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50

"NOOO!!" Kadai sat bolt upright, gasping for air, his heart thumping madly in his chest.

Everything was gone. Literally. He was sitting in an endless expanse of white. There was no sky, there was no ground. It was all just white. He didn't even have a shadow.

He clutched at his heart, sucking in great big whooping lungfuls of air that whistled in the back of his throat. He was so caught up in Shekka's words he didn't even give a second thought to where he was or how he got here. All of that was secondary.

She knew. Somehow she knew. Did Wardo tell her? Is that why she -

Is that why she poisoned me?

Kadai stopped. Just like everything else in this empty place, he just... stopped.

He could feel the air flow over his tongue and into his chest and back out again, even though he suspected there wasn't really any air in this place. He could feel his hand clutching his chest, he could feel his heartbeat pounding against his palm, but he suspected none of those things were really there, either. He could think clearly again, more clearly than he had in years, and there was no mistaking it now.

Shekka had poisoned him. Shekka... his mate of thirty years... the mother of his children...

She had murdered him.

Kadai squeezed tighter and tighter, hooking his claws into his own flesh, pushing them deeper and deeper inside. Maybe, if he could go hard enough, he could claw his own heart out. Maybe then he wouldn't have to feel this way anymore. If it was simply a feeling of betrayal, he would have been able to live with it. If it was simply a feeling of loss, he would have been able to live with it.

But not this. Overlaying everything else like the putrid layer of poison that had covered his last meal was the absolute certainty that he was getting exactly what he deserved. This was exactly what Shekka must have felt like, so why should he be pardoned this torture? It was only fair. He had failed his people, he had failed his children, and he had failed his mate.

As warmth started to trickle down his chest, Kadai wondered if he had indeed been cast into hell.

He held his hand up to his face and, contrasted against the pure white of everything beyond, it looked like a dark horror, stained with years' worth of blood. He watched it drip from his crimson claws and fall past his legs and just keep going, falling through the eternal white, never striking the bottom, just falling and falling forever, until the drops became too small to see.

He started to get up like the old Wolf he had become in his recent years - carefully, supporting the parts of his body that always ached and groaned or stabbed him with random bolts of pain, but it only took him a second to realize there were no aches or pains in this place, no fatigue in the bones. Not even the holes he had scratched into his chest were causing him any discomfort.

Of course not. There was nothing else here, so why should he be able to feel anything besides the overwhelming pain in his heart?

He stood up. He did not know what he was standing on, but he was standing nonetheless.

He had to set things right. He had to take it all back.

"Shekka!" he screamed. "Hezzi!" He spun around in a circle, looking for a way out. There were no echoes. His voice simply dispersed into the great vast nothingness surrounding him. "Shekka!! Hezzi!!" He was all alone in this empty place. He walked on nothing. He breathed nothing. He existed in nothing. He was nothing. "Shekka? Hezzi?"

He stopped turning, and the hopelessness of his situation finally started to dawn. He couldn't do anything from here. Not anything. His eyes began to burn and he bowed his head in shame. A tear flowed past his nose and dripped down into the infinite whiteness beneath his feet. He watched it fall, and he wondered if it would ever catch up to the blood that had dripped before. Probably not. Blood was thicker than water. Blood was heavier than water.

"I'm sorry." He whispered. "A thousand times, I'm so sorry."

"Please don't cry."

That voice startled him, despite its simple beauty. He jerked his head up and saw a she-wolf in the distance, sitting on a mossy log, looking at him with the strangest smile on her face, so beautiful, yet so sad.

Kadai wanted to call out to her, but something stopped him. He wanted to feel relieved that he wasn't the only one in this godforsaken place, but for some reason he felt deathly afraid of her, like she might turn into a monster the moment he approached. He knew for a fact she wasn't there a second ago, so where did she come from?

He started walking regardless, unable to turn away. She was the only speck of colour in this entire empty place, and he was drawn to her like a moth to flame.

As he came closer, other colours started to bleed from the white, turning into browns and greens, and before his very eyes a path materialized on the other side of the log, forming stone by stone and pebble by pebble, a carpet of earth winding its way through invisible white hills and crests, stretching so far he could not see where it ended.

She waited for him, so patiently, and when he finally stood before her, staring into her emerald green eyes, Kadai found himself speechless.

