I sought after the forest then, young as I was. My mother always at my side holding my hand, leading me through paths only she knew. I wanted the song of the forest. I wanted to live inside that memory my mother had.

  I wanted to see a wolf. To be one.

  The words of my mother from that night burrowed inside me during the long night that followed. As usual, Akmuo and Medis slept at the center of our home. Akmuo loved sleeping in the dirt at the deepest part of the hillhome. “It’s the heart of the home,” he would always say. He and Medis were curled into one another, the way I imagine they were in mother’s womb. Holding hands, their legs entwined and heads almost touching. That night Akmuo had a thumb in his mouth and Medis frowned, his brow furrowed on his otherwise smooth face. Medis was beautiful. He was lean and angular, with the sharp features of mother, while Akmuo was round and soft and big, the way I imagine HoPa was at that age.

  Sometimes I still think about them. I wonder if they survived. If Akmuo would be the mirror image of HoPa or if age had given him his own face. I wonder if Medis found a place where he could be a warrior. If he died in some foolish battle.

  Beside them was the metal wood burning stove that heated the home in winter. A foreign piece my mother had acquired in her earlier adventures, along with her sword, and LoPa. No one in the clan could make such a device. Part of why they called her a witch. It was a round black metal thing with a hinged door and a pipe extended from the top of it straight into the hill above and through to the outside, where it spat out the fire’s smoke. It was still early autumn so the nights were warm enough. We kept the door to our home open to create a breeze, which also let in the moonlight.

  Not much, but my eyes had adjusted over the hours of darkness. The outlines of the home were just visible, as were the shapes of my family. Straining my ears to hear that far off music my mother spoke of. That eternal melody that would make life more beautiful, that would bring me closer to the gods. Like the Angel I saw from so far away. Or the wolf my mother saw so long before that.

  I slept beside mother and pressed my head to her chest, nuzzling into her breasts. She muttered and threw an arm over me as she turned into me. I listened to her heartbeat. That slow pulse that’s still inside me. Thump. Thump thump. Thump. Then came HoPa’s heavy arm draped over mother. It gripped her stomach, then wandered up to her breast but found my face first. I leaned out and his big hand enveloped her naked breast. She smiled in her sleep and wriggled her body into his.

  I removed myself from her lazy arm draped over me. She didn’t mind. Standing over the three of them, they looked so peaceful. HoPa curled over mother who pressed her back into his body. LoPa’s body was splayed away from them, his mouth open. He began to snore as I watched. His right hand was beneath HoPa’s neck, as if tethering him to them, keeping contact with the ones he loved most dearly.

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  I crept from where we slept at the back room of the hill to the central dome where my brothers slept beside the stove. Even though Medis looked more like my mother and Akmuo more like HoPa, they seemed to share the same face. It was peculiar in the way that everything between twins is. I crept past them and out through the door.

  In some ways the world is so quiet at night. It’s a different place. No moss being burned, no songs being sung, no shouts of anger or joy or love. There were no people, as far as I could tell. But there was sound. Music.

  It was a different kind of music than what my mother talked of. But there was a different, more visceral, music to the forest. One of insects. Of the wind and the moons. Birds and all the animals I never saw. Everything the wind touched was a note that became magic to me. The songs of night birds, so different from their sunny cousins. Their music was haunting, elusive. Slow and deliberate with so much space in between the notes. It ran over my skin like centipedes. I breathed in and out at the front of our home. Bolted there, hearing the forest breathe.

  Looking up, I saw the Lunar Archipelago of the Shattered Moon, the broken sister. A thousand bits of moon hovering so far above me. But, at the same time, they seemed just past the canopy. If I could climb like Medis or even just as well as Akmuo, I could reach up and pluck those bits of moon from the sky. I could rest my hand against the quarter of the moon that was always missing. I could climb into it and sit, like it was a chair. My bottom comfortable against the depression in its surface. If the night was just right, I could tie the seven moons together.

  It comforted me. My mother told me I always loved the moon, even as a newborn. That’s why she gave me my name. A foreign name for her daughter.

  Braver now, I circled the hill. It was the newest of the homes in the great clearing of the Wolf Clan. Its soil was one of the richest, because of that. I walked up the hill and into our garden, where so much food grew I could barely see the ground beneath. Soon we would be harvesting the carrots and saknis, and even the apples that grew from the small tree that was planted the day my brothers were born. I couldn’t reach the apples but they were green and caught the moonlight. I shook the tree gently. Its leaves rustling but no apples fell.

  Standing there, the wind blew over me, the moon shined down on me, and I dug my toes into the dark, rich soil, trying to feel my way to my mother’s heartbeat, to the sound of LoPa’s snoring, to the pulse that my brother’s shared, to the immense heat HoPa’s body made. I closed my eyes and listened to the night’s soundscape, reaching after my family’s pulsing bodies.

  After a time, I walked back inside and curled into my mother’s body.

  This became a ritual for me. Listening to the night, trying to pull it inside my body and hold onto those sounds, those sensations. Trying but failing to hear the music my mother spoke so briefly about.

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