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And for Luca, the Anubis meant Nox.
Isaiah did what Luca said, then replaced the cap on the bottle. With exaggerated care, he set it beside the Tupperware container of mashed potatoes.
“We aren’t humans, but we’re hominids, which means we have similar needs: food, water, land. It was normal for there to be conflict. We’ve always been stronger, our senses heightened, but humans were clever.” He shrugged a little. “We would have died out, but for some reason, luck, fate, whatever story you want to believe, the Fenrir chose us to be their hosts.”
“You don’t have any idea where the Fenrir came from?”
“Like I said, there are stories, but no. We do know that when the Fenrir endowed us with their form, we used it to fight for the things we were being killed over. We became the demons, the devils, the nightmarish stories humans told around their campfires.” Isaiah shrugged. “We became monsters.”
Luca wasn’t sure fighting for survival made a person a monster. Just someone who desperately wanted to live, thrive, and survive.
A lot like Nox.
“The Fenrir had no love for death, and neither did our people, so we migrated as far as we could, mostly north, where the climate was less hospitable to humans. As the Fenrir, snow, ice, and terrain didn’t matter anymore.
“But eventually, they came to us.”
“They started a war?”
“No. We just made a mistake thinking we could isolate ourselves. Humans reproduced and grew in population. When the Fenrir came to us, they took all our people. There were a few hundred at the most. There was no need to reproduce because there was no Cana to call more wolves.”
“Why not?”
“There wasn’t any need for one then.” Isaiah leaned forward, resting his weight on his elbows. “Living as the wolf allowed us to live indefinitely and made us virtually indestructible. When the environment doesn’t force you to adapt, you don’t need to change.
“In order to survive, humans had to change. They had to invent, they had to build. They learned to harness their environment and manipulate it to their needs. They were a civilization while we were still living in the mountains and woods.”
“The Fenrir didn’t want to… you know, experience the world?” Luca hoped he didn’t have to explain.
“It didn’t know then. It came to us, changed us, and we lived through them. It didn’t take the time to learn the human body. And the Fenrir is sexless. It doesn’t procreate like humans or Varu. By not reproducing and living only as the wolf, we didn’t evolve.”
Luca frowned.
Isaiah watched the outside through the small gap in the window for a moment. “We were very primitive compared to humans twenty thousand years ago. We didn’t have a language. We didn’t have tools, clothes, permanent buildings. The Fenrir gave us everything we needed to thrive in the harshest environments and protect ourselves from the deadliest predators.
“When humans finally reached our territory, we didn’t even recognize them. And they had tools, weapons, andnumbers.” Isaiah drank more water. “We still remembered what we’d done, and we didn’t want that to happen again. Adaptation was our only chance to keep a full-on war from breaking out. One that we could have very well lost.”
“But you were still stronger.”
“Yes, but living as the Fenrir had limits. If they set the forests on fire to drive away game, we would have starved. They could grow crops, we couldn’t. We could have stolen from them, but what would have happened when we’d taken everything? Our only chance at peace was to be who they were. To learn how to be more—”
“Human.”
“Exactly.” Isaiah emptied his bottle of water. “To do that, our egg-bearers went to their seed-bearers.”
Luca frowned. “What?”
Isaiah laughed a little. “We don’t separate ourselves by gender. The Fenrir are sexless, and gender lost its meaning when we lived as the wolf. We were simply those who could sire young and those who could carry them.”
Now it made sense. “So your egg-bearers got pregnant.”
Isaiah’s smile fell. “At first, humans killed many of them, the rest….” He squeezed the water bottle. “We were very different. Things were different, but eventually, several returned pregnant. It was the first time we had young in tens of thousands of years. We had to learn how to build shelters, how to use fire, how to protect them and keep them warm and fed.”
“Because they didn’t have wolves.”
“We can’t take a wolf until puberty, for whatever reason. And many of us who had taken the Fenrir hadn’t ever produced young. We didn’t even know how to care for them. The rest of us had been alive so long, we’d forgotten.”
“Did a lot of your children die?”
