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“Amazingly, no. Like I said, adaptation and we learned quickly. But we also had remarkable teachers.”
“I thought the Fenrir….” It dawned on Luca. “You mean humans.”
“Yes. We observed, we learned. We began doing things like they did. And once we began having young, once the Fenrir experienced life, it couldn’t get enough.”
If it had been anything like the Anubis, it would have been insatiable.
“Two Cana were born in the first generation. We think one of them was an egg-bearer, but the Fenrir have a hard time differentiating between who can sire and who can carry since they can’t do either.”
“You actually mean remember. Like they have memories the same way people do.”
“How do you think I know what happened?”
Luca hadn’t thought about it. But now that Isaiah brought it up, how did he know? Especially if they didn’t have a language to pass down stories
“They remember almost everything,” Isaiah said. “And they share memories. It’s not perfect, they’re limited in their understanding which can make it difficult to decipher what they tell us, but for the most part, we don’t lose our history unless our wolves are destroyed before they can tell the others.”
Luca bet the death of their Cana had taken a lot of those memories.
“We accomplished what we needed to do,” Isaiah said. “We adapted, and through future generations and by bringing across more wolves, we gained our first Greater Alphas like me.”
“What’s the difference between a Greater Alpha and an Alpha?”
“We have very low fertility rates as a species. But Greater Alphas are always fertile. When we reproduce with human egg-bearers, they always get pregnant. And a single seed-bearer could reliably reproduce with humans siring hundreds of offspring with human egg-bearers.”
“What about betas?” Again, if they were anything like Nox, and were fertile, they could reproduce a lot of young as well.
“Their wolves are very… aggressive. Humans may not see the Fenrir, but they sense them and fear them. We will not force a person to be with us. Greater Alphas like me aren’t—weren’t—controlled by their wolves like betas. Unlike us, they aren’t always fertile and they won’t trigger an egg-bearer to ovulate.
“By interbreeding with humans, we adapted our lives right down to their language, culture, reasoning, questioning, but….”
“It wasn’t enough?”
Sadness filled Isaiah’s eyes.
And that same sadness flowed through Luca. He wanted to be disturbed by knowing someone else's emotions, but it felt too natural. Almost like breathing.
A necessity he hadn’t known he needed.
“The Fenrir was a part of us. It had experienced life, but it was still the wolf. It didn’t want to relinquish things like Phasing, and as I said, once it knew what it felt like to be the hominid, it wanted more. It wasn’t a problem at first, but since humans lived shorter lives and changed so fast, when our ways became a problem, it caught us by surprise.”
“What changed?” Luca got up to get another couple of bottles of water.
“The thing about questioning your existence is that you look for answers. Whether real or imagined, or a truth we can’t prove, it can become a powerful motivator for a shift in society.”
Luca returned.
Isaiah took one bottle. “Government, societal norms, religion, it rose everywhere, and what we were, found its way back into the nightmare stories they told.” Isaiah pressed his lips together and closed his eyes. After several deep breaths, he said, “They started with the ones we cast out, the Mah.”
Luca sat back in his chair. “They killed them.”
Isaiah bowed his head. “They did far worse.”
“And you didn’t stop them?”
“They were criminals.” His tone was more of a terrible memory than a proclamation. When he looked at Luca again, those nightmares reflected in his gaze. “It was enough, at first. Then humans came with armies. They had weapons, and we’d tried so hard to be human that even with the Fenrir, our people didn’t stand a chance. And killing any humans only brought more. The elders pushed for conformity. To be what humans wanted us to be.”
“Like them.” The words tasted bitter.
