Why the Wolf Cries to the Moon
A song, sung in the Sunburst at Sunton in session 3 by a performer whose cloak was embroidered with stars and clouds that moved of their own accord, and who vanished the moment he had collected his money.
It is set long before the war between the Aesir and the Vaenir, when the world was newly peopled and still wild.
The tale
Lucian was the first wolf — the Great Wolf, an Aesir. Luna was the very first unicorn, mother of all unicorns. They loved one another and were married.
Draco was the first great dragon and the father of all dragons; the dragon form was one he made and invented himself, and in it he fathered his whole race. He loved Luna, and Luna was his friend and never knew it.
When he learned of the marriage he went into a rage, took his dragon form, and flew at Lucian. Lucian met him as the Great Wolf — a wolf the size of a woolly mammoth, ferocious and cunning, the match of any dragon.
Luna stepped between them and begged them not to fight. Lucian mastered himself and stopped. Draco, blind, struck anyway, and Luna took the blow. Draco’s claws kill whatever they so much as scratch, and her veins began to blacken.
Lucian threw him down and tore open his chest.
Then the Storm came — the great Aesir of Tyre, and the greatest healer among all the Aesir — and found that there was no saving her. Nothing in a world of magic could hold the poison back. So he made a rainbow bridge to the moon, because the one place Luna could live was a world where there is no magic at all.
She went, and she lives. Lucian could not follow: their children were here, and he would not abandon them.
What it accounts for
- Every descendant of the wolf calls to the moon at the full — Lucian calling still to Luna, a world apart.
- The enmity between the Lobine and dragonkind, which runs both ways and is older than any grievance either could name.
- That the Storm’s rainbow bridges were, at least once, an act of mercy.
Hearing it told, Tanwen pitied Draco — to love someone so much and have it not returned — and remarked that she has met this dragon herself, and that it was an interesting experience. She has promised the story of that meeting to whoever brings her Rowen home.