The Wolf

She was born unique: everyone in the small village knew she would be trouble. After all she bore the mark of the Dark One, the Black Man. Her eyes were the mark for they were two different colors; the left was blue and the right was green, a sure sign that she housed the power of Him within her. Sadly the villagers were a superstitious lot and they didn’t realize what good she could actually bring to them if they got over their fear and helped raise her right.

Unfortunately fear and tradition prevailed. Loved only by her mother, scorned by her father, and feared by everyone around her she would become what they feared; the only light within her kept alive by her mother’s love. That love was the only thing keeping her tied to the good in the world and herself. She grew up faster than any child should have ever had to. By six she seemed wise beyond her years and more mature than other children of the village.

“Mother, why do they hate me so?” She, the gifted child, had asked her mother once as she sat on the older woman’s knee. “I haven’t done anything to make them hate me like they do, have I? I’ve tried being nice like you tell me to, but mothers pull their children away from me while muttering something about a demon’s child.”

Her mother’s eyes watered as they always did when she heard of the cruelty of the villagers. “You are not like the people of the village, love. You are different, special. It’s your eyes and,” she paused, looking for the right word for her daughter’s otherworldly powers, “skills that scare them.” Combing her fingers through her daughter’s wild mane of blue-black hair she pulled the unruly mass back into a ponytail to try and brush it out. The mother frowned, her fingers moving through her daughter’s hair slowly as if she were unaware of what she was doing, while thinking on past and recent events.

She couldn’t hide it anymore, the girl was awaking to the things she could do. Why it was just last week that she had seen her child revive a small rabbit that had been killed in one of her father’s traps! And then the day after the mother could have sworn she had seen the ghosts of the child’s grandmother weaving flower crowns with the wild girl. Her powers were stronger during the night, however, and uncontrollable on the girl’s part. The child’s nightmares had started to manifest themselves within the house, causing everyone to wake screaming with all sorts of monsters and walking dead hovering over their beds until the child had been shaken awake.

“Mother?” Dual colored eyes gazed up at her with the innocence of a child that didn’t quite understand how hard their life was going to be.

“I’m working on it, child.” Pulling the small body back against her the mother rested her chin on the top of her daughter’s head. “Love, you’re not exactly what people would call human, no you are more like…like…a goddess!” She tightly hugged and kissed her cheek, squeezing a small giggle from the young girl.

“As you grow ,you’ll notice that you can do things that no one else could ever dream of doing. Have you ever noticed that there is something unique about your eyes? Besides the color.” When the daughter nodded she smiled. “Close your right eye and tell me what you see when you look at me.”

Closing her green eye as she had been told she looked at her mother through the blue one. “I see a gold halo of light surrounding you with a little bit of blue mixed in. Are you sad mother?” Her eyes snapped open and she frowned, framing her mother’s face in her small hands. “I’ll be normal, mother! I can be! I’ll make you proud of me so you won’t have to be sad! I…”

Her mother’s much bigger hands rested over the small ones. “Don’t you ever change who you are! I am already very, very, proud of you just the way you are.”

Over the years the child learned and experimented with the abilities she possessed. As she grew she noticed her green eye had developed a power where it had none before. Now when she closed her left eye she could see things, ghosts, if you will. The souls that haunted the living; the souls, the memories, the living refused to give up; the souls that haunted places they refused to give up. Yet the most amazing thing she could do, at least in her opinion, was take the form of a beautiful black and white wolf. Innocence and evil together, Yin and Yang. Even in wolf form her eyes stayed the same, their perspective colors enhanced by the transformation.

Little did she know that each time she grew stronger the people in the village grew more fearful, more hateful, towards her; their fear pushing them toward the border between sanity and insanity. The only thing that kept them from banishing her from the village was her mother, and by her sixteenth year her mother’s health was failing, decreasing in strength while her daughter grew ever stronger. The woman-child knew her time with her mother was short and her time in the village was shorter.

When her mother passed away the day after her seventeenth year, the villagers wasted no time in running her from the village. She left them with a few words; words that would haunt the place until its destruction a year later.

“Fear of the unknown is a human’s worst enemy; it eats away at the soul until there is nothing left by the paranoid shell of what used to be.” She picked up her satchel, pulled the hood of her worn cloak over her head, and then turned from the village never to return.

Tala Nyoka, the wolf, went on entering and leaving villages with nothing more than a few brawls between friends, the only evidence of her passing. Tala would remain a shadow, a snake that slithered through the grass unnoticed until it was too late. She was the one, destined for more than she knew.