The Book of Sins, Chapter 2. The Mad-Dog
#2 of The Book of Sins
In the beginning, everything was dark. Save for the glow of the moon in the night, or the burning fire of the sun in the day there were no lights in our world. For millennia, our species existed In a dinural cycle of movement, camping down every night under the fresh boughs of mountain trees. I can hear them call to me, even now - songs from the shared past of my ancestors. The lights go out and the wind whistles to me as I drift off to sleep. My home of brick and mortar is, in my mind's eye, dashed with the ethereal grey-blue glow of stars and moons, and although I am silent (for years of warring had quelled my ancestor's call through necessity) I still hear the howls in my head.
I imagine the voices of my friends, of my family and of a hundred other wolves, each seeing the same moon in the same sky in their own minds as they drift off to sleep. Each of them reliving the song of our ancestors - a song as old as the land which once we hunted and now we farm; a song as pure as the thoughts of an innocent, a song which whispers sweet lullaby to our departure.
But not for every wolf. An age ago, the first wolf discovered it. Perhaps it was in the coal-rich equator of the planet, where nights were warm and caves are plentiful - the coal barely hidden beneath the surface of the rocky plains my ancestors used to hide and raise young.
Perhaps still it was the densely packed dry woodlands of the north, covered in icicles in winter but bone dry in the summer, where an errant storm caused the carnage to rage out of control at one bolt of lightning.
Perhaps further it was the invention of some clever wolf, who found the secret by chance, coming across the right kinds of rock with a violent disposition.
Fire.
What must have that mind thought when first it beheld the power to create such destruction? How must those eyes have appeared, if one could have seen the fear, or fright, or seduction such a being felt at that discovery? Could they be as a child, clinging to the familiar whilst struggling to grasp the new? Would they have been as the elders, confident and assured with a simple-minded confidence at their power? Did that lucky wolf realise how he would change the face of our species?
When wolf first looked upon fire - first held it in paw and struggled to control the destructive power of their new-born creation - those eyes must have held so many emotions. Some, I can imagine from others I have met - those of fear; of wonder, of trepidation, of reluctance, of fascination, of hope, of intelligence, but perhaps unbeknownst to that first wolf the mere act of this creation spawned a new kind of eyes. As the light burned in that wolf's paw without harm a new light was kindled in our species. Suddenly, the night which had covered our night hunts and had cradled our souls to dreaming was no longer just a passive friend. It had become an enemy - an enemy we had weapons to combat.
It may not have been those first eyes, but it did not take long for eyes to find the flame, watching it dancing it's energetic, macabre celebration and find not the calm and comfort of the elders or the curiosity of the young. One pair of eyes when seeing the lick of a flame, found it dancing not in the paw of the wolf, but in the mind instead. Fire gave birth to the mad-dog, and madness has been with us ever since.