She was young, probably somewhere in her early twenties, and she was very beautiful, incredibly beautiful, the most beautiful she-wolf Kadai had ever seen. Her fur was a dark grey colour, laced with veins of a lighter grey, as if she'd been made out of a storm cloud. She wore the same garb as the Wolves of his village, but he did not know her. He was positive of that. And yet...

Why did she feel so familiar?

She looked up at him, and in a small, musical voice she said, "Hello."

"H-Hello," Kadai returned, not knowing why he felt so nervous. There was just something about her he couldn't place, something that made the fur on the back of his neck stand on end. "Who are you?"

She looked away, down at the path stretching out before them, and absentmindedly rubbed her shoulder.

She did not say anything.

"My name is Kadai," he offered, feeling like a fool. He watched her closely, and he realized she was shaking. Maybe she felt nervous, too? Or maybe she was just scared? Was it him she was scared of, or was it this place? He looked around, but it was still just as empty and foreboding as ever. He did not know why he should feel this way. There was nowhere for any creatures to hide, Wolf or otherwise, no places for anything to jump out of, no discernible threat at all. But that did not change the fact that this place did not feel safe. It felt like... waiting. He couldn't put it any better than that. It was as if this whole place was a manifestation of waiting. It constantly felt like something was supposed to happen, but then never did. Is that why he felt so ill at ease? He cleared his throat and tried something else. "Do you know where we are?"

She looked at him, and he was once again struck by how beautiful she was. But it was strange. He did not view her beauty in any carnal sense, like the way he saw Shekka when they first started courting, or Sarah when he stumbled across her sleeping by the river. That kind of beauty was drunk in by the eyes, it came in from the outside, but this... this was something else. This feeling was originating from inside, and looking upon her was igniting it like a piece of flint and tinder.

"I do not think this place has a name," she said with a slight shrug. "It simply is as it is."

"I see." Kadai sort of understood what she meant, but it still felt like she was keeping something from him.

"I do not think we will be staying here much longer, though," she said, and that strange little smile crept across her face once again.

"Have you been here long?" Kadai asked.

She nodded. "I've been waiting for a very, very long time."

Waiting. The exact word he'd been thinking. Surely that can't be just a coincidence? "How long have you been waiting?" he asked, not really expecting to get a straight answer out of her, but a straight answer is exactly what she gave him.

"Twenty-three years," she said, and her words struck Kadai with such force he stumbled backwards as if he had been punched in the stomach.

"No..." He shook his head in denial, refusing to believe it. "It can't be..." His hand crept to his bloody chest, up to the tiny line of scar tissue he had carefully kept hidden under his fur for twenty-three years.

She looked at him with those beautiful green eyes, but Kadai turned away, unable to meet her gaze head on. He wanted to run and run and never stop. He wanted to go deep into the blinding white nothingness and become nothing himself. He wanted to disappear. He felt that, if he tried hard enough, he might actually be able to do it. And he would welcome it. So long as he didn't have to face the young she-wolf at his back, the one with the beautiful green eyes and the fur like storm clouds.

The she-wolf who had been unable to give him her name.

"Fa-"

"NOO!!" Kadai screamed. He had to get out. He did not care which way he went, for there was no such thing as North or South or East or West in this place, there was only distance, and he wanted to put as much as possible between him and -

There was a massive tree blocking his path. Not just any tree, but a beech tree, its thick branches reaching up towards a blank sky that did not contain any sun or moon or stars or clouds. It simply existed inside the nothing, floating motionlessly with no wind to rustle its leaves or soil to anchor its roots.

And there, right at eye level, was a single word, a word he himself had carved deep into its trunk twenty-three years ago.

enka

Kadai clapped a hand to his mouth to stifle the sobs building up inside of him. This was it. He didn't need any more confirmation than this. He really had been cast into hell, and this was to be his punishment. He slowly looked down, unable to stop himself. Without any soil, he could look straight down into the gnarled mass of roots growing out of the trunk. Little bits of dirt clods and fine grains of sand still clung to them, as if the entire tree had been ripped out of the real world. He could see them fall into the nothingness like rain. And there, cradled between the reaching, winding roots, very close to where the surface would have been...

It was a tiny, baby Wolf skeleton, all curled up, as if sleeping.

