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He does play with her. He comes the very next night with a galaxy in his eyes and the whole moon in his hair. He rushes to her with the howling night gale singing an opera of his coming. He leaps in the air, the grinning kamikaze itself, and lands face-down as she backs away in shock.

"No," she spits at him in a whisper, her maw a loom of terror weaving a net to keep him at bay. He feels the force of the tone, the word, and pops up to his feet, full of energy, wanting to play, and confused.

"Why?" he asks, his head cocked to the side. One ear seems to twitch. She watches it in morbid curiosity. Damien, the spirit, she thinks. Damien, the demon.

"It's... wrong."

"But it's playing!" Zephyr himself breathes spirits through his hair and eyes.

"No! It's..." She backs away from him, silver eyes flicking all over his trembling form. "It's mad."

"I'm not angry..."

"I didn't say you were; I said you're mad. That's not how you play!"

Confusion wars with reason in his eyes, with still that happy, steel firestorm that now flickers and begins to wane. "I don't get it..."

She swallows, suddenly nervous. She cannot understand what is wrong with the boy. She can hardly name to him what she thinks is wrong. For many moments, they simply stare at one another, breathing the moonlight-flavored air into the silent, gossiping wind, until she says, "This is how you play."

She sprints away from him, and he follows with a frown, trying to see how she plays. Her tail waves hypnotically, low to the ground and seeming to move slower than the rest of her does. Damien wants to know what makes her so different, besides her fur. He runs after her in grim determination, no longer smiling, because he feels he has failed. When they reach the pool, she grins and splashes him again. He puts his arms up and stares at her, brow lightly furrowed in thought.

"I'll make it easy," she announces. "We'll make it a real game. Hmm..." She has to think about this, because if she makes it too competitive, well, he might fail to understand it. It has to have innate silliness, she decides. And in that thought, she has a mind-boggling realization. "...are you ticklish?" she inquires, with the most innocent of fingers delicately on her chin.

Immediately, his mind races back to before his mother was alone. It's a thought reflex - he knows the feeling. It's not one he's thought about much, though, so he hasn't had time to miss it or dampen it. The mere memory softens his face and almost summons a smile. "I... guess?"

Her face ignites with sudden pleasure. "Gooooooooood..." With a sinister grin, she darts her paws forward at his ribs. His instinct to flinch has been long since eroded and the contact sparks a lightning storm of sensation that vibrates and ripples through his body from the point of contact. "HAH!" he yelps with a wild lifting of his eyebrows, and he twitches away. She advances slowly, an almost predatory look on her face, paws held out in a playful mimicry of mantis-style kung fu. His eyes are bright again, though the smile has not yet reached his lips, and he backs away.

With a bark, she jabs forward again, first one side, then the other, making him squirm and writhe, and then she leaps at him as he tries to dance away, hardly knowing it's a dance. While she growls and giggles in ridiculous ferocity, he yips back at her, trying to be on guard, but letting out awkward laughs each time. The sound is foreign, but pleasant. The confusion returns, but with wild wonder, and his mind is transported to when Siber held him underwater and that same sense of discovery, of a completely new sensation. Suddenly, he grins, and her face flashes again with pale delight in the silver-lit darkness. "There!" she shouts, and tackles him, fingers running up and down his sides like spiders while he spasms underneath her, giggling still as his face and mind get used to this... this simple happiness.

"You're laughing! Now play back, come on!" She demands it from him, and pauses her assault to sit on his hips, her arms akimbo. "Play!"

He hesitates for only a moment, looking up at her, taking in her whole, nearly nude body framed by space itself, and is struck dumb. She's... ravishing. And now she's frowning. "You stopped," she pouts. "Why?"

"You're beautiful," he breathes, and flushes brightly after he realizes he has said it. The blush deepens as he registers a more subtle reaction, one that would not be so subtle were he not wearing heavy denim.

