The Same Stars

They called them biters.

Those which stole souls to survive, those with mouths that were built to cut and kill and tear and rend and ruin - they were monstrous distortions of life that took without giving. Biters came in many forms, and three-walks and two-walks alike had their own variations. There were even biters that looked almost like the Family itself. The worst biters to the family, though, were hookteeth. Many biters left them alone, but not these. These biters always came only when the family was most vulnerable, out of the dark or in from the storm, and dragged away its members one by one. So for many years now, the Family had fought against the evil. Coming for them when they were not expecting turned the tables, and bit by bit the evil was defeated. Biters were soul-snatchers that served no purpose except to break the cycle of first-wakes and the long-sleep. They were a disgrace to Dawn, the spirit of the creation of life, and to Dusk, that which welcomed the tired souls when they took their last rest and joined all those of the past in the stars overseeing the family. Souls taken away by biters before seeing Dusk didn’t join the stars - they were lost forever. A world rid of biters was necessary for the family to be assured that they would all remain together in the next world and be able to guide their descendants.

That was how it was always described to Blaze, and she believed it for most of her life, since the word of the elders is always right. They had the most life experience, so almost anything that a member could experience was surely already lived through by at least some of them. Blaze saw souls taken firsthand more than once in her youth, of both her closest in-kin from her own herd, and out-kin she didn’t know well, as they came from the other herds in the family. She felt the evil teeth graze her flesh more than once and fought herself free. She knew well the danger that carnivores posed, and understood that their lives and those of her kind were opposing. But now she was grown, and all the elders of her youth had met Dusk and now looked down upon her. The youth of the herd now came to her for guidance, and she was conflicted on what to tell. She felt it was especially important to be sure what she spoke was as true as it could be, because she now had more influence than any elder before her. She was a widemind. An innovator. To others, though the family didn’t use such terms, she would be a seer. All of the family were thinkers, but wideminds were known to be less constrained. They were venerated from a young age, and expected to improve the lives of their people by changing how things were done in ways only they could devise. Blaze had been very successful in the niche she was born into. She was, in a way, proud of her accomplishments. It was because of her, after all, that the family far and wide had learned to hunt the hookteeth. The success of the movement meant that Blaze was widely respected, not only within her herd but from all the herds. Family members traveled wide distances for her advice.

If only she knew what advice to give now.

Because in becoming a skilled hunter of the hunters, she had to learn their ways. And in doing so, in watching her quarry to learn how best to destroy them, she had come to a conflicting perspective. Biters weren’t simply the evil things she was assured they were. Certainly, the hookteeth and the family were not compatible. Each of their ways of life was inherently antagonistic to the goals of the other’s. But did that make them evil? Evil to the family, perhaps. But what if everything that was said with such certainty was subjective?

For a long time now the hookteeth had grown wary and scattered, no longer posing her or anyone much threat, yet her kind still sought them out to destroy - and because she had told them to, many years earlier. She didn’t - she couldn’t - blame them, for this was the culmination of a goal to ensure the safety of their kind. Yet she saw biters with their young, and saw their own distress when their young were taken, and recognized for the first time that even soul-stealers can care for others. When predators cowed and fled when they caught scent of her, the emotions she felt troubled her. The family had become to the biters, what the biters long were to the family. She didn’t know what else the enemy was capable of. Did they, too, tell stories about threats that take souls in the night? Hulking two-walk monsters armed not with cutting teeth, but weapons beyond their comprehension? She wondered how many biters that she alone was responsible for not reaching their Dusk.

And as she came to find the last of the hookteeth that morning, prostrate in the snow, lying helpless and tired at its end, she didn’t see a monster. She saw a living thing suffering. Every breath of its frail and broken body brought it pain. Its eyes met hers, and she saw the soul behind them that was different from hers, but not lesser. This was not a thing of evil. It was a thing that could only survive in one way, a way that was no longer possible. It was her enemy. But it deserved respect.

It would join Dusk soon, but it might take hours more to die. Nature didn’t have morals, it just did as it did, and would get the job done when it got around to it. Every moment the creature spent in this condition, exposed and slowly dying, was longer it had to endure its torment. She couldn’t let it go on.

As she let the last hooktooth free, she hoped its Dusk would understand and let its spirit through to wherever biters went.

Maybe in the end, they were all the same stars.