Children of Dusk
Once, when the river of Time had just begun to flow through the world, there lived a woman in the western forests who could outrun, outshoot, and outwrestle everyone she knew, and everyone they knew as well. Her parents despaired of her ever finding a spouse and giving them grandchildren one way or another, and so, tired of their nagging, she vowed before the community that she would marry the first person who could best her.
Many tried, men and women and otherwise, human and lion and orc; but she was stronger, faster, and cleverer than all of them. Until, one evening at dusk, just as nights began to outrun days in their slow and steady race to the solstice, a dark man in dark clothing found her in a clearing. He challenged her: after three sunsets, if he could cause her to care about him, she would hold to her vow and marry him. She laughed, thinking she could resist any temptation, and accepted his challenge.
On the first night, they met again in the clearing, and the dark man promised her riches beyond her imagination, in jade and leather and the gold that ran in the streams. She heard his proposal, and refused it, for she felt that her family already had all they needed to prosper.
On the second night, he brought with him all the birds of the world to serenade them, and they danced until the stars faded and the music waned, as songbird after exhausted songbird fell silent, and a family of mockingbirds scrambled to pick up the melodies and weave them into something approaching the whole. Again, she refused him; and from that day on, the mockingbird has learned every song it can, lest it be called upon again to sing for the flock.
On the third night, she arrived in the clearing to find it empty. She waited for him, and she waited, and just as the last sliver of sun sank below the treetops and she began to wonder what had happened to him, she saw movement in the trees.
A black squirrel darted out of the forest and leaped into her arms, pursued by two hungry-looking wolves. She stood her ground and raised her bow to frighten the wolves, and was surprised to see them give up, turn tail and head back into the forest without her firing so much as a warning shot. She looked down to check on the squirrel and found it was no longer clinging to her arm. Instead, the dark man stood beside her. He bowed, and in that moment she knew that it was him she’d been protecting. She had been bested, and this was the man she would marry.
***
When her firstborn children were twin wolf pups, some in the village took this as an evil omen. Others were convinced that the man she had married was a god. But she and the dark man cared for these pups as if they were any other children, and by the time her third and fourth children were born human, it was no longer strange.
The four children of Dusk lived together peacefully until they had grown enough to go their separate ways: the wolves returned to the forest with their divine father, and the human children stayed in the village with their mortal mother.
And so their descendants lived, in their separate worlds, until the tribes of humans and wolves had each grown to the point where something had to give, and war broke out among the Children of Dusk.
And Dusk wept, seeing his children dying around him, but for all his cunning he could not find a way to end the fighting. So he made the desperate journey to the top of the world to speak to the Sage. And there where the air is thinnest, on the night Her light was brightest, She gave him a shape to add to the pattern of the world, a spell that would change his children forever, so that they would never again forget their kinship.
And so he journeyed again, back down the world to the place where his children fought. And standing between humans and wolves, he set the Sage’s spell into the shape of the world, and set it free to do as it would.
And his children were transformed around him. No longer simply wolves, or merely humans, they would hereafter belong to both worlds, and move between them as their ancestor did. And so it is that we call werewolves the Children of Dusk.
The fighting did not end immediately, because no conscious being forgets a quarrel easily. But this moment was the beginning of peace among werewolves, and there was little left for their ancestor to do but gather the souls of all his kin who were lost and bring them West.