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There's a wolf in my dreams, Dan Heng thinks.
It’s massive. A black wolf, with fur dipped crimson red at the ends. Sometimes, Dan Heng thinks it looks like matted blood, old and dried, from old, scarred wounds. Maybe someone else's. Other times, it takes on an ethereal sheen, crimson dusting the midnight blue fur.
…
He feels the way its teeth sink into his stomach. Every awful tear, the slow rip as he sees into his spilled intestines. The wolf’s muzzle nudged and cracked ribs apart, pushing spilled organs aside, to make room for its massive head. It’s snout buried deep and burrowing deeper, until its jaw snapped shut around his heart.
It's agonizing. Every breath is permeated with a nauseating haze. Sometimes, his eyes are pulled open and unable to close. Dried and stinging, meagre tears bead at the corners of his eyes. It's these times that he sees the wolf at work. When his other senses shut down and he is forced to stare the beast in the eyes. Its eyes are crimson. Dan Heng gets the faintest notion that those eyes should’ve been a brilliant violet.
Other times, his eyes are glued shut. Tears flood his eyes and drip and leave wet streaks down his face, the droplets joining the growing puddle of blood he lies in. It's here, where the wolf drinks his tears. A warm tongue laving over his face is the closest he’s ever come to feeling comfort. With his sight gone, he feels the furnace-like heat of the wolf, he smells the iron of blood, and feels the shifting landscape he is devoured on.
…
It changes each time, the way it devours me.
His voice never works, however. Every time he begs and pleads, tries to make amends, to befriend, he cannot move and cannot speak. Maybe the wolf tore out his throat and he never noticed, perhaps he had grown so used to the gore he cannot tell what's been rend apart. Maybe it's a cruel trick of his own, to not give the wolf the satisfaction of screams. Whatever it is will not allow him to speak, to convince, to offer platitudes or apologies, no matter how empty they might be. Sometimes he managed a blood filled gurgle, others a dried and stinging rasp, and the wolf looked with undecipherable eyes. Most nights, it’s utter contempt, accusations and blame, demanded apologies and whispered promises of revenge. On the kinder nights, supposed delusion makes Dan Heng see guilt in the wolf’s eyes. An apology Dan Heng will never hear over the blood rushing through his ears.
The location changes. Most times he’s sprawled amidst a battlefield; gore surrounding him, a visual nightmare for unwilling eyes to feast upon. The gore– the crimson –is sickening, overwhelming. The battle has long ended, silence except for the whistling of the wind. He cannot recognize the corpses that lay around him, but in this dream he thinks he should. There's craters and gashes too deep to be a soldier, and Dan Heng knows there was something worse that tore through this battlefield. But gone is the action of war. All that writhes here now is Dan Heng and the wolf.
There was a different corpse that was supposed to lay here, Dan Heng knows.
Other times he overlooks the sea. The salty spray stings his half-eaten flesh yet so cruelly sustains him, if only to last a little longer. It’s here that the wolf seems the most conflicted. Its emotions mixed into an unbearable cocktail that makes its jaws jerk with every movement, twitch at every decision, and bite so horribly slow. It offers wisps of tenderness and the echoes of comfort while its jaw clamps onto his mangled corpse, unwilling to give him more.
Sometimes, Dan Heng rests upon a bed of linen sheets. The smell of a forge– of metal and ash– coating his senses. It’s warm and familiar. It’s here that he finds himself melancholy. Forced to endure memories so faded that no words or faces are anything more than mumbled speech and smudged paintings. So he lays still as the wolf so tenderly rips him apart. It’s these nights that Dan Heng awakes with his heart feeling torn asunder.
…
Dan Heng so desperately hates this wolf. Not a restful night's sleep he’s had since they’ve started. He cannot close his eyes without crimson bleeding into his sight. A puddle he steps into becomes a pool of blood, surrounding voices drowned out by white noise. The tang of iron blooms in his mouth as he realizes he bit into his own tongue.
The wolf starts to haunt the corners of his vision.
The waking world is respite, a calm before the storm; but figures won’t stop walking past and he cannot stay in one place for too long. Devoid of companionship, the wolf gives him far too much. Against his own sense, he feels reverence in the way he’s devoured. Dedication? Love? Hate? He sees the wolf’s eyes, but he can’t read minds. There's an intensity to the slow shred of his muscles, to how he’s taken apart. An intensity to the way it seems to despise the very sight of Dan Heng, to show him the way it's disgusted by his flesh. The way it's gentle as can be, when the slow, painful pull turns into tender reverence as Dan Heng’s chest collapses, and he watches his lungs be ripped out. A loyalty to be found nowhere else.
Maybe, this wolf could be tamed, Dan Heng thinks.
Where else will he ever experience such unfaltering dedication. Who else could devour his heart with gut wrenching tenderness? It unnerves him, how he looks forward to sleeping on his worst days.
…
There's a wolf in my dreams, and his eyes are crimson red.
It so happens to be Dan Heng’s favourite colour.