By Connor Orico
How many nights since the Wolves of Woe leapt upon us in lupine lechery and hate? From shadowed crags they found us: my watch faltered and by cold moonlight the vulnerability of our camp was laid bare. I need not recount the terror for it recounts itself in nightmare; my heart cannot bear reliving how my error nearly cost us our lives as we fled to the relative safety of Umbra’s Root, perpetual shadow beneath the mountain. Gúð-wine, my theroid companion and friend, was greatly wounded and here we are in subterranean depths as ancient as the Dionysian drama whose music ruptures my breast to subtend us in resonance.
After we stepped from under sky to beneath earth, some translunary magic or mysticism shut the way, barring entry from the Wolf horde pursuing us; yet some handful of the beasts passed the threshold in time to disappear from view, grey hide lost in grim dark. I suppose we shall find ourselves beleaguered as soon as they regather their strength. The lontano echoing fugue of snarling laughter belies their careful guerriero calculations as we now wander warily in the dark, hoping for a way out and peace from this dithyrambic diablerie.
Walking within Umbra’s Root knows no time and offers no comfort, a ceaseless caesura suffused with the drone of forgotten musique concrète, freddo creation of primeval stone. The Wolves do not abate more than is needed to mock. Gúð-wine is not recovered and has not strength to resist Woe’s revenant stretto; if we do not soon find an escape or defense, my companion will perish, along with all the music in my life. I cannot heal them by listening arts or moonless magic. My mind is clouding like acciaccato static. The air grows foetid as we stumble forward. Is not our marche funèbre presage of the end? As danger swiftly swells, I try to bend my thought towards some new light.
Whether lassitude, lentando faith, or folly of negligence, it matters little: volti subito, my percussive footfalls muffle as I step into a pool obscured in dark and silence. I lurch forward then steady, Gúð-wine entering quietly behind. We are still, but the semitone noise we made at the water’s edge echoes tenfold in submontane endless night. Restez – the fermata out of our hands, our hearts long for luminosity to see or a lullaby to put the pool back to sleep.
It only took a breath to divine the distinctive aura of fae. The water, too viscous, clung dreamlike about our feet. We took another step, knowing through this sibylline spell we must swim to free ourselves from Woe and hear the mending music of moonlit skies again. But that is when I felt beneath my feet the bodies and before our way the phantoms. Transfixed, we stood, realised as the summoned shadow and light of Umbra under the mountain.
O Oneiric One, Noctilucent Necromancer, conjured coda within me: sing a song of healing and lustrate my lycanthropy.
About the Author
Connor Orrico
Connor Orrico is a student and field recordist interested in global health, mental health, and how we make meaning from the stories of person and place we share with each other, themes which are explored in his words in The Collidescope, Burning House Press, hedgerow, and X-Peri, as well as his sounds at Bivouac Recording.
Ion Newcombe is the editor and publisher of AntipodeanSF, Australia’s longest running online speculative fiction magazine, regularly issued since January 1998, and conceived back around November 2007. He has been a zealous reader and occasional writer of SF since his childhood in the 1960s, and even sold a few stories here and there back in the '90s.
Mark Webb's midlife crisis came in the form of attempting to write speculative fiction at a very slow pace. His wife maintains this is a good outcome considering the more expensive and cliched alternatives. Evidence of Mark's attempts to procrastinate in his writing, including general musings and reviews of books he has been reading, can be found at www.markwebb.name.
Timothy Dwyer is an American science-fiction writer living in New Zealand.
Haneko Takayama is an award-winning Japanese writer. In 2009, her short story “Udon, Kitsune tsuki no” was a runner-up for the Sogen SF Short Story Award. 
Kerrie Noor was born in Melbourne Australia in 1960 but has spent most of her adult life in Scotland.
Amy Logan's first work was published on October 29, 1970. It has been a bit of a dry spell since, so she is very excited to have the opportunity to contribute to AntipodeanSF.
Keech has been writing fiction and poetry for 40 years, and is currently working on a speculative novel of the Afterlife, focusing on Victorian literature, though it is technically set in the near future.
Bruce is an older Australian, living in Adelaide, who enjoys reading and writing, especially short stories and flash fiction.
Myna Chang writes flash and short stories in a variety of genres.
Umiyuri Katsuyama is a multiple-award-winning writer of fantasy and horror, often based on Asian folklore motifs.
Laurie Bell lives in Melbourne, Australia. She was that girl you found with her nose always buried in a book. She has been writing ever since she was a little girl and first picked up a pen. From books to short stories, radio plays to snippets of ideas and reading them aloud to anyone who will listen.
Old enough to just remember the first manned Moon landing, Kevin was so impressed he made science his life.
Pixie is a voice actor, cabaret performer & slam poet From the Blue Mountains in NSW.
Timothy Gwyn is a professional pilot in Canada, where he flies to remote communities. During a lull in his flying career, he was a radio announcer for three years, and he is also an author.
Margaret lives the good life on a small piece of rural New South Wales Australia, with an amazing man, a couple of pets, and several rambunctious wombats.
Geraldine Borella writes adult short stories and stories for children and has been published in anthologies for both. In 2018, one of her children’s short stories placed second in The Buzz Words Short Story Prize and she won an ASA Emerging Writer’s Mentorship. She currently works part-time as a hospital pharmacist and as an online creative writing tutor.
Garry Dean lives on the Mid Coast of New South Wales Australia, and has been a fan of SF for most of his natural life. Being vision impaired, he makes good use of voice recognition and text to speech in order to write. Many of his stories have appeared in AntipodeanSF over the years, and his love of all things audio led him to join the narration team in 2017.
Although a writer of the baby boom persuasion, Ed has not boomed for quite a while.
Tim Borella has never lost his childhood passion for SF and writing in general and has been lucky enough to have worked most of his life as a pilot — in other words, he’s never properly grown up.
Alistair Lloyd is a Melbourne based writer and narrator who has been consuming good quality science fiction and fantasy most of his life.
