Chapter 37: The Taste of Boredom
Weeks.
Weeks had passed since the great orgy, weeks since my presentation to the Olympians. Time, in this realm of perpetual light, did not flow; it stagnated. It accumulated like dirty water in a golden pond, and I was trapped in it.
I found myself in my usual spot: the deep shadow cast by Zeus's throne in the great banquet hall. From here, I watched. The feast that had begun after my audience had never truly ended. It simply ebbed and flowed, an endless tide of divine hedonism.
The novelty had evaporated as quickly as dew under Apollo's sun. And what remained was... boring.
The gods were creatures of absolute predictability. Their passions, which at first seemed so vibrant and chaotic to me, were simply grooves in a record, repeating over and over in an endless cycle.
I saw Aphrodite, reclining on her divan, her summer-sea eyes fixed on my shadow. She was no longer the intrigued predator; she was a frustrated collector. Every few hours, she tried a new trick.
"My dark wolf..." her mental voice, now a cloying purr, slid into my consciousness. "Why do you hide in the darkness when my bed is so warm? Do you not crave the taste of nectar from my lips?"
I turned my colossal head and turned my back on her, even within my shadow refuge.
'Your taste is sweet, goddess. But I have tasted enough to know there is nothing but sweetness. It is a one-note flavor. And it bores me.'
Her aura twitched with the petty anger of a spoiled child denied a toy, before returning her attention to a minor river god who was eager to worship her feet. Predictable.
Ares, on the other hand, was not trying to seduce me. He was trying to recruit me.
The god of war, bare-chested and stained with wine, approached my shadow, a wild grin on his face.
"Wolf!" he roared, his voice a thunderclap that silenced the lyre music for a moment. "There is a three-headed chimera causing trouble on the coast of Lycia. Come! We will tear it apart together! It will be a glorious bloodbath!"
I raised my head, my ember eyes fixed on him. "Why?" my voice was a block of ice in his burning mind.
"Why?" he repeated, blinking, the question confusing him. "For the slaughter! For the glory! For the feeling of its hot entrails in our hands!"
"There is no glory in killing a lesser beast. And if I wanted its entrails, I would take them myself, without the help of a noisy barbarian."
Ares' smile wavered. "Bah! You are going soft, shadow! Too much time on Olympus is turning you into a poet like my effeminate brother!"
He snorted with frustration and walked away, grabbing a Maenad by the waist to vent his pent-up energy. Predictable.
Even Dionysus tried, stumbling toward me, his face purple from wine. "Drink!" he insisted, throwing a golden cup at my shadow, where it bounced harmlessly. "Wine frees the soul! Even a dark soul like yours!"
'My soul does not need freedom. It needs stimulation.'
I sank deeper into the darkness, an alpha predator trapped in a glorified zoo. Every day was the same. The golden light, the smell of ambrosia, the sound of carefree laughter. It was a cage, not of bars, but of sterile perfection.
My mind wandered back to the raw honesty of the grotto in Greece. To the brutality of the Egyptian court. There, lust was a weapon. Depravity had a purpose. Power was taken and defended. Here... here everything was a game. A game without stakes, played by immortal children who had forgotten what true hunger was.
'I am trapped in an aviary full of noisy peacocks,' I thought, disdain a bitter taste in my essence. 'Beautiful, yes. Powerful, perhaps. But deep down, they are just birds. Waiting to be eaten by a predator who still remembers how to hunt.'
The decision crystallized. I had seen everything there was to see. I had measured the alphas and found them... lacking. I had tasted their pleasures and found them... bland.
This hunting ground was exhausted. It was time to go.
The decision was as simple and absolute as a blink. Boredom, that cold poison, had done its work. This realm was dead to him.
Canis Lykaon rose from the shadow of Zeus's throne. His colossal form materialized in the center of the banquet hall with a silent finality that cut the lyre music and silenced the nymphs' laughter. The party, which had been swirling around him with drunken indifference, stopped dead. A hundred pairs of divine and semi-divine eyes turned to look at him.
He had felt their attempts to interact with him for weeks. Now that he moved with intent, he felt two presences separate from the crowd, their auras the most potent and predictable in the hall.
The first to intercept him was Aphrodite.
She appeared in front of him, not walking, but simply being there, her beauty a loaded and aimed weapon. Her silk tunic had slipped off one shoulder, revealing skin that glowed with its own light. It was no longer the lazy invitation of before. This was a display of power.
Her aura of lust was unleashed, a wave of conceptual heat that hit Canis Lykaon with the force of a tidal wave. It was a psychic assault, a divine command etched into creation itself: 'DESIRE ME.'
The air around her thickened, became sweet and musky. The nymphs and satyrs in the room moaned, falling to their knees, their minds erased by the need to mate. Even the minor gods blushed, their breaths becoming ragged. The goddess's power was absolute.
"Are you leaving, my dark wolf?" her voice purred in his mind, the question a silk caress over a blade. "The party is just beginning. And you haven't tasted the true nectar yet. Stay. Stay and I will show you a pleasure that will make your millennia of solitude seem like a single, pitiful instant."
