Heiwo Gecko

The black wolves are at once coveted animals, suspected carriers of a devastating disease, and part of the ancestry of the rochai hunting dogs. Their story crosses the history of Otawalle and the practical, sometimes sharply contrasting animal traditions of Aquafa’s peoples: animals first pursued for their pelts become associated with mass death, while later accounts turn their descendants into prized working dogs and objects of religious explanation.

Appearance, Trade, and the Outbreak

In the account Hohsalle gives Yotalu, the black wolves have glistening pelts unlike those of wolves around the Otawalle capital. The Ballad of the Fall of Otawalle opens with the image of black shadows coming from white mountain peaks, and its account links the kingdom’s decline to noblemen who brought wolves back from the Toga Mountains. The first animals may not have carried the disease. Their attractive pelts and clever faces nevertheless made them desirable, and noblemen competed to collect them. Beast merchants and hunters captured and sold the wolves; some were reportedly bred with dogs, and demand grew large enough to support merchants specializing in them.

A rumor spread in spring that black-wolf merchants bitten by the animals had contracted a frightening illness. The reported symptoms included high fever, convulsions, and rashes; victims died within a night and a day. The Divine King of Otawalle responded by banning the black-wolf trade. The disease seemed to disappear, only to return as summer approached, now killing people who had not been bitten by wolves. The shift from a suspected bite-related sickness to an epidemic among the wider population undermined the apparent reassurance of the ban.

The later outbreak spread through the crowded poorest districts of the capital during a hot, muggy summer. Physicians at the Academy of Deeper Learning proposed that the illness had passed from wolves to the fleas and ticks that fed on them, and then to rats, whose increasing numbers rapidly expanded the pool of carriers. By the time the capital began exterminating rodents and pests, thousands had died. The remedy described in Hohsalle’s account was not a cure: the inhabitants abandoned the capital. He also tells Yotalu that the sickness had once killed six thousand people and brought his people’s kingdom to the brink of extinction. An effective cure had still not been found.

After the Culling

The black wolves’ disappearance did not end their influence on the mountain environment. Van’s account says that after they were culled, ossam numbers increased dramatically. People shunned the light-gold-coated mountain dogs, whose coloring was said to bear the light of the next world, while Van’s people hunted them in winter because they attacked pyuika. The sequence places the wolves within a changing ecological relationship: their removal altered the abundance of another animal, which remained a direct concern for herders.

Van and Ohma also reveal a difference in how animals were classified and valued. Van identifies rochai as ossam bred with wolves and understands the term as derogatory; his people might breed dogs with wolves, but they would not use an animal with ossam blood for hunting. The Aquafaese, by contrast, considered rochai intelligent and prized them as hunting dogs. Thus the descendants associated with the black wolves could be regarded as unsuitable or contemptible in one community and useful in another. Their presence in the mountains also gives Van reason to reconsider the disappearance of young boar and deer: he had suspected increasing ossam, but wonders whether these darker, larger animals are the creatures that multiplied.

The Ahfal Oma Tradition

A later conversation about the Ahfal Oma’s hunting dogs links rochai to black wolves and ossam. Cheehana identifies the dogs as crosses between the two and says the Ahfal Oma call them a gift from Kinma. She knows the connection through an old story, which Shikan and Tomasolle develop into an account of both animal breeding and horse burial.

In the Kinma chant, horses that die are treated differently according to cause: a horse that dies otherwise is to be burned, while one that dies of sickness is to be buried. The tale then describes a dog carrying pups by a wolf that eats the flesh of a sick horse from the burial mound, falls ill, and dies after giving birth. Her pups survive and flourish as excellent village hounds. Shikan distinguishes the community’s practice from the myth: when many fire horses existed, the Ahfal Oma buried horses that had died of illness, later dug up their carcasses, and fed them to pregnant bitches. In practice, the bitches did not die, and their pups grew loyal and strong and did not succumb to sickness. Tomasolle adds that the Ahfal Oma used the same burial-mound practice when horses died from eating poisoned rye.

Historical and Narrative Significance

The wolves’ history is not confined to the epidemic. It reaches forward through animal breeding and inherited custom, while the proposed chain from wolves to parasites, rats, and people makes animal movement central to the history of Otawalle’s collapse. The black wolves are not presented simply as deliberate instruments of disaster: the first animals may have been free of disease, and the epidemic’s later spread beyond people bitten by wolves points to the failure of a simple explanation. The distinction between an animal’s original status and the consequences of trade, transmission, and human practice gives their story its force.

The contrast between the ban and the eventual abandonment of the capital also clarifies the limits of control. Authorities could prohibit the trade and later attempt to exterminate pests, but neither action prevented the disease’s return or reversed the deaths already sustained. Centuries—or, at minimum, a long historical interval—are not specified, but the narrative plainly sets the old catastrophe alongside a later present in which rochai remain known as hunting dogs. The wolves therefore connect disease history with living ecological and cultural differences: animals may be feared, avoided, hunted, or valued as skilled companions, depending on the community and the relationship at stake.