"Yes, I am. Now play with me!" She tickles his sides again, but though it gets him to squirm, it's not the same, and she sighs. "We'll play again tomorrow. I don't want to watch you not be playful. You're no fun then. But you're..." She pauses, looking down at him with that same enigmatic curiosity as before, and splays her fingers on his chest, over his shirt. "You're..." She tilts her head to one side, feeling him, and then unabashedly lifts his shirt, already rumpled from their playing. Both paws explore his unblemished, youthfully waxen chest, which hardly even has the scattering of soft velvet underneath his navel. "You're smooth," she says as her silken fingertips glide across his flesh, and then she blushes as her actions defy even denim's attempts to protect the boy's piqued interest.

He notices her notice. "Sorry... I..." But she stays there, and though the blush remains, her face goes blank. She's studying him. He knows this face. Siber likes this face. Without realizing it, he, too, adopts it as he watches her face and her silver eyes. He memorizes the pattern of darker fur dimpling her cheeks, like a delicate mask and she presses closer against him, measuring his reaction and her own to the muted contact between them. His back throbs where his scar has been, but he hardly notices. Because she is on the opposite side of his scar. Who could possibly care about anything opposite her?

She climbs off just as he reaches his hands to touch her fur. "See you, demon," she mutters, and dashes away, her face a mask of clay and marble. He lies there, watching her, propped on his elbows, until she disappears into the forest.

"See you," he murmurs back to her, and sees her great ears flick just before she vanishes, the trees swaying with ancient pleasure for her entrance to their domain. He waits for the pressure to be relieved, but it refuses to abate. He remains in that moment, with her paws on his skin, and her hips against his, and her warmth radiating from her entire body as she used hers to explore his. His gaze is like granite, but only hollow for its absence from the present.

"She's the closest thing I have to a daughter-in-law," Siber says from behind him. The pressure immediately fades as Damien somehow jumps and spins, his own agility unnoticed by him. The wolf man is squatting behind him, eyes riveted to him. Damien blushes faintly again as he realizes he has been fantasizing about a girl whose father-in-law had saved his life. Then, again, the blush deepens as he realizes he has also fantasized about the father-in-law.

"I... think she's beautiful," he manages, trying to both be a man and an admiring boy.

"So do I," Siber answers simply.

"So does she," he responds, trying to joke. It feels strange. He hardly knows he's done it. His mind is still with her.

Siber smiles. "So does she. When she's being playful, she reminds me of a hyena I once knew. Proud almost to the point of arrogance, insouciantly playful, and captivating in her confidence. But she has the darker, more internalized side I rarely saw in him. I like that."

"I like that, too," Damien agrees mindlessly. Tetra's scent is still in his nostrils, though he can't tell.

"Good! I'm glad she found you."

"Why?" he asks without thinking, and suddenly snaps out of his reverie. She was breathtaking, though...

"Because you both need someone to play with."

"Why? Is she alone?" She has said as much, but maybe she was just saying that. Maybe she really does have friends and she just gets tired of them and needs him for something later. Maybe this was his last chance to play with her and he ruined it by calling her beautiful.

"Yes."

The conversation ends, then, when Damien smiles. The throbbing is still there, right between his shoulder blades, but again, he doesn't even care. Siber jumps higher than anyone should and takes flight, and the boy doesn't watch. The boy is back with Tetra, while she tickles him and makes him giggle and smile. He's smiling again.

I will be your parent. She's the closest thing I have to a daughter-in-law. His heart catches. What... what is Siber doing?

He spends the next eight weeks with all of them. Each night, he plays with Tetra, and then she leaves, and either Siber or Tatrix finds him. It takes him time to trust the two men. He is unnerved by their closeness to one another, and how easily each ignores the other while either is instructing him in any given way. His time with Tetra is, therefore, the most precious to him, even if he does, in his innermost turmoil, admit his admiration of and lust for the other two.

