territory; Tira, half-drowsed, clung to her hand.

From neighboring ridges, wolf yōkai emerged— They came not to intrude but to honor, entering into Osamu’s lands to lend support; though their lands were separate, they gathered where it mattered. Their territories marked the old way: stone cairns beneath cedar, torii half-swallowed by moss, the scent-maps of urine and resin that told other packs who ruled this slope and which hunting corridors were claim and which were neutral. Yōkai territory overlapped in seasons; boundaries were negotiated with ritual howls and shared kills rather than constant war. The mountain hummed with that order—wolves, spirits, and men woven into the same geography. Their numbers had thinned over centuries, hunted by larger demons and driven from their dens by humans claiming sovereignty over earth that once belonged only to ancient creatures and immortal beings, much similar to Manya’s tribe. They watched the funeral line and strangers following from ridge-lines, eyes shards of lantern light. Smaller than Manya, smaller than the pair of dire wolves, they carried a more domestic scent, yet their movements retained the same lethal grace.

In a short distance ahead, The dire wolves padded ahead in ponderous silence, their great paws whispering over the ground. Where they passed, Osamu’s lesser wolves parted lowering their heads in instinctive reverence. Foxes at the wood’s edge watched from the shadows, black eyes bright like the corners of the world. Here they were no longer hunted beasts or mere legend—but guests. The visiting Wolf Yōkai, sleek and disciplined, were well aware of their own power, yet even their practiced eyes could not ignore the enormity of Storm and Shadow—watching with quiet, almost trembling awe. The white and black dire wolves moved like living mountains across the ridge, paws pressing the soil with a weight that made the ground seem to acknowledge them. Every strand of fur glinted with ancestral power, their eyes burning with a depth that spoke of the northern wilds, of frozen winds and primeval hunts. Manya herself, though in humanoid form, carried the same presence. Her stride was long and unhurried, each motion echoing the ancient rhythm of wolves who had learned patience across centuries. To the visiting Yōkai, she seemed almost a new species: larger, wilder, untethered by the rituals and hierarchies that bound them. Only few elders told stories of eldr-born beasts. Even as she kept Tira close, a child of both land-bound wolf and star-born koshka, the Volkolak blood thrummed through her vein in waves that could not be mistaken. Seasoned alphas from other territories, used to commanding obedience through ferocity or ritual, felt the instinctive pull of respect. It was not fear, exactly—though a shadow of it lingered—but recognition of a primal authority they had never encountered before. Here were wolves not just alive, but old as the mountains themselves, carrying memory in every step, every breath, every flick of their tails.

Some of the younger Yōkai whispered among themselves, their voices low and shaken:

“Such size… such presence… these are not like us.”

“Nor like anything we’ve seen… they move like the old stories. The ones our ancestors whispered in fear and awe.”

They spoke with stillness, their commands rippling through the forest, a breath through fur. The entire mountain was alive with their order; even the wind seemed to bow to Osamu’s tribe. Tonight, those boundaries were softened; the mountain had called them to a single purpose. When members of a pack die, their spirit is guided by a somber song sang by their comrades in which the winds carries their howl back home. Manya’s people had known the wolf-song since the first fires of the north. But this… this was familiar tide threaded together into something different. Where Volkolak packs thrummed with instinct, this place pulsed with discipline—ritual.

She could feel it in the air, a quiet rhythm beneath her skin.

A drum-beat.

At the grove, torii gates—paint faded to the color of rusted iron—stood like bowed sentinels. Smoke coiled from a stone altar at the center, mystics and shamans from each pack had already arranged their implements: bowls of water, bundles of juniper and cedar, scatter of moss warmed on hot stones and wolves sat in perfect stillness around it—men and women both, their eyes half-lidded, their bodies shimmering faintly with spiritual light. The air tasted of cedar resin, honeysuckle, wild rose, and damp moss—an old recipe for purification. A single figure waited near the altar, his hair a bright splash of red against the gray fur of his robe; robed in the fur of the loss—sunlight caught it, shimmering hot embers through every movement. When he moved; a simple leather tie held most of it back, but a few stubborn strands fell to his forehead.

Osamu.

There was the calm, methodical quality to him that had felt like a spine for his people: a measured breath, the minimal motion of a man accustomed to leading without bluster. He spoke in his language—soft syllables that Manya only caught pieces of—“First Wolf,” “call back home”—phrases she understood as if they were half-remembered songs. Her grasp of his tongue was small, but meaning traveled in the tone and the rising smoke—and at his signal, the Yōkai rose.

