I hear voices in my dream, calling out to me. "What?" I say drowsily, looking up to see nothing at all.

I hear one long resonant sound, lighting up the darkness like thunder across a cloudy sky.

My ears sting and my vision is blurry when I wake up. I feel a raindrop slide down my nose and remember I fell asleep in a cave. The past few days have not been kind to me. My fur is a wreck, and the braid Avery made has long since turned into a tangle of knots down my face.

I still see something at the edge of my vision, so I turn to face it. A glimmering Canira, glowing too bright for me to see anything else, stands there silently.

"Who're you?" I mutter drowsily.

"I am the Unknown Canira. I am here to offer you a choice."

I curl back up in a ball. "I choose to have five more minutes."

"No! It happens as we speak. You must come with me."

She grabs my paw and we disappear into darkness. I come out of it on the other side, and the sky is red.

"You were supposed to stop this," I hear whispered in my ear. "It was your destiny and you failed."

I get up and stretch my wings to find that I have none. My fur is still black, almost russet in this intense light, but the spectrums. I am pure black, black as the night sky. My body is leaner, swifter, more angled to the ground. My paws are less flexible and my ears are pointed. I am a wolf. Something about the air here feels familiar, the sounds and the sights even more so.

That's when the sky explodes. I see it pretty quickly, what looks like a comet in the distance, if comets were the size of the moon and growing fast.

Someone runs past me, a small, weak-looking pack behind him. I blend into the pack, running with them like I've done it my whole life.

A black and white wolf guides everyone else into a cave, pups in the furthest back along with the old. I go to the middle, not wanting to see what lies in front or behind. The ringing sound of shattering stone fills my ears and the world caves in around me. I close my eyes, finding myself holding on to someone else. Dust fills my nostrils and yelps and the sound of cracking bones fills the cave, then it's all silent.

I open my eyes and see bloody stone. Another wolf is pressed up against me, breathing heavily. "The stars..." he pants, "The stars were wrong."

He raises his head to the roof of the cave. "If you're listening, Star Spots, I hate you! I hate you for lying, I hate you for not helping, and I hate you for not sending her to save us!"

He turns to me. "Who are you? You're not from our pack, that's for sure."

"My name is Dark Rainbow and I-"

His curious glance turns to a dead stare, a slightly insane one. "It's you. Finally decided to show up, did we now? This was the Ancients doing, wasn't it? Sure, let's send in our hero after the meteor comes. I would've done it, you know. If they doubted me, well, I had reason to. I did."

I have no idea what he's saying, so I try to get out, but I can't fly and the stone is much too steep to climb up.

"Who are you and what are you talking about?"

"You of course, who else?" he says like it's the most natural thing in the world.

I look at him sideways, trying to figure out if he's delirious or joking. Then, a quick flash of memory comes back: The stars surrounding me, the five Ancients, not wolves, but Canii, sent me off, back to save the world of the wolves again. When the world begins to fall, the spectrums of hope will answer the call. "Storm Runner will help you. He will be with you." They promised.

They promised.

Darkness.

Falling from the stars.

We were going home.

There was light for a second, and then darkness again.

This is the wrong world. I was never supposed to come here. Struggling. Obsidians. The mindwipe. It was all black after that.

The wolf looks at me for a while, confused. "Are you okay? You just started spasming."

"You're right," I announce, "I was supposed to come here."

"Then what happened? Where's Storm? Why didn't you make it here in time for us both to sacrifice ourselves?"

"Sacrifice?" I wince at the thought of that.

"Yes. You and I were supposed to stop the meteor. It was a prophecy given to our ancestors a long time ago. I waited my whole life and you never came. Just answer my questions!"

"Okay." I breathe in for a second, and then breathe out. "First of all, I have no idea. I think some type of magical force stole me away when I left the stars to return to your world. Second, Storm is dead. I ... He had it worse than me. Don't ask. Third... I had no idea you existed until roughly five minutes ago."

"Liar." he spits.

"What?!"

"I can see it in your eyes. You're lying and you know that."

"About what?"

"You knew. You always knew. Now let's help the pack."

"It's too steep!" I say, but the wolf doesn't listen, he just runs up the rock, graceful and powerful.

"Name's Paladin, by the way. Thought you might want to know, we were supposed to save the word together and you screwed up."

I bound up the rock to him, amazed by how easy it is. It's not pretty below- rocks block everything, but from what I can see there's about as much dead as alive.

"We're going to need a better shelter." I murmur, looking down at the blood splattered rocks.

"Agreed."