But they do claim his time. Tatrix has decided to teach him how to use his voice. He learns to listen to the entire world around him - even to silence. To some, that is not such a tremendous concept, but to a pubescent child, the idea that there can be a sound of silence is transforming. Some nights, they simply walk through the forest together, and Tatrix has him describe everything he hears. He teaches Damien to listen to his own voice, and to hear how a particular silence will respond to being broken. Some silences dread the change, like the silence of after midnight in a thick copse of trees, where all sound is muted and shouts are assassinated by a strange echo that barks in the listener's ears before smothering them to a muffled death. Some silences beg for the change and sing anthems of it, like the sunlit silence of dawn on a granite mountaintop, where sound is caught by the stone, blown like glass out of proportion, and shatters the stillness into thousands of scattering waves, bouncing off each new surface into the symphony that, on Damien's first meeting with Tatrix, had led an army with the wolf-man's call.

Damien often leans against Tatrix's side during these walks, though after one light cuffing made his ears ring, he no longer dares to press his ear against the wolf's fur. He still sometimes blushes at the memory; their discipline is effective, because he wants their approval so badly. The great wolf loves to lecture, wax poetic on sound, and frequently sing to the boy, so the boy has his opportunity to be close with Tatrix when his teacher sits and lets Damien rest in his lap. Many nights, the boy has lain there, listening, but lulled by a voice that sounds like it has issued from another planet and brings the entire world with it. It is a voice that can be as deep as the earth itself and sometimes rises to the heights of the stars where it belongs. The wolf is not perfect - Damien shares laughter with him when he chokes on a note or stutters on a word - but it is an otherworldly experience that comes to envelop the boy; it is an embrace of sound.

Continuing on that line, though, it does sometimes seem as though the great wolf is more than he seems to be. His height is truly unbelievable and his voice ascends from mere metaphor into honest, psychic strength. Glimpses of his black eyes seem to sometimes reveal gold, and... Damien blushes to think of it, but the hardness of his muscles betray more than simple skin and fur. Tatrix also teaches the boy and his daughter how to be agile. He insists, over and over, that Siber is the dancer, but Tatrix brings them spheres that appear not to ever turn because of their reflective smoothness, and fencing swords, and glimmering coins to do magic with, as well as charcoal for drawing and dyes for temporary tattoos on both fur and flesh. The children sometimes look at him askance and exchange glances. He is preparing them for something that they certainly do not understand, and he does not appear to, either.

Siber teaches him meditation. When Siber chooses to be the one who finds him either before or after he plays with Tetra, he takes the boy (against his warm body, through the air, etc.) to any of a great many places - the tops of trees, the pool at the base of the mountain, the creek where they first met, an open field - and has him sit, and breathe. This, the boy understands least of all. Tetra tells him over and over that Siber is pleased at his progress, but the boy feels no progress. "He says you live in the world and the world lives in you," she tells him. When he asks about her meditations, because he knows she does them and has seen her sitting in silence as dawn breaks, she answers that they're "Oh my god so boriiiing."

The cobalt wolf remains in silence throughout these sessions, and only speaks before and after them. They breathe together. It is then that Damien feels most clearly the shimmering eloquence of a night sky's hymn, or the rancid bickering between tree branches, or the postlude of mossy aromas to the night's many movements of scent. He does not understand how synesthetic the experiences are, or why they are, or what they are. He knows he is hearing manmade music in cicadas' mating calls and assigning the metallic tang of an unwashed spoon to the taste of fresh-spilled blood on the forest floor, but the significance of it troubles him. He feels it like he is trying to grasp an entire swarm of butterflies with just his hands. The idea splashes away from him when he seeks it, and only tenuously lands on him when he tries to ignore it, fluttering away the moment he clutches at it.

Siber explains that the earth is whole, and seems unable to articulate what he wants to say. His ability with his voice is pathetic, really, compared to Tatrix. He only has reason to guide him - not verse, or diction, or rhythm. He repeats himself many times, generally only changing the words slightly. "The world is whole. It's one thing. Everything that you see is just... it's one. You can't go outside it, but you don't need to, because it's all one thing - it's everything. Sight is smell, is sound, is touch, is taste. Is light. It's all... one... thing." Sometimes, he can expound on a flower or a particular animal in an attempt to paint a new picture, but Damien never hears anything different - to him, the wolf is incurably confusing and caught in his own world.