“Tonight,” he said in his own tongue, “we remember the breath of the First Wolf.. the call back home.”

By her side, she could hear Tira whispering back the words, her voice careful and bright. The child, small yet bold, had spent months learning the nuances of Osamu’s language, though as always picked up words so naturally. She translated not only his syllables, but the meaning behind the sound, the emotional weight: “Tonight we remember the breath of the First Wolf… the call back home.” Tira’s voice threaded the ancient words through Manya’s memory, connecting distant lands, dead tongues, and the rhythm of their own people. In this moment, Tira became a bridge between dying languages—her own Norse-inspired Volkolak bloodline; the ancestral memory of their Koryak mountains, and now Ainu-inspired Yōkai tongue of Hokkaidō. The Ainu language was dying across this ancient world as humans forgot their sacred ties, a language once scattered even their Siberian homeland but is now confined to kuril islands and Hokkaidō.

The yōkai changed as one. Bones clicked similar to bamboo in wind—not the shattering scream of a Volkolak’s transformation, but the sound of water sliding into a new channel. Only those Yōkai who carried the weight of ancient ties—marked by tails that swept behind them as banners of lineage—stepped fully into wolf-forms. Sleek, disciplined, and elegant, not the hulking dire shapes Manya knew. Osamu’s wolf-form burned with brightness, lean and quick—bright as fox-fire, a coat that flashed, his tail carrying a single sweeping stripe of white, a painter’s brushstroke across paper. He moved with the grace of an inked brush on washi, each step a deliberate stroke. Around him the other Yōkai assumed darker; their eyes glowed the muted blues and golds of lantern light. Elders moved to the frontal ridge, heads thrown back. They howled. Their voices rose and fell in a formal cadence that stitched individual grief into communal prayer.

Manya felt Storm bristle beside her. The great dire she-wolf lowered her head, ears flicking in quiet acknowledgment. Shadow’s low growl rumbled through the air, not challenge, but instinctive disdain—a creature of the old blóð recognizing kin that had grown tame. Manya felt the difference keenly. Her people’s transformations had been bone-splintering, an entry into the body of the wolf that was always costly and always true. All of her tribe could transform by the blood in their veins, raw with power. The Yōkai were different. Only the solemn few—those marked by ancient lineage—made the change, and even then it was as if stepping into an old garment. There was no tearing, no agony—just deliberate motion, measured and ceremonial. The transformation was honor, not trial; precision, not instinct; a ritual made flesh rather than a wolf clawing its way into the world. Manya’s chest tightened with longing and awe. She understood, in a way only a child of the eldr-beasts could, that this was not weakness—but a devotion to order, a reverence for their own history, and a power shaped differently from her own.

Osamu turned toward them.

“You come from the line that remembers teeth,” he growled softly under his breath. “We come from the line that remembers breath. Both are sacred.”

His wolf eyes met Manya’s, and she felt something move deep inside her chest—an echo of understanding that was older than speech. Behind her, Tira watched with wide, silent eyes, her mixed blood shimmering faintly beneath the torchlight. Storm’s head bent low to the child, a silent promise. Shadow’s tail brushed the girl’s shoulder, protective, heavy with warning.

The ritual began.

The first act was for the wounded.

Before burial could be performed the living needed tending.

The wounded were gathered close to the altar. Here the healing was both practical and sacred. Healers—old women with slow hands—rinsed battered flesh in hot, herb-infused water. They tore strips of linen and applied mashed moss, juniper berries crushed to a paste, and warmed fish oil to rewrap last nights bandages, sealing deeper wounds. For burns they smeared a cooling poultice of powdered kelp and crushed rose petals; broken bones were splinted with carved bark and held by leather cords soaked in resin. They worked quickly but carefully: Manya’s shoulder—where barbs had torn through muscle, from the night prior—was stripped of dried blood; steam rose as heated moss was pressed to the wound. The moss itself had been boiled in broth of willow bark and a paste of crushed cedar sap and heated fat. It smelled of the old forests: sharp, resinous, bitter-sweet. Their hands moved with ritual precision, repeating the names of ancestors as if each syllable were a stitch closing flesh. A bit confused, Manya allowed them to tend to the wound. The tribe’s healers moved with ritual precision, their gestures soft yet sure. They murmured prayers carrying the rhythm of instruction. She sat still, though every instinct told her she didn’t need this—her blood mended fast, her skin already knitting faintly around the punctures that lined her shoulder. The mixture they spread across her wound hissed faintly, cool as mountain mist. The sting came first, sharp as flint, but then the heat sank deep, loosening the irritated pulse beneath her skin. Her muscles unclenched. The ache dulled to a low hum.