And that was what finally broke him. Kadai simply couldn't take any more. He had carried the weight of his title, the weight of his responsibility, the weight of his guilt, the weight of his shame, and the weight of his betrayal for far too long, and he simply could not take it any longer.

He raised his head and he screamed at the silent roof of leaves, just as he had done on that stormy night twenty-three years ago. He screamed in anger and sorrow, trying to get it all out before it could poison him any further. He screamed for Shekka and he screamed for Sarah and he screamed for Banno and he screamed for Hezzi and he screamed for Ander. But most of all, he screamed for his secret daughter. His enka. Taken from this world before she could earn a name.

His scream finally died away to nothing, leaving him feeling empty inside, as if this blank world had somehow gotten inside of him. Tears built up in his eyes, making the leaves and the pure white gaps between them fuse together into a blurry shimmer. He lowered his head and the word struck him again, the proof of all his sins, carved into the bark just as it was carved into his heart.

enka

He suddenly felt her hand on his shoulder, and it was the first warm thing he has felt in this cursed place that didn't come from his own blood and tears.

But she was his blood. She was his tears.

"I'm sorry," Kadai said, struggling to get the words out. "I wasn't able to give you life. I wasn't able to give you love. I wasn't able to give you a home. I couldn't even give you a name! And I... I'm just so sorry!" The sobs came out of him in violent bursts, rocking his entire body, and he was powerless to stop them. These were the tears he's been keeping secret, the tears no other living soul has ever seen, and he couldn't keep them in any longer.

"Please, please don't cry," she said, and next thing Kadai knew, she had wrapped her arms around his tired, heaving body, and given him an embrace unlike any he has ever felt before.

The embrace of a daughter.

He could feel her hands on his back, squeezing him so tightly, and her face against his neck, so warm. He wanted to hug her back, he wanted it more than he's ever wanted anything, but he didn't think he deserved to. What right did he have to even look upon her, let alone touch her?

"It wasn't your fault," she said, burying her face against his chest. "There are no sins for me to forgive, but if it will give you peace, then I forgive you, Father! I forgive every wrong you believe you ever committed against me! I forgive you! I forgive you! So please, please... stop crying for me."

Kadai gasped. It can't be. How can she say something like that? How can she just... forgive him so easily? How can she give it away so recklessly, without a second thought? How can she hold him with such love after all he's done? How...

How can she call him Father?

"You..." There were many things Kadai could have said. You can't forgive me. You don't understand what you're saying. You were denied too much to be able to give so freely. But in the end, Kadai didn't say any of that. He couldn't.

What he did do was throw his arms around the daughter he hasn't seen since she was born. He couldn't stop crying all at once, as she had asked of him, but he could cry for a different reason, and that was okay, because she was crying with him.

They stood holding each other in the non-existent shadow of the beech tree for a very long time, or perhaps it was no time at all. Time itself seemed to have lost all meaning, but that didn't matter. They were together now.

"Thank you," Kadai whispered, feeling almost at peace. "I only wish I could have given you a name."

"But you did, Father!" she said, suddenly excited. "You did give me a name, you just never finished it. Don't you see?"

Kadai pulled back a little and looked into her smiling, upturned face. She looked even more beautiful in her happiness, so much so it almost hurt. "What are you talking about?"

"Come! You should be able to see it now!" She grabbed him by the hand and started to pull him towards the tree, but Kadai dug his heels in. He didn't want to face that tree again, and he didn't want to look upon that word, that terrible marker.

"No, I can't," he said. "Please don't make me look upon it."

"Come on!" she insisted, pulling and tugging on his arm until he relented.

He followed her, but he kept his eyes on his feet, not understanding why she wanted him to look upon his greatest failure yet again.

"Look."

"I... don't know if I can."

"Please, Father! Just do it!"

It still felt so strange, hearing her call him 'Father' so easily. He did not know her, and she did not know him. They were perfect strangers to each other, and yet it felt like he _did_know her, and he knew that she felt the same way.

He could still see the mass of roots reaching down into the white abyss, twisting and curling around each other, but something was different now. It was such a fundamental change it took a moment for him to realize what it was, and even when he did, he searched the whole thing several times more, top to bottom and side to side, just to make sure he hadn't overlooked it, but there was no mistake.

The tiny skeleton was gone.

