Welcome to Gaia! :: View User's Journal | Gaia Journals

In the beginning was a castler high on a craggy precipice. The air around it was so cold that it seemed the sky itself would crack like ice. Night was starting to fall around its walls and the great stone stairway, which rose up and up tword the castle through the vaulting pines. The huge weathered steps disappeared into darkness, and the shadows reaching out from the forest far below clawed their way toward a little village, nestling just beneath the cliffs.
All around the sky was draining of color, the air growing pale and bloodless, as the dying circle of the sun finally disappeared behind the crags. Beyond the castle, the range of the Carpathian Mountains rose into the distance, like mighty clouds frozen into lonely monoliths below an infinite heaven. The conifers climbing the valley slopes were laden with snow, and their tops smoked eerily in the coming darkness.
Now and then a mound of snow would topple to the forest floor with a muffled thud that quivered through the air like a boom of distant thunder. It was the only sound in the woods. The stillness that settled now across the country was as deep as blackness beginning to swallow up Transylvania, the land beyond the forest.
But there was life in the woods: a single pair of hungry, searching eyes. They were moving rapidly through the twilight, glittering furiously in the shadows as they came. Their intelligence, the ancient cunning of the predator, and their febrile, nervous brillance made them seem thoroughly human. But they were far from human-for they belonged to a Lera, a wild animal. There was a longing and profound curiosity in those strange, semitransparent orbs, and as night swelled they became even more aware of the shadow world around them.
As the darkness thickened, the wolf's pace through the trees grew even faster and its pupils opened wider, seeming to draw in the last rays of light. Then, as it came to a sudden stop at the edge of the woods and peered out toward the glow of fires from the village at the edge of the valley, those eyes changes color. For wolves have a power that Man himself has always longed for, the power to see in the dark. Gold suddenly turned to a brilliant greenish-yellow.
It was a gray wolf, common to Transyvania, but its strength and size was unusual. It was clearly a Dragga-an alpha male, dominant in its pack-but it was bigger than most. Its fur was beautiful glittering silver gray, and its tail was tinged with red. It had a strong, handsome face, with brilliant white fangs and gums as pink and healthy as the flesh of a new plum.
From where the wolf was standing he could just spy humans moving around on the edge on the village, stooping in the night to collect wood for their fires, and his nose curled into the beginnings on a snarl. But suddenly a wind rakes the forest, and in the surrounding air giant flakes began to flurry from the heavens. The wolf swung up his head and there was fear in his eyes.
"It's starting again," he growled bitterly. "The cave. I must find the cave."