02 Rescued by Wolves

Thick, swirling smoke blanketed the ruined zoo, blurring cages and pathways into a single, suffocating maze. Out of the haze, silent shapes emerged—low to the ground, swift and steady. They were wolves. The same ones the boys had watched hours earlier, before the fire. Now, they moved with eerie calm, their glowing eyes sharp, slicing through the smoke like lanterns.

The fire had spread fast, licking at the sky with feral hunger, fuelled by something more volatile than mere wood and hay. The zoo had become a furnace, and the boys—two brothers—had been caught in its belly.

One of the wolves nudged the younger boy gently with its snout, brushing away soot from his cheek. Another passed close to the older boy, not aggressively, but with urgency. There was no hesitation in the boys. With no other path forward, they followed, hand in hand, their small forms dwarfed by the chaos around them.

Through the flaming wreckage the wolves led them—past broken gates and cracked concrete, away from the scream of sirens and the groan of falling beams. The fire roared behind them, a monster devouring everything it touched. But the wolves never looked back. And neither did the boys.

Beyond the zoo’s edge, the city faded into a smoggy silhouette. The air cooled. Trees rose like sentinels. The forest waited.

The wolves did not stop until they reached a clearing beneath the rising moon. The grass there was untouched by flame. Quiet. Sacred. Waiting. Another group of wolves stood in a loose ring around the centre—larger, wilder, unconfined. These were not zoo animals. These were the wolves of the forest.

For a moment, nothing moved.

Then the two packs approached each other, slow and measured, their breaths visible in the cold night. No growls. No snarls. Just an unspoken understanding. Side by side, the wolves circled the boys, who stood still at the centre of it all—mud-streaked, ash-covered, eyes wide but not afraid.

Something passed between the wolves and the boys in that moment. Some old memory in the bones of both creature and child. The fire had burned away the world they had known, but this—this was something new. Or maybe something older than memory.

The wolves accepted them and lead them to an ancient tree in the heart of the forest: a tree once struck by lightning and scarred forever, with an enormous hole passing through it's truck. This was the ancient tree of transition. The two boys understood its meaning and crawled through the hole, with the encouragement of the accompanying wolves. By doing so, they had pledged their bond with the forest and the start of their new lives with the pack.

From that moment on, the boys were no longer just children. They were something else. Something wilder. They were not intruders in the forest. They were claimed by it.

The older boy would be called Bigger Two-Paws, for the way he stood firm, even when his voice trembled. The younger became Little Two-Paws, small but unwavering, his courage hidden behind quiet eyes.

The wolves became their family. The forest became their home.

The sounds of the pack—paws rustling in underbrush, distant howls beneath the moon, the steady breath of beasts sleeping in a circle—became the rhythm of their lives. They no longer missed the hum of traffic or the glow of streetlamps. They no longer mourned the city behind them, nor the lives lost in fire. That pain had been real, but it had transformed into something else out here—something that ran with the wolves and rooted itself in the soil.

They belonged now—not to a world of walls and cages, but to the wild. And the wild, in its quiet, eternal way, belonged to them too.