She squeezed his hand, and as Kadai stared at the clump of roots where her infant skeleton used to be, curled up as if sleeping, he wondered what life would have been like if she had been allowed to live, how different all their lives might have gone. Would she have grown up to be the same as she is now, so caring and warm? Or would she have turned into just another she-wolf with a heart of stone? Kadai didn't think so, but it was impossible to know for sure. Something he did know, however, was that, if she had lived, then Ander would have been the one buried deep in the woods somewhere. The thought saddened him. She and Ander were alike in so many ways, and yet it was as if the entire world had conspired to make sure they would never know each other.

"Father, it's okay. You can trust me."

She held his hand a little bit tighter, and Kadai knew he couldn't deny her any longer. He looked up, his eyes traveling along the roots and up the coarse bark of the trunk until they finally reached the -

He stared at the word, his mouth slightly open, unable to move a single muscle. He must have stood there petrified for quite a while, because it took a short burst of giggles from his daughter to end the paralysis.

He approached the tree, not in fear or anxiety, but in awe of what he was seeing.

His old carvings were still there, the symbols for the word 'enka', first daughter, dull and faded by time. But there was a new symbol in front of it, its colour still fresh and vibrant, as if carved only days ago.

He reached up and traced the lines with shaking fingers, hardly daring to believe that such a miracle could be real.

Lenka

"Daughter of Life," Kadai whispered, feeling like he might start to cry all over again.

"Do you understand now, Father?" she asked. "You did give me a name. It just took someone else to finally finish what you started, someone who believed he owed me a great debt."

"But..." He looked at her, his first daughter, and she was smiling so beautifully. "Who? Who did this?"

A tear rolled down her cheek, but she was still smiling. Still smiling. "It was my big brother."

Something happened to him in that moment. He felt it just as sure as he could feel her hand in his. It was a sensation of letting go of something heavy, something he's been dragging with him for years, constantly pulling him down into the mud. He just... let go.

"Ander," he said.

She nodded. His daughter. His enka. She finally had a name.

"Lenka..."

She nodded again, more exuberantly than before, so happy she could barely contain herself.

"Your name is Lenka. You're my daughter and your name is Lenka..."

She laughed and nodded again, too emotional to speak any real words, but that was okay. Kadai pulled her in close and he hugged his daughter yet again, he hugged his Lenka, and she hugged back, laughing and crying all at the same time.

The leaves overhead started to rustle in the breeze, their shadows flitting over their bodies in alternating flashes of light and dark, and Kadai realized the earth was back beneath their feet. He could feel the sand between his toes and the sunlight on his face, shining down in hundreds of shifting rays.

She pulled away and looked up at his tear-streaked face, her own eyes slightly red and puffy, but still oh so beautiful. "Are you ready to go?"

"Go where?"

She turned her head and Kadai followed her gaze. It was the path she had been staring down when he first saw her, but it was no longer just a carpet of crumbling earth suspended over nothing. It was a peaceful path bathed in the shade of trees lining both sides, gently swaying to and fro, their leaves whispering in the breeze.

"Where does it lead?"

"I'm not sure," Lenka said. "But I've been waiting to go there for a very, very long time."

"Then we shall go there together."

Lenka smiled. "I'd like that."

Holding hands, they started down the path together, with Lenka slightly in the lead.

There was green grass growing out of the earth in random clumps, and Kadai could feel them brushing against his feet. He could hear birds chirping in the trees, and somewhere up ahead was the soft roar of a river. This place was becoming more and more real with every step. The white emptiness was simply fading away, filling up.

Kadai looked back at the giant beech tree dominating the clearing. He could just barely make out the symbols carved into its trunk, and looking upon them awoke no sense of guilt or shame at all. He only felt peace.

"Thank you, Ander," he said, and when he turned back Lenka was still there, holding his hand, smiling so beautifully amidst the sun dapples, making the lighter veins of her fur stand out silver.

"Come on, Father!" she said, gently pulling on his arm. "I want to see what's at the other end!"

Kadai smiled, feeling truly happy for the first time in many years. "All right, Lenka. I'm coming."

From the bottom of my heart, thank you.

---

This is the end of Chapter 4, easily the hardest chapter I've had to write so far, and not just because it was the longest. I'm going to need some time to get the next subchapters ready, but it shouldn't take longer than a week. Updates will resume on the 9th.

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How and Why: The Story behind "Ander" (Journal): https://www.sofurry.com/view/517234

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