When Siber realizes he won't be able to teach Damien much about thought, he falls back on teaching him about nature and there, Siber has vast stores of knowledge. Much of it is too abstract for the boy - molecular biology and quantum theory in particular, and some parts of chemistry, although Siber does seem to be able to help Damien understand and apply whatever he's learning in school. The boy finds his grades improving quickly, and after a few weeks, Siber begins alternating between tutoring sessions and hours of meditation. His face and entire personality light up when he talks about science and technology, and that is when Damien absorbs the most, and when they both realize it, that is when they feel the most truly connected. That is when Siber doesn't mind that Damien has inched his way into the blue wolf-man's arms. It is also when he most often sees Tetra, listening from afar.

Besides the intertwining webs of thought and biology, Siber also teaches dance. He is completely terrible at teaching dance. It's as though he once knew, and has forgotten out of a lack of practice. This only lasts a few days, though it does teach Damien a few basic steps of what he later learns is not just a dance, but combat. He learns how to step in circles and swing his legs and arms in fluid movements, and tries not to trip too often. When he does, Siber keeps his head against the ground and demands the names of the grasses and insects that he frequently cannot see in the shadows of the trees. The wolf retains his silent, half-mad ambiguity. Damien never begins to trust him. He only continues to want him.

Tetra remains gorgeous, to him. He learns to herd her in their games so he can see her against different parts of the sky. They wrestle and chase one another and climb the trees, and once, Tetra kills a Black who gets too close in the treetops. That day, they both watch it fall to the ground, little more than a black rag with a metallic beak and claws, and this one with a sword. They see Tatrix arrive over where it lands. He doesn't look at them, and when he is gone, so is the Black. They don't speak of this.

He tries to make sure they wrestle on the full moon, or close to it. He has gotten good at it, as the adolescence he had been denied by his mother takes fervid hold and thickens his shoulders and trunk, beginning to sculpt gentle ridges into his chest and belly. It is slow, and he does not become chiseled or blocky, but his masculinity quietly and unimposingly asserts itself, finally, on his androgynous, wispy frame. His mother snorts when she sees the grocery bill, but he doesn't mind.

On this full moon, he falls under Tetra. He has learned to dance and weave and carry her and twitch and jump and spin out of her way, though she still pins him regularly, because she knows how. But he knows how to slide and trip her, and tonight she lands on top of him, and he is rewarded by the picture of her smiling face, and her damp, panting breath, and the glow of her heat, all framed by the aesthetic background of a smiling, lunar globe. She notices him looking behind her and smirks.

"I thought you'd been doing this." Her soprano is wry, but the fingers that slip along his sweat-slick chest and the faint redness he can see in her ears betray her.

He smiles back, and his words are honest, defending himself from her playful accusation. "You match the night. I don't know what I'd do if I saw you in daylight."

"Cringe, I'll bet," she answers, staring into his argent eyes. Her smile begins to fade though its brilliance remains, and as she lapses into her studious enigma, he lets his head lie back on the grass. His hands are on her shoulders because they have never ventured lower. Hers, like his, have gained definition from their nightly playing. He can feel the soft firmness of her abdominal muscles against his, and he is well aware from chasing her and being thrown and carried by her that her thighs are strong, as well. The brown patches of fur on her cheeks seem to have shifted slightly with the season, becoming darker and more defined. They are symmetrical, and each is like one half of an open eye. The two of them are growing together. Again, he knows it is all purely aesthetic, but... it's nice.

