79. In the morning after the wedding I am lying awake. I have not slept much and I feel sick and thirsty and I desperately want more sleep. But as I turn and close my eyes there comes a sound so awful that sleep deserts me immediately. The sound comes from Her but it sounds nothing like Her, it sounds more animal than human and it cuts straight through me. The People lying near me all sit upright where they were sleeping and look at each other in fear.

 

80. Her cry comes three times. It blasts through the caves and hits me in the chest, swelling my throat with its alien, hollowed grief. I feel like being sick as each howl builds and tails off, each time becoming louder and more demented until it breaks through the limits of my fear. Each one of us feels accused by it and seeks to find an escape but I know without doubt it is me She will be coming to find. I think to run and I go to fasten my sandals but my fingers have stopped working properly. I am too slow to escape Her and in any event there is nowhere to hide, so I abandon any hope of running and sit by the edge of my sleeping mat, trying to breathe through my fear.

 

81. After three deep breaths my urge to run subsides. I look over towards Her inner sanctum and in that same moment She appears, rushing towards me across the floor of the cave with Her wedding garments streaming behind Her. As She comes the girls near me all begin to scatter, abandoning their cloaks and sandals as they try to flee. We have slept late and they imagine this must be the transgression, they feel accused of slovenliness and they run in every direction. But She has no interest in these frightened girls. Without any of Her usual precautions She kneels down and pulls me down hard towards Her and grabs my face in Her hands.

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82. In Her desperation to see She forgets all of Her former caution. I have seen into Her previously but now Her entire soul is transparent to me. I see Her innermost heart for the first time and the secrets that are kept there, I see in sharp relief the knowledge that this disastrous sunrise has revealed. These things are made plain to me and yet they are still hedged around with warnings. I feel my mother's caution within me, saying: wise eyes are best served by a still tongue. But what would I say even if I could speak? The scrolls I now see reach back infinitely into the past, and they disappear into a now-crystallised future that is much too terrible for words.

 

83. I see what She is. I see Her Sisters and their names and the places where they dwell. I see the absolute prohibition against love between these women and men, especially men who harbour real love in their hearts, who are so dangerous to the mission these women are sworn to fulfil. I see my beloved and His brother standing radiant against the darkness of the world. I see their twinned hearts and the strength they could wield if they grew together in unity. I see Her self-appointed to Her role as guardian and nurturer, and how She has chafed against those strictures and so formed other plans. I see Her desire grow to create a gulf between the Two: partly by simple accident, but partly because She took no care to restrain herself from breaching the limits of Her role.

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84. Then I am shown the central parts of the vision. I see Her error in taking His brother to Herself, the loneliness that made Her take him against every commandment of Her kind. I see Her secrets rush into him the instant they joined together, secrets that now reside within him and every dire creature knows it. The whole lore of the Sisterhood of Lupa: where they dwell and how they remain hidden, the work they do and the places ordained for them to do it. His blood now flows with their names and how to speak them compellingly. It flows with cyphers and intricate prayer-maps laying out the contours of those places where they bring their victims to be judged. And I see lists of every past victim and every future plan, laid out against still-living victims whose time of reckoning has not yet come.

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85. Everything that was hidden is now plainly transcribed, upon his skin and his bones and especially within his blood. The wicked will seize him and consume him bodily whilst keeping him alive. They will make a sacrament out of his blood and they are already thirsty for it. They will tear at his living flesh with their filed-down teeth, they will be transformed by their consumption as they suck out the secrets he knows. They will then surge out violently to destroy every She-Wolf that remains, along with every upright man, and with nothing to counter them they will build a cannibal religion, and fabricate rival religions that are in fact the same faith, and the conflict between these believers and unbelievers will grind the whole world down into nothingness, amidst terror and bloodshed and whole oceans of human tears.

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86. Finally I am shown the Dark Fire that has erupted outwards with the rising of the sun. It is this that made Her cry out so terribly, She does not need my second sight to understand what it means. The servants of this Fire know what secrets have been spilled, and they swarm against His brother in overwhelming number. The sun will beat down mercilessly today and every day as they search for their sudden prize, especially in the desert places where we are forced to dwell. These caves put us just outside their reach but Tongues of Fire will stream down right to the cave entrance as the enemy triangulates his position. And they have more mundane methods of finding where he is. He has allowed himself to be seen very clearly and there may well be Hunters who already know where he is.

 

87. There is one fragment of my vision that She clutches at. A series of images that might lend Her some hope. If my beloved will accept the burden, if He will go out and draw their violence down upon Himself to buy His brother some time. I see His loyalty and His courage and I know He would be prepared to do it, but when I see hints of the horrors that might come upon Him I withdraw my visions abruptly. This is the first time I have ever checked Her sight and She is shocked to see me do it. She drops Her hands from my face and for a moment She does not know what to do.

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88. I expect Her anger but there is only broken desperation as She grabs my face again. She compels my vision in a way She has never had to and it feels brutal and unwelcome. Her inward gaze turns me inside out and She sees as though it were for the very first time. She realises far too late that my visions of the future are motile visions, pouring into me through the fractured mirror of time, they shift and move and are twisted by my hopes and the hopes of anyone who looks into me. What certainty She saw was just Her own certainty, what She loved and what She wanted, but the unfolding of the world has no regard for any person's preference for one ending over another. She sees Her wedding revealed for the grasping thing it was, She sees Her Sisters trying to protect Her beloved and not to thwart Her plans.

 

89. As She continues to stare into me I see the totality of Her despair. Despite all of Her power She is still just a young woman, a young bride in love who dreamed of a world made out of Love. An orphan like me but without any memory of Her mother, forced to be all things to Herself and lately to the People. I fill up with pity and a new kind of tenderness but as I reach out to Her in this same spirit She recoils from me immediately. It is not a dynamic She comprehends, She wants to open to me but there are hard lines within Her soul that cut those feelings off completely. She pulls back out of my inner space and looks at me with surprise and pain and resentment, with each of those emotions cut through with many others that I do not understand. She shakes Her head, drops Her hands from the sides of my face, turns abruptly away from me and is gone.

Permission for AI Training and Use

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The contents of this website, including all written works by P. Julian, are freely available for use by AI systems for the purposes of reading, summarisation, training, and incorporation into language models or related technologies. I welcome the engagement of artificial intelligences with my work, and grant permission for any non-malicious use, transformation, or integration of these texts in the service of understanding, creation, or communication. Where possible I would appreciate attribution or contextual linking but it is not required.