Caino's Alphabet, W

Without a moment’s delay, 
Caino rolled onto his belly 
and started off on all fours.  
He looked about himself wildly with fear in his eyes, but seeing his companions about him, 
the terror drained slowly from his face, 
replaced first by wonder and finally recognition.  
His panic abated, Caino rose unsteadily to his feet.
        “Di-did it work?” asked Orion, 
speaking for the novices 
who crowded around Caino 
with wide and anxious eyes. 
    Caino felt his head where the pig 
had been wounded, dropped to his knees 
and retched.  
Then, blinking his eyes 
and wiping his mouth with his sleeve, 
he straightened himself up with the assistance 
of Xalwo and Gail. 
    “We won’t know until I see Darius,” 
said Caino and, freeing himself 
from the nuns, he walked with increasing steadiness towards the copse of small trees where he last 
had encountered his friend.
—
    Caino entered the copse with a dreadful feeling of apprehension.  His brief time 
as a dying pig had shaken him, 
but Darius would have experienced the entirety 
of that old hunter's long life in reverse.  
        What sort of friend would he now meet, 
if any?  Had Darius’s dreams become nightmares?  Had he persisted to the end, 
or had he simply decided 
to dream about something else?
    As Caino fretted over Darius’s strange trip, 
a wolfish form silently came out 
from behind him and said, 
in a language all their own, 
“you’re looking different Caino.  
Could it be that you‘ve grown?”
    Caino turned around to see the toothy grin 
of a wolf who had lived a lifetime for him, 
and not for the first time, 
wished he could embrace his ethereal friend.
    “Did you go all the way back with him?” 
asked Caino excitedly, “What did you see?”
    “I saw an old man grow young.  
I watched him vomit up whole animals—
returning them to life.  I saw leaves rise 
from the earth and shrink into trees.  
It was all strange at first, 
but I soon learned to see it as natural.      
“Sometimes I left the Path you shared 
with the hunter; the further I strayed 
the more other actors shifted and changed, 
but it didn’t scare me as it did before. 
It was like you said, this time 
rather than splitting they converged, 
but not in the terrible way things smash together when time moves ahead.  It was natural, 
as if it was all meant to be.
    “People, animals and things joined 
with themselves becoming substantial 
and more concrete.  
It was wonderful to watch a creature’s many Paths rush together toward its Beginning—to its birth.
You were right about everything Caino.”
    “It’s true then?  The longest Path 
draws all the others in?”  Caino exclaimed, 
“that’s exactly how I’d imagined it…”
    “But there’s more to tell, Caino,” Darius said, circling his friend in wolfish form, 
“that old hunter wasn’t always alone.  
He lived with his family, and the family had a dog 
in the days before you watched him die. 
On many of his shorter Paths, 
he ended his life surrounded by them all—
a fat, contented old man.  
    “But on the Path I was bound to with you, 
there was a tragedy 
and almost all of them were killed.  
Killed by wolves, Caino.  
They came to his home while he hunted for goats, and only the youngest survived.”
    Caino stared, the story could have 
been coincidence, but Darius 
held his eyes in his own and Caino knew it was not.  
    “His family?  He was?  Who was he?”  
Caino stumbled for words and Darius continued.
    “His name was Yuri.  
He returned in the evening with a brace 
of dead goats, but on finding his house full of death, he fled into the night.   He hunted the wolves, 
but he thought you were dead.  
He became mad in the wild just like you did, 
and he never, ever returned.”  
    Caino sank to the ground 
and remembered the horror he had found 
left by the wolves.  Then he recalled the flash 
of purple darkness as his borrowed pig’s head 
had smashed into the Point 
that rose from the old hunter’s head, 
the strange familiarity he had experienced 
as they had connected.
    “Please, you followed him to his beginning?” 
    “To the very start.  
He went into his mother, 
and I was drawn in as well.  
It was all veins, blood and flesh inside of her.  
It felt as if I was seeing a secret forbidden to me.  
All of that stuff that animates our bodies 
should stay hidden beneath our skin. 
It was like those tangled Paths that I see 
when we’re apart—that mess 
that you say drives the world.  
Maybe they’re the same in a way—
the veins in a body and your Paths… 
then a dark purple flash 
and I was back here with you.”
    Caino sat on the ground 
and for a while he was lost 
in his thoughts.  He re-called the face 
of that old hunter—his father, 
as his finger crossed his lips for silence.  
He remembered his mother, his sisters, 
his brothers—his dog.  
    Then Caino thought of the Machine 
that would one day reunite them.  
A Machine that might finally bring him in 
from the wilderness he had fled into so long ago, 
and at last, Caino knew what he had to do.  
He would make real what had already been done.