Victory's Price

Wolf (Part Seventy - Nine)

A.N. Song on the side was played on repeat until this chapter was complete - thought it might help you with the ambience :)

 Chapter 79

Wolf steadied his breath, staring fiercely back at the final Star's single eyed gaze. He needed to get a grip on himself, just a little bit. It would not do to stand before the greatest challenge in the history of his world and think only of the Phoenix. It was a sure way to get himself killed.

And if Wolf was going to be repaying her in some way, it would be by winning.

It was still dark, too dark to see out across the plains, but Wolf knew his brother would be out there somewhere, sometime soon. And the Phoenix was amongst those grasses as well, disappearing into the distance. If she could bring him back to life, she could make herself another prison. A stronger one, a smaller one; more hidden.

It would be a place he would never find.

The Stars tugged eagerly at his resolve, pulling him in. Wolf sighed, wondering if this frame of mind would prove tantamount to suicide, and gave in to their persuasion.

He hovered in the in-between for the longest he ever had, blinded by Starlight and saturated in his lethargy. He was hardly over the threshold but still it made him theirs and slowly, despite his distinct lack of motivation, white light turned to reality.

Wolf's feet landed silently on desert sand and he looked up into a world that was too familiar. It stung him that, on the day he lost the Phoenix, he was shown such a potent reminder of where he had first found her. The earth had cracked beneath scorching sunlight, blistered and dry. It was a cheerless place, the final Star. For the ground was red, the sky blue and there lay nothing in-between. The edges drifted off, fading into the distant horizon, allowing only one thing to draw his gaze.

A figure, masked by the haze of eternal heat. She stood, not far from him and yet infinitely too distant to grasp, delicate fingers already clutching the hilt of a rusted peasant's blade.

"Phoenix?"

Wolf blinked the remnants of Starlight from his eyes, striding tentatively toward her. She nodded, tersely, and he knew immediately that something was wrong.

"I don't understand." He said. "What are you doing here?"

Phoenix sighed and, for the first time, he noticed the tears in her eyes.

"What is going on?"

"What has proven itself greater than the wolf, Wolf?"

"The Phoenix." He replied, looking around himself, bewildered. Realisation was dawning, though he did not wish it to be so.

She sighed, silent tears trickling over her cheeks. "The Stars give all, that they might take it away."

"Do you want to fight me?" Wolf asked, stepping slowly toward her. She continued to grasp his sword with graceless desperation but he was just happy that he was seeing her again. "We have fought a hundred times before."

And not once had he won.

"My will means nothing when we must follow the rules."

"I need not follow your rules, Phoenix, they are commandments I do not even know."

Her blade continued to rest uncharacteristically limp at her side but Phoenix drew up her back at his words, reciting, as though from an old textbook, the rules she must have learnt in a similar position to his.

"The Stars are an entity of infinite power. No man can rule all, no monarch has the right to infinity. And so no king shall be a player and no player a king."