She pressed her free hand to the throbbing of her shoulder and felt the slow, stubborn throb of healing—a rhythm she knew too well. Old Volkolak ways had taught her to bind wounds with threads of tendon and knot them with song and herb, so flesh could remember its shape; here they used herbs, heat and careful hands. Pain, her elders said, was the body’s song of returning. The shaman’s poultices would close the wounds—skin would scab, the pain would recede—but the deep part of the tearing, the one that moved through muscle and memory, would take longer. She welcomed the methodical care. The moss pressed to her shoulder smelled of loam and the clean sting of cedar; when the warmth spread, she felt a thread of the northern cold loosen in its hold for the first time that day. Manya watched the motions with an attention sharpened by a lifetime of northern rites. She saw echoes of her grandmother Anfisa, in the way elders lifted hands to the moon, the same prayer patterns repeated but rendered different by language. It was comforting and strange. Here, the Yōkai worked differently. They soothed instead of sang. It unsettled her a little, how gentle it felt.

One of the healers from a western tribe looked up briefly, eyes meeting hers—hesitant, curious, as though unsure whether this foreign primal-looking wolf woman might bite.

Manya gave a small nod. “You honor your craft,” she said softly, her Scandinavian curved by Siberian wind accent curling around the words. “It will hold.”

The healer exhaled, relief unspoken but visible. When they finished, Manya flexed her arm and felt the skin stretch, the warmth beneath the surface pulsing steady and alive.

Drums beat softly—three heartbeats, then pause.

Across the firelight, Osamu watched quietly. His gaze flickered from her healing wound to her calm composure, and for the first time, he saw in her not the wild creature who had shaken the mountain—but something wiser. A woman who carried the memory of a thousand hunts, and still found grace in letting others help. When the medicines had been applied to all who were inured, the tribe moved onto the funeral purification. Each body slated for burial was washed at the cold stream below the grove. Hands moved with solemn care—feet first, then knees, the torso, face—anointing the dead with cedar oil. Each Yōkai wolf lifted its head, exhaling a long, controlled breath, notes that were not music so much as the sound of the pack remembering. Manya felt the air move through her, stirring the memories of the tundra—the chase, the kill, the moon’s cold watch. The dire wolves joined the rhythm, their howls threading through the controlled chant, a wild thunder through rain. Osamu moved through the crowd with leader-sure steps. He paused where a young hunter lay with ribs stitched by a crude but steady hand; he murmured, in the soft half-phrases Manya understood, instructions that the elder healers obeyed without hesitation. In that close work she saw how he commanded not by bellow but by the quiet certainty of a man who knew his place in the pack’s mind. Manya felt the old ache in her chest—ancestral memory pulling at her ribs. She remembered a summit under a blood-moon and her grandmother’s howl that had once felt like the sky being rearranged. Now she walked through other people’s grief with the kind of distance a storm has when it passes over a valley. The ritual’s ways were different, but the sorrow was all the same.

When the elder shaman reached the altar, he raised a smoking branch of juniper in his mouth, his muzzle pressing close to the stone. Around him the Yōkai chanted the rite—words old as the mountain—calling the wind to carry the lost, asking the First Wolf to shepherd the spirits. Manya stepped forward of her own accord, and though she did not speak their language, she laid her palm to the altar stone and hummed the old northern ode in the same cadence she had known since childhood: remembering bones-flute notes woven into the earth’s pulse. The sound in her memories braided with the Yōkai songs until the difference between them thinned.

The sound rose, ancient and new all at once.

Order met chaos.

Spirit met blood.

Moments after, they reached the burial ring—an old circle of stones and saplings—Osamu called the assembled packs to silence. The howling rising and falling. The shamans threw handfuls of juniper into a fire and the smoke leapt like a blue specter. Then, in a movement that was both a farewell and a promise— As dusk folded around them, the bodies of the loss where buried beneath a bright cherry blossom marked with stone, torches wrapped in incense were set at the heads of each grave. Stones were stacked at the head as markers, and a final handful of soil from the high ridge—where the first wolves had been said to run—was thrown over each mound. For the young dead, they tucked small versions of Hichiriki in the crook of the arm, so that the winds might carry the song home.When the howls faded, Osamu approached her, human again, his breath visible in the cooling air.

“You are of the Eldr’s kin,” he said quietly. “The wolves remember your scent, though they have not smelled it for a thousand years.”

Manya bowed her head. “We carry what remains of them.”

A few of the younger hunters from other packs noticed a hybrid child standing within the circle, they dared murmur that the child emitted a faint unnatural power.

