The beast reigns. He sits atop a wicker throne beside a pool of ever clear and azure waters. His jowls lounge toward smooth cement, as he beholds scrying visions of strange delicacies that shall be brought before him by biped giants with strange-thumbed paws. Divining nostrils and enchanted ears upon the beast’s crown of fur study endlessly the air and all its scented secrets. And he presages all occurrences through his sorcery of smell and sound.
In the distance, a vehicle encroaches on his kingdom’s curb. His ears perk and point toward the source of this sound as his nostrils sift through psychic scents within the wafting aether. He easily decrypts the essence of a brown-clad biped’s sinister soul and dark intents. And he barks immortal words of wolfen warnings. His voice resounds in echoes as the Metatron presiding over all eternity.
This incursion is thwarted upon its very inception. The would-be intruder ventures no further than the outer threshold of the beast’s great kingdom. It pauses like prey encircled by an entire pack of apex wolves. And it leaves a sacrifice at the front door’s alter before absconding with haste, as so many penitent souls have offered alms to appease this angered and unseen omnipotence so many times before...
Silence breathes a prayer of atonement that sooths the beast’s shaded belly. He relaxes his ever-vigilant posture, flopping with a powerful thud to rest upon his wicker throne. His nostrils and ears still attend to the subtlest scents and whispers which waft like prayers or curses proffered blindly toward him. But his eyes repose in a pulsing cadence of impermanent relief, blinking and scanning the outer sanctum of his back yard until he groans mighty and shifts into a shallow sleep.
Soon the airs will whisper scents of his returning clergy. He will rise with great vitality to welcome his prodigal familiars back into his kingdom. They will praise and pamper him in ways that all the old gods envy. His water dish will be replenished with cool waters to balance out his drool. He will kiss the liquid with sloppy lapping glugs, lavishing his chin and jowls with dripping delight. The bowl astride his water will overflow with a meaty paste which his guts will sense before his tongue can taste them. And once contented, he will sequester his humans back into the bowels of his castle to study shadows cast at dusk in houndsley sciomancy.
Crepuscular creatures will wander his vicinity in cringing trepidation. Their fear will stain the air and proclaim a truth that he can fathom much more clearly than these trembling critters. For he knows that darkness would be all they knew without his presence. No shadow cast upon their eyes could ever take shape without his form to mold it into more than a specter they behold. All their terror and exhaustion, all their blood and breath, their bones and flesh, their desires and aversions would be random waftures of suspicion and impulse without this beast presiding supreme and giving them definitive meaning.
They are born to fear death in oblivion and abstract. But death is rendered visceral and real by the transcending presence of his majestic jaws and teeth that pierce flesh like truth to penetrate the deepest depths within them. And the sharp claws upon his slashing paws which summon blood like ink will leave the bones and carnage of his great work like sigils drawn by deities on grounds where wanderers in search of answers to the riddles of existence may well read these scriptures he has left them.
At night the many kingdoms of this beast’s kind gather their voices in choirs of congress. They decry the abominations of squirrels, rebuke the arrogance of felines, proclaim valiant victories over failed delivery-man incursions, and preach great gospels of dogkind. Without their multifoliate howls, the night could not endure. No sun could yearn to return like a wistful eye driven by the hope of once more gazing down upon him. For the stars would find no resonance so vibrant and alive to quench their lonely spirits and sustain the heavens they construct. And the filth of dark would find no pure and purgative force to dispel its nightly sieges which might otherwise invade and claim his proud dominion that compels the sun to shine.
As the sun does rise again, the beast yawns and stretches its exuberant appendages. Its tail wags and slaps against everything that nears it like a hammer clanging against reliquial bells to signal the cadence of concluded conquests. A pink and moistened tongue protrudes for the beast to probe and purify its outer sheen. And its castle door is opened by human hierophants that come to offer strange hands to pat and rub the beast and its great belly, as if anointing it with absent oils.
The giants praise and pamper the beast with affections that ancient gods all envy. Their strange paws place alms before its snout for judgement and consumption. These bipeds seem to have finally ascended above their ignorance and confusion to understand their role and serve as clergy to this beast and his vast kingdom of fenced-in acreage. They keep his temple-palace clean and pure, even kneeling in reverence afore the beast’s excrement before bearing it up in crinkly vessels and ushering it away. Their strange-clad kind has long kept and crafted the bloodlines of this beast’s kin to honor its sacred canine heritage.
And as the bipeds filter out of the beast’s outer sanctum to complete those tasks which draw them elsewhere, he returns to his wicker throne. He thinks once more of all he’s done and must yet do to sustain the order and virtues of all existence. His head weighs heavy upon his mighty throne. A silence settles over his kingdom. Peace and tranquility praise his valiant rule. And though he merely waits to perform his next demanding task, in his heart of hearts he knows. He is such a good boy.
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