The Moon Wolf

Chapter 34 (First Draft)

Penn stood in the center of a skep shaped inner chamber. The bottom of the cave was the widest part of the cavern and perfectly round as if it had been hewn by hand. Then, the cave got predictably more and more narrow as one's eye followed the smooth walls to the top, which ended in a small rounded cap. However, the most striking feature of the room had nothing to do with the fact that it looked like it had been expertly carved from the mountain by a stone sculptor. 

What caused the elders to transform into their skin one after the other as they entered the chamber was the ornamentation on the walls. Ancient moon runes, which glowed and pulsated a brilliant silvery white and blue, encompassed the entire surface of the cave, including the floor they stood on. And, if that wasn't shocking enough, the primordial symbols and writings were not carved into the stone but rather floated on the surface of the smooth walls as if placed there by a projector. But there was no projector in sight. This was not the effect of modern tech. The granite room was under a mysterious enchantment and that thoroughly stupefied the elders.

"Are you seeing what I'm seeing?" Ruuni asked the others in a hushed voice.

She had to be certain she wasn't having a break with reality. She had never, in all her years, experienced a supernatural event. She'd only read of such things. So, it was possible, she was just seeing things - that the thin air at the top of the mountain was playing tricks on her mind.

The other elders answered her by kneeling in reverence.  They were seeing it too and were stunned into silence. She quickly followed suit knowing instinctively that they had stumbled on a living Moon shrine where the power of the goddess lingered in a tangible way. Together they raised their arms to their goddess while turning their faces to look skyward and offered a quiet prayer of submission to her. 

They remained this way for a very long while. No one moved. No one spoke. They just closed their eyes and tried to be present in this holy place where the sublimely tranquil atmosphere felt like a warm blanket sheltering them and beckoning them to find rest. So much so that they felt they could drift off into oblivion without being the least bit aware. In this sacred place, they seemed to lose all sense of time and self.

But, that reverent silence was quietly disturbed by Lofgren's soft voice as he suddenly admitted, "I feel strong."

Though the youngest of the six elders, he was, like the rest, exceedingly old. Old enough that his eyes and hair had both turned grey long ago. A sign that he had lived a century longer than most of the wolves in the pack. But, he wasn't feeling his age in this pulsating shrine.

Though his voice wasn't more than a whisper, it broke the strange spell the other elders were under. They opened their eyes and began to look at themselves more closely, taking notice of how their bodies were feeling in that moment - in that strange but blessed place.

Ruuni got up on her feet and gently flexed and stretched her limbs.

"I don't ache," she confessed with genuine shock.

After the long arduous climb up the mountain, Ruuni was ready to sleep for a week, but now, after five or was it fifty minutes in this place, she felt her youth return. Was that possible? Could standing in a moon shrine have that kind of effect on the body? Even bodies as old as her own?