The two of us slowly gather up our... I mean his... packmates, finding and gouging new marks in the rock to jump onto and trying to help everyone to what seems to be the largest open space. There's a dead mouse stuck under a rock, which two young wolves are pulling at greedily.

"Wolves of Fallen Star Pack!" Paladin yells, and no one bats an eye.

"Let me do this. HEY, LOOK UP HERE, MONGRELS!" Everyone turns to me.

"The prophecy may not have been fulfilled, but we found the wolf from the stars. She has come to save us all!"

I actually just want to go home. Maybe I'll stay a loner, but really I want to go back to Torch. I feel so stupid for running away. For now, though, I will help these wolves.

I try to look proud, and everyone cheers like I made a speech or something. Even if it looks like we have a chance... (I mean they) the world is destroyed. There's nothing to live off of.

The next day, after a crowded but comfy rest, I lead the first hunting party out into the world outside the cave. It's not completely dead, but twisted with half dead trees, no birdsong except for one raven cawing, and no prey big enough to sustain us in sight.

We spend all day hunting with me at the lead and find a squirrel, half of an already dead deer and a few crows.

I am invited to eat first. It's even bad by my standards, but working for it so hard makes it taste so much better. I sleep with Paladin that night, next to him on our lonely but still comfy ledge in the rock.

The next day all the females are assigned to inside duties, which sound easy, but they're not. The first few hours of my day are spent scraping dens out of rock, and the next few are spent helping look for the dead, a disturbing and morbid task. It doesn't help that my partner in all this apparently knew all of them.

"See, that was Juniper. She was a sweet one, for sure. Never did hunting, she couldn't stand to kill small animals. You really didn't want to mess with her if one of the pups got hurt, though. They were her little angels and anyone who touched them got shredded. Her pups are some of the only few still alive."

"I think that skull belongs to Blazing Tail. He chose to get the second part of his name like we used to, like yours, Dark Rainbow. He was actually descended from one of the Ancients- I think Flowering Vine. He was Paladin's dad."

I eventually start blocking her out, but the annoying voice in my head takes over. You could've saved them. You were supposed to save them all. It's so ridiculously irrational, because there's no way I could have gotten here. It doesn't make me feel any better, though.

Paladin tells me about the Ancients the next day.

Once apon a time, the creatures of darkness began to invade our world, spreading turmoil and hate until it became so strong they could take physical form from it. They lived off of hate and pain, and eventually all creatures lost the will to live. In this dark time, five spirit animals came to our world, calling themselves Canis. They took wolf form and learned our ways, but they had only come to drive out the darkness and nothing more. Together, they finally did drive out the darkness with love, leadership, determination, hope, and the final value, which has been lost to time, mainly because the symbol of the final value was killed in the war. The Canis had to continue to drive the darkness out of all the worlds, but they told us that someday, if such a thing were to happen again, they would let the alpha wolf at that time, Dark Rainbow, and her loyal mate Storm Runner return from the stars to stop them, even though she could only stay for a short while and then sacrifice herself, and Storm Runner would have to leave soon after.

The Canis, forever remembered and looked up to, became known as the Ancients.

Paladin clears his throat. "That's it."

"So I was supposed to stop the Obsidians here."

"Yeah, but I guess they were too scared of you to show their stupid faces."

"What makes you say that?"

"They didn't feel like fighting so they just used an asteroid instead. We still haven't found the actual asteroid itself, though." He shrugs.

The days pass like that, eventually coming to around what I assume to be almost six months. It's the sixth full moon since the apocalypse, but we were starting out the first month and had no food to make a good feast and enjoy the next few. We howl together, mourn for the dead over that past month, about three young wolves, an older wolf, and a pup, celebrate a decent meal (a full moose, only a day old) but that night, Paladin isn't in our comfy den. Sad and slightly confused, I walk outside to see a dark figure running towards where I came here, when the asteroid hit.

I know immediately it's Paladin, so I run after him. He sees me but doesn't slow down until we reach a small tree around midnight. It's a weeping willow, ironically enough, but much older than the one from Dreamland. It feels the same, in many ways. It's as if the tree itself has defied everything and decided to simultaneously exist in two dimensions at once.

"This is our sacred tree. If you sleep under it, sometimes the Ancients come to you, if you truly need answers. I've been holding off coming here, but I thought tonight would be a good time. Maybe it'll work. It hasn't for the past five season cycles, but maybe tonight it will finally work."

He closes his eyes, and I sit on the other side of the tree and close mine. For a second, I feel like I'm back under the willow tree with Torch, Avery, and Spritz. I wonder if they miss me.

Black begins to speckle my vision, but I let it take me away and drift to sleep.