If they are romantic with one another, they are unaware of it. They are aware that it could be romance, but neither has yet had the courage to approach the subject. It took him three weeks to reach this level of playfulness, and comfort. It was not easy. What Siber teaches him when he is teaching him always feels like the opposite of what Siber teaches him when he is talking to him, though the wolf insists that's not true. Tetra rolls her eyes at all of the rest of them when the matter is broached, though Damien knows how much she thinks about it. Touching nature is solemn and calm, but being with nature is a celebration...? And furthermore, it always sounds like hypocrisy. Siber is only celebrating on rare occasions. He glows when it is obvious he has just been intimate with Tatrix, but he only smiles - he doesn't trot, or bounce in his step, or anything like that. He remains always an adult. That is how Damien sees it.

So, he has learned to choose to take what he wants from each of the three of them. He is accustomed to stealing comfort where he can find it; now, he copies personality. But it's not an act. It is the truth that he is choosing to become, and somewhere, when he is silent with Siber's instruction, he knows this. He is playful because Tetra demands it, and because they both love it, and because Tatrix laughs with him and congratulates him on every success he has. He is powerful because he adores Tatrix and the aura of command and strength that emanates from the gargantuan wolf. He is lithe because Siber insists on his both mental and physical flexibility and because it helps him to play with Tetra. He knows he is creating a self, and as far as he can tell... he likes it.

A black silhouette flits across the moon. "The Black," he whispers, and peels Tetra off him like a heavy blanket. She rolls to her feet, eyes searching the heavens. The Black are nearly impossible to see. They are visible only when they cast shadows on the celestial bodies, or at dawn and dusk, or - Damien grimaces to admit it and recalls his former solemnness - to the nocturnal eyes of his companions.

They are both on their feet. One thing neither of the adults talks about is the Black. Tetra's knowledge of them is limited, and it's not that Tatrix and Siber reject questions about them - they completely ignore them_. "Siber, what are the Black?"_

"The root structures of cypress trees are actually really cool; microarrays show that their gene expression..."

The creatures appear only briefly, ever, and the men nearly always destroy them and somehow make them vanish before the children can investigate. Both of them silently wait for one of the adults to appear, not willing to speak out loud or even move until they can identify the threat. Just as silently, though, they secretly hope neither one is watching.

The light wavers in the corner of Damien's eye and he shouts and twitches to his right, tugging Tetra with him. A line of acid makes the grasses scream where they had stood, and both begin panting as the adrenaline truly sets in. Damien swallows, ears straining for noise. There should be the cracking of wood that follows Siber's ebony sword. There should be the clacking of stone that follows Tatrix's onyx spears.

"To the pool," Tetra whispers behind him. "I don't think they like water." There is no reason to think that, but at least the pool is a place both children identify with safety, so it seems as good a place as any. The sky overhead is strangely free of comment. The wind is still, the trees vapid, the starlight placid. The vibrancy Damien has come to expect is gone. It is as though the Black has stolen it.

Suddenly, Tetra's leg sweeps under his and he lands on his knees, then rolls on top of her protectively where she's thrown herself down. In the same instinct, she shifts her weight and rotates on top of him while the air rips out a pained howl around them. The Black's movements seem to make the entire world sinister, and all the children can do is try to hop out of the way.

Damien eventually manages to toss Tetra into the creek, and she tugs him in with her. They sink underneath the surface and meet one another's eyes in the unspeakably clear pool. Tiny roots waver in the current on the edges of the banks around them. The same ochre and rose stones clack emotionlessly around the bottom of the shallow stream. Damien sees the frolicking waves of Tetra's fur in the scattering moonlight, and smiles at her. At least the two of them seem to have retained some life. He grimaces only briefly, a fluttering expression as the scar on his back itches and pounds, but the pain is numbed, in this cool serenity.

For long moments, there is no more sign of the Black. Damien takes a sip of air, and Tetra copies him, and they continue waiting as the current saps their heat away and slows their hearts. She smiles back at him, finally, and rolls herself over like an otter. He follows suit. Even afraid for their lives, it feels incredible to play. There is no cold - there is only the two of them. Only the world. Only life. They finish their roll. One of the roots suddenly withers and dies. A spear plunges through Tetra's back, and into the ground beneath. Her eyes go wide.