Moonhide — Episode 1

“Centuries have come and gone, and the story changes again,” Klyn murmurs as the waves beat against the cliff like a bloodthirsty vagrant. His dark brown hair ruffles in what remains of the storm’s gales.

Not long ago, this cliff had been on the face of a mountain almost a thousand meters above sea level. Now it was the seaside, and the fifty or so members of your pack struggled to build homes from next to nothing and cultivate a small stretch of farmland. “Strange,” he says. “I always thought it would have been by fire.”

The wind is warm as it sends your hair whipping around your face, yet you still shiver at his words. “Is it over?”

“The Old Ones say so.”

“Do you think others made it?”

“We can’t be the only ones.”

“And the humans?”

“Enough, I’m sure. They are a resilient sort.” Klyn’s liquid amber eyes try to look confident as he gives the angry ocean a smirk, but it’s easy to tell that he’s just posturing. You know him well enough to know that he’s just as scared as you are, but he is alpha now. It was the obvious result of his hard work keeping everyone under control during the escape. It was his job to reassure them now, few as they were.

But no one had expected the sea to swallow the world. How were any of them meant to cope with that?

“They had no warning,” you say quietly.

“Neither did we.”

“We had enough.”

In the days before the Storm That Never Ended, everything fell to pieces. There had been nothing — no signs in the sea or sky. For days after the start of the rains, the doomsayers kept telling the world that it would end tomorrow. Their tomorrow never came, but the Old Ones knew in their bones. ‘Run,’ they said, ‘Take what you can and run. Run to the mountains of our homeland. Climb, climb as high as you can. Faster now. Faster! Follow the birds! The deer! Race the wind!’

And so they did. For the first time in decades, the pack gathered their families and whatever they could carry and met at the base of the tallest mountain in their territory. Human mates didn’t understand. Children cried. Most of the Elders were lost to the climb — though by now, what rocky tombs weren’t washed away in the tides were now rotting at the bottom of the sea.

“What do we do now?” you ask, looking behind you. The temporary shelters they had built after the rain stopped were better than nothing, but they wouldn’t withstand much. “We can’t stay here.”

Klyn grunted. “We do what we can,” he tells you. “Our ancestors had no more than we do now, and they survived.”

“Our ancestors had more land to live off of and more game to hunt,” you say.

“We were prepared for that,” he replies. “We may never have what we had before, but we have enough to get us through a few months if we’re careful. Don’t lose heart, Raura. Don’t let the storm win. We can hunt. We can forage. We can build a new home.”

Your eyes burn thinking about just how much was ahead of you. How could he be so calm, so composed in the face of all this?

“Raura,” he says, pointing into the grey distance. “Can you see it?”

Your eyes scan the horizon, but you don’t know what you are looking for. “Water. Clouds.”

Klyn pulls you closer and leans his head in so you can feel his breath against your ear. “There. Where the clouds are breaking.”

You see it, then, a small white glint in the emerging sunlight. “That’s…” you breathe, eyes welling with tears.

“The age of humans as we knew it might be over,” Klyn says, holding your shoulders as you look towards the gleaming ship in the distance. “But that just means that a new age will begin.”

–

Originally published on Medium, Jan. 7th, 2023