She approached, her hips swaying, her hand reaching out to touch his snout. She was about to unleash her full dominion upon him.
And Canis Lykaon looked at her.
He looked at her, not as a goddess, nor as a lover, nor even as prey. He looked at her as he would look at a rock, a tree, a speck of dust. His essence of pure darkness, a void anchored to infinity, had nothing for her power to hold onto. Desire is born of lack, of hunger. And he lacked nothing.
'Your power is based on weakness, goddess,' he thought, his voice an icicle in her burning mind. 'You demand a tribute my nature cannot pay. You are irrelevant.'
Her hand stopped an inch from his fur. The sensual smile on her face froze, wavered, and then crumbled. Confusion, followed by a wave of icy disbelief, flooded her perfect eyes. Her power, which could bend Zeus and make Titans kneel, had crashed against a wall of absolute and impenetrable indifference. She had been rejected. No, worse. She had been ignored.
Before she could process this conceptual failure, a second figure blocked his path.
Ares. The god of war. He had left his wine and his armor shone with a crimson glow. He smelled of blood and excitement.
"Wolf!" he roared, his voice a thunderclap that made the golden cups tremble. "Leaving the party is one thing, but leaving a good hunting ground is cowardly! Stay. Fight by my side. We will shake the foundations of this world! Blood and pleasure, wolf! What else is there?"
He offered him an alliance. The only one he knew how to offer. A brotherhood of fury and domination. It was the second most tempting offer on Olympus.
Canis Lykaon didn't even turn his head. His ember gaze passed through the god of war, as if he were a dirty pane of glass barely obscuring his view of the exit corridor.
There was no answer. There was no recognition.
And then, he began to walk.
He took a step. Then another. A slow, heavy, and unwavering rhythm, heading directly toward the two gods blocking his path.
Ares, the god of absolute fury, froze. The confusion of battle filled his eyes. This beast was not attacking him. It was not fleeing. It was simply not acknowledging him. His warrior brain could not process such an insulting tactic.
Aphrodite, her face now pale from the shock of her powerlessness, remained paralyzed.
Canis Lykaon did not stop. He walked straight between them. His massive shadow shoulder brushed against Ares' bronze breastplate, a contact as casual and indifferent as a man brushing past a beggar on the street. He did not swerve. He did not push. He simply assumed they would move out of his way.
And they did.
At the last instant, both Aphrodite and Ares took an instinctive step back, their own powers betraying them before a will so singular and so contemptuous.
The entire hall held its breath. They had witnessed the impossible. The god of War and the goddess of Love, the two most powerful passions in the universe, had been pushed aside not with power, but with a disdain so absolute it was a weapon in itself.
The frustration on Aphrodite's face turned into a mask of livid rage. Ares' confusion transformed into a silent, humiliated hatred. They had been dismissed.
Canis Lykaon continued his solitary procession. He crossed the banquet hall, minor gods and nymphs parting from his path like water before the prow of a ship. He ignored their looks of awe and terror.
He did not head for the exit portals.
He walked calmly, with regal calm, to the very center of the throne room. He stopped before Zeus's great throne, the symbol of absolute power in this realm. The place where his visit had begun.
Under the stunned gaze of the entire pantheon, he looked at the empty throne. And then, as a final act of supreme contempt, he dissolved.
Not into a portal. Not in a flash of power.
He simply sank into the shadow cast by the All-Father's throne. He used the greatest symbol of their power as his personal exit mat.
One moment he was there, a mountain of night in the hall of light. The next, he was gone.
The silence he left behind was deafening. Only then did the sound return. A scream of pure pent-up frustration erupted from Aphrodite's throat, and the crash of an armored fist striking a marble pillar resonated as Ares finally unleashed his humiliated rage.
But it was too late. The predator had grown bored of his zoo. And he had just returned to the wild.
Olympus dissolved into an echo of golden light. The transition was instantaneous, a leap through the web of shadows connecting the arrogance of the gods with the honesty of the earth. Canis Lykaon flowed from the shadow of Zeus's throne, not to another place on Olympus, but to a place his instinct had chosen at random, a place as opposite to the sacred mountain as possible.
He emerged in darkness. A deep, damp, living darkness.
The air did not smell of ambrosia or nectar. It smelled of decay, damp pine, and cold earth. He was in the heart of a primeval forest in the depths of northern Europe. Colossal trees, older than any human civilization, stood like the pillars of a ruined cathedral, their canopies so dense they barely let the moonlight through.
Canis Lykaon drew himself up to his full height, a colossal form of solid night amidst the gloom. He inhaled deeply. The air was cold, clean, and for the first time in what seemed like decades, there was no constant hum of divine light irritating his senses.
He was alone. And he was free.
For a moment, he remained motionless, savoring the sensation. There was no leash. There was no invisible hundred-meter circle. There was no host soul tied to his like a shackle. Only the cold wind, the silence of the forest, and an entire continent beneath his paws.
'Free.'
The thought was not of human joy. It was a primordial exultation, the feeling of an alpha predator whose cage has dissolved. And the first instinct of a released predator is to run.