Osamu’s gaze flicked to Storm and Shadow, then to Tira. “Then what remains must learn to breathe with us. Wild or not, the old ways are dying.”

“Wolves don’t die,” Manya murmured. “They change.”

A faint smile curved his mouth finding solace within her words.

Shadow’s low rumble moved the air at the few who muttered such words. One hunter clamped his mouth shut and stepped away. Osamu’s eye—calm, measured—caught the offenders and, with a slight motion, quelled them. He did not need to shout; in his hand rested the authority of one who had long learned the ways of negotiation between spirit and wolf. The eldest mystic from the Southern most tribe—her hair like bleached bone—stared at Tira for a long time. “ I have been aware that she breathed a song that was not ours,” she said at last, voice thin but carrying. “The sky answered through her.” Others nodded, some with reverence, some with fear. The mystic added more quietly, “Gifts that arrive without rite always carry cost.” marking Tira with the same anointing oil they would use on their dead, a claim that she carried a gift. “Without you, young one..our people would have carried more loss.” Her eyes briefly shot to the one who gossiped. “ It would be wise of us to give gratitude where it’s due …We thank you.”

As the rite closed, Tira’s small hand tightened in Manya’s. The girl’s eyelids fluttered; the odd green glow in them. After the graves had been filled and the torches had guttered down to fat glows, the tribe did not scatter immediately, lingering at the edge of the ring. Instead they performed a final unifying act: a low song that drew all voices together—Yōkai and Volkolak, dire and lesser wolf alike. They sang for the dead and for those who would live to remember them. The song rose and fell, a tide that smoothed the rough edges of grief. Tira, nestled against Storm’s side still holding onto her mothers hand, murmured once in drowsiness from days events and then turned her face toward the torchlight. When she blinked her eyes met Osamu’s for an instant; there was something like recognition in that glance, a bright, undisguised curiosity. He lifted his hand, palm open, and when Manya inclined her hand placing Tira’s small fingers in his for a breath—an unspoken pact sealed by song and the hush of the mountain.

At last, when it all came to conclusion; each pack, including his own—began to move away, back down the mountainside to their territories and their dens. The Yōkai shifted, their wolf-forms folding like cloth, and the new line of cairns on the ridge seemed to hold the mountain’s story a little tighter. Manya remained a moment longer, watching the last of the torches gutter. She could feel, under the ritual and the medicine and the mourning, the old pulse of the world—unyielding, a bone that will not break.

Osamu drew near and did not speak for a long while. When he finally broke the silence, his voice held no sermon—only the practical steadiness of a man used to tending a living thing. “Tomorrow,” he said, “the hunters will go to the river to lay offerings. The elders will ask the neighboring packs to patrol their boundaries for a week. It is how we keep the balance. You will stay at my side while you mend.”

Manya’s laugh was small huff, a breath of smoke. “I will not be mended by promises. and surly can mend this wound within a day or so. Those spider demons were not as strong as I have been used to.”

He met her eyes with a steadiness that had the force of the old torii. “We will do what is ours.” He nodded once, not to command but to confirm. “And we will teach Tira the mountain’s ways. She will need them.”

She watched him, the fox-spark of his hair an ember against the gray. In the way he held himself—quiet, methodical, a man of careful rituals—she saw a different kind of ancestry: one that had adapted to the shape of the mountain. In their shared silence, the lineage of snow and the lineage of cedar touched like two hands across a stream.

That night Manya sat in the dirt still at the burial grounds, in somber reflection, while Storm and Shadow lay down beside her feet, guarding their precious child who slept against storm’s side— their eyes glowing with reflected firelight—two living echoes of Sköll and Hati, watching the stars flicker, remembering what they once were. She fingered the rag at her shoulder, feeling the slow heat that meant the wound was closing. In the hush, with the torchlight at the tip of the pines, she remembered Anfisa’s old words—how the wolf’s voice became the night sky. Around her, the Yōkai now gone, had made their own promise to the mountain: to keep its borders, to guide the dead, to teach the living. The rites were familiar yet different; the faiths were different echos of each other— but the work of mourning and the work of healing, though, were the same: hands, herbs, song and the patience of people who knew how to wait for bones to knit.

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If you like what you read please continue here and read the prologue, 1st chapter and chapter 9 on my website! Thank you for the support!

✨Please if you enjoyed this, it would mean a lot to me if you can comment what you thought and share it around. The more eyes on this the better chances I have to build an audience for my book. (Chapters are subject to change. Any chapter shared is bare bones of what it could be)

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