I came to the tower of the Viscount in 2166, in a silver Lexus R3 whose trunk was filled with fine clothes and a heart that was filled with dread. The lands he ruled were rife with dark tales, and though I had begged my father to send me to another court the older wolf had been adamant. The ties between Brightfang and Silvermane were old and strong, spanned the centuries in spider webs of arranged marriages and secret alliances. Subtle, tangled, and nigh invisible, yet there in entrapping potency nonetheless, and so my fate had been woven long before I had ever been born.

At present Trent Brightfang had no daughters, no children at all in fact, yet a Silvermane Marquis had always served as steward and stand in lawmaker on those days when the lord himself wished to skip court. My uncle, Walter Silvermane, had vanished under mysterious circumstances months ago, and so as the eldest son it fell to me to take his place.

The tower itself is called Skyview, a grim spike of steel and glass forty stories high and so close to the heavens you could almost touch the clouds. The official elevation of its base is 10,404, and the crenels of its crown are just shy of 11,000. It looms dark and imperious over a lonely meadow that is a riotous rainbow of wildflowers and pine copses, and it’s framed by the jagged, snowcapped stone fangs of mountain tops whose white summits are often lost in the restless roil of cumulonimbus that haunt the earth’s stratosphere.

It’s hard to breath up there, at first, for the air is very thin. The views, too, are breathtaking. On a clear day you can almost imagine you can see the entire world below that place. Forests, farms, and grand cities are visible at every point of the compass and all of it seems very small and very distant.

Easy to imagine that one was seeing as much as the gods saw, should they deign to look down from heavens not so far from the place, and this in and of itself invited into your soul an addictive and poisonous megalomania, if only because you literally were above it all and you knew it…couldn’t deny it. So many lives, so many places, so many miles to gaze upon at once…how to explain how that makes one feel? I can’t. You have to be there.

I was tired when I finally pulled up into the tower’s shadow. The ascent had been long, twisting and treacherous, and even though I had made the climb in a luxury car the sheer drops, torque and heart pounding adrenaline had taken its toll. Much of the road up had no guardrails, just black top, gravel shoulders and a dizzying sheer blue that promised death with one wrong turn of the wheel. Falcons and eagles often soared level with me and head sized stones washed free from the looming cliffs by the recent rains had been everywhere, slowing my climb to a hackle raising crawl for many miles.

I took in the state of Skyview’s courtyard, the driveway cracked and broken and wild with weeds. Marble statues covered with lichen rose from twisted overgrown islands of rogue roses bristling with thorns and jungles of sunflowers whose heads were huge and heavy. The once grand fountain that dominated the roundabout of Skyview’s driveway was bone dry and filled with dust, the dolphins all but lost in a crush of ivy. The likeness of Poseidon presided over them, his crown missing two tines, half his face obliterated by the cruel freeze and thaw of several winters.

A soft smile stole across my face. I could just imagine what my father would say, what most any other noble would say. They’d be aghast at all of it, of course.

My personal story is a long one, but suffice to say I have a paw in both worlds, rich and poor. It’s a miracle I wasn’t dubbed a bastard and left to a commoner’s life in some monstrous megacity. I would have probably been confined to a corporate cubicle, a slave to a paycheck, a computer and a soulless, vampire boss, my only future collecting enough acorns before the winter of my life so I could die old and gray without having to bag groceries eight hours a day while I was at it.

I understood what I saw in the shadow of Skyview, as such. Lord Brightfang had other matters on his mind, matters that clearly eclipsed any concern for manicured lawns. I wondered what those were, and hoped to unravel that mystery in time.