He launched himself.
It was not a run. It was an explosion. His shadow body came undone, becoming a smudge of darkness moving faster than the wind. He tore through the ancient forest, a stream of liquid night flowing between the trees without touching them. The ground was a blur of dead leaves and twisted roots beneath him.
He didn't need to touch the ground; he ran on the shadows cast by the trees themselves, his path a river of gloom gliding at impossible speed.
'No leash. No anchor. Only speed. Only power.'
He crossed the Carpathian Mountains as if they were hills, leaping from the shadow of one peak to another, his form barely visible against the moonlit rocks. He reveled in the sheer physicality of movement, in the power of his shadow muscles tensing and releasing.
Days and nights merged into a blur of motion. He crossed the vast plains of Germania, chasing herds of aurochs just for the pleasure of seeing them scatter in terror. He bathed in the icy fjords of the north, his dark essence an absolute contrast against the blue ice.
But freedom without purpose is just a bigger void. And Canis Lykaon's instinct craved a purpose. The predator's purpose: the hunt.
He stopped at the top of a rocky peak, his wolf form silhouetted against the moon. He sniffed the air. He no longer sought mortal prey. He sought... a challenge.
And the post-war world, still wild and full of magic, provided it.
He caught a scent on the high-altitude wind. It smelled of ozone, old feathers, and the hot blood of a recent kill. He looked up.
In a nest the size of a small house, perched on the highest cliff, he saw it. A Griffin. A magnificent creature with the body of a colossal lion and the head and talons of a giant eagle. It was devouring the carcass of a mountain ram, its hooked beak tearing the flesh with brutal ease.
'A king of the sky. Arrogant. Noisy.'
The Griffin felt his gaze. It raised its head, blood dripping from its beak, and let out a screech that echoed in the mountains like the cry of a thousand eagles. It saw Lykaon's form on the opposite peak and recognized a rival. With a powerful beat of its wings, it launched itself into the air.
It was a vision of aerial power. It rose, its wings blocking out the moon, and then dived. A bullet of feathers and claws, its front talons, sharp as scimitars, extended, ready to tear this dark intruder apart.
Canis Lykaon watched the approaching charge with icy indifference. He didn't brace himself. He didn't tense up. He simply waited.
The Griffin struck.
And passed through.
There was no impact. Its claws, capable of shredding steel, passed through Lykaon's body as if it were smoke, meeting no resistance. The momentum of its own charge caused it to crash awkwardly against the rock where Lykaon had been.
The Griffin turned, confused, letting out a screech of frustration. Where was he?
"Here."
The voice resonated in its mind just as Lykaon solidified behind it. Before the beast could even turn, a shadow claw, as long as a sword and as sharp as nothingness itself, slid upward. The movement was of brutal efficiency.
There was a silent hiss and a flash of golden ichor. The Griffin's head detached cleanly from its shoulders and rolled down the rock before falling into the abyss. The colossal body teetered for a second before collapsing, a fountain of arterial blood spurting from its severed neck.
Lykaon approached the corpse. He watched the steaming blood on the snow, the divine power fading from the feathers. He felt a brief, cold flash of satisfaction. Not for the victory. But for the perfect execution.
He wiped his shadow claw in the snow, an instinctive act of cleaning, and continued his journey. The Griffin hunt had been a simple appetizer.
His next target found him days later, drawn by the stench of sulfur.
On a blackened volcanic plain, a nightmare creature was feasting on the livestock of a terrified village. It was a Chimera. The body of a lion, a madly bleating goat's head sprouting from its back, and a tail ending in the hissing head of a venomous snake.
The lion's head roared when it saw him, and the goat's head opened its mouth. A torrent of sticky, liquid fire erupted, a storm of flames sweeping across the plain toward him, burning the very earth.
Canis Lykaon didn't even bother becoming intangible. He simply opened his jaws.
'Your fire is just noisy light,' he thought. 'My darkness is the void that swallows it all.'
He inhaled. A vortex of pure blackness formed in his throat, a hole in reality. The Chimera's flames were not blocked; they were absorbed. The torrent of fire was sucked into Lykaon's mouth, disappearing without a trace, generating no heat.
The Chimera's three heads froze. Panic replaced fury. Its ultimate weapon had been consumed.
"My turn."
He launched himself.
This time there was no subtlety. It was a massacre. His shadow claws shredded the lion's front legs. His jaws closed over the goat's head, crushing its skull with a crunch of bone. The snake tail struck, but its venomous fangs broke harmlessly against his solid darkness skin.
The beast fell, screaming with three different voices. Lykaon didn't kill it quickly. He tore it apart. It was an act of pure domination, a reminder to the world and to himself that the chain had been broken.
When he finished, he stood amidst a pool of blood and severed limbs. The thrill of the hunt, the joy of freedom, filled him for a moment.
But as he looked at the carnage, the euphoria faded, replaced by the familiarity of his natural state.
'Noisy beasts. Easy trophies. No challenge.'
The world was vast, full of prey. But he was the alpha predator. And the top of the food chain was a terribly boring place.
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