Chapter Text
Was the sky always this grey?
Eight year old Anaxagoras wondered this as he lay dying in the snow. Through the haze of pain, he could see his own blood stained arm, bent at an angle he didn’t know was possible, pulled at by the animals around him.
His mind wandered as sharp, white hot pain blossomed in his chest and spread all across his waist. Around him, he could hear the hungry whines of at least four wolves, hastily shoving their muzzles against one another, eager to go all in on their fresh kill. Their sharp teeth nipped at his clothes, tugging at them, trying to get to the flesh. He felt the nails of one of them, ripping at his waist, drawing more than blood.
Anaxa felt a cough rattle in his throat but he could barely move.
He wanted it to be over.
He wanted to scream, to fight, to do something that indicated he was still alive.
He prayed to the Titans in a last attempt to seek comfort. If there really were Gods, surely they would intervene. Surely someone would save him and the stories his parents told him would all come true. That there really were higher beings, looking out for him. But the sky remained grey, cold and unsupportive.
Anaxa’s vision in his left eye gradually faded, the sky turning black. He was too wrecked with pain to even lift his hand to check the damage. All he could feel was the warmness of his own blood; trickling down the side of his face as his consciousness continued to fade in and out.
He had been sitting on the old swing in their backyard, reading and relaxing in the warm chill of early winter. His sister had stopped to put on a coat for him, telling him to get back inside by six. It was way past that time by now.
He vaguely remembered struggling at first but after one of them injured his eye, he could not even scream, even as snowflakes melted against his now bare arms and exposed chest.
The suffocating smell of wet fur made him want to throw up.
He tried to find that fire inside him to fight back, to do anything to scare them off, to get back to the warmth of his house and pretend none of this was really happening. He opened his mouth, trying to scream but nothing came out.
He was going to die.
Then he saw it. A flash of brilliant blue.
Anaxa’s eyes widened, fixated on the sudden appearance of a white wolf standing over him. Through the haze of pain and the soft flakes of snow drifting from the sky, he could see that the wolf had the most mesmerizing eyes he had ever seen, cyan blue and deep, glistening golden pupils.
They seemed too intelligent to belong to an animal, for they inspected him with interest and curiosity.
The front of its chest was stained with crimson, contrasting against the dappled flecks of white and grey fur, reflecting off the feeble dayglow of winter.
His own blood.
Anaxa opened his mouth again, trying to find his voice but only a wisp of breath escaped his cold trembling lips once more. The wolf’s ears twitched, holding his gaze for a second before slipping away as quickly as it had appeared.
With the absence of the blue eyed wolf, the others pressed in, moving closer till their heated bodies felt reassuring in the cold. Anaxa closed his eyes, accepting the hand of death’s embrace as he let himself fade into nothingness.
But gentleness enveloped him in a way that felt tender, calm and reassuring, the feeling comparable to being picked up from a comfortable couch in front of a television late in the night and carried into another room where it was quieter. A sensation that he knew and experienced before, many years ago.
The sound of wolves faded away, and he was reborn into a world of warmth.