The remote was buried somewhere in the couch cushions again.
Ruby Cole dropped to her knees on the living room carpet and shoved her hand between the seat and the armrest, fishing past a petrified Cheerio and what she hoped was a raisin before her fingers closed around the familiar plastic rectangle. She yanked it free with a triumphant grunt and checked the time on her phone. 8:29.
One minute.
"Dad! It's starting!" She vaulted over the armrest and landed cross-legged in the center of the couch, already punching in the channel number.
Jason's voice drifted from the kitchen, accompanied by the clatter of dishes being loaded into the dishwasher. "Be right there."
"It's starting," Ruby repeated, louder, bouncing a little against the cushion. She'd had the date circled on her phone calendar for a week, ever since the Late Show's social media accounts had posted the teaser. Mithyan. On Colbert. Live. The woman, the wolf, who had held up a collapsing parking structure with her bare hands while forty-six people scrambled to safety, caught on camera from every conceivable angle, viewed over two billion times across every platform imaginable. And she was going to sit in a chair and have a conversation on television like it was the most normal thing in the world.
Ruby hugged a throw pillow against her chest and turned the volume up three notches.
Jason appeared in the doorway, drying his hands on a dish towel. He draped it over his shoulder and leaned against the frame, arms crossed. "You're going to blow out the speakers."
"Sit down." Ruby patted the cushion beside her without taking her eyes off the screen. The Late Show's opening credits were rolling, the familiar brass fanfare filling the living room.
Her father settled onto the couch with a long exhale, the one he always made when he transitioned from doing things to sitting still, as if his body needed an audible signal to switch modes. Ruby noticed he didn't pull out his phone, though. He was watching, too.
He's curious. He won't admit it, but he's curious.
The band finished their intro, and the camera swept across the studio audience, capturing a sea of faces alive with a particular electricity Ruby could sense even through the screen. This wasn't a normal taping. Every seat was full, and people were leaning forward, craning their necks, buzzing with a frequency reserved for moments when the world was about to tilt a little further on its axis.
Stephen Colbert strode out from behind the curtain, and the applause hit like a wave. He was grinning, not his usual sardonic half-smile, but something wider, less controlled. He adjusted his glasses, tugged his cuffs, and let the ovation wash over him for a few beats before raising his hands.
"Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Late Show! I'm your host, Stephen Colbert, and folks tonight we have a guest who is, and I say this with full awareness of every guest who has ever sat in this chair, the most extraordinary person I have ever had the privilege of speaking with. And I include the Pope in that calculus."
Laughter rippled through the audience.
"Our guest tonight needs no introduction, because you've already seen her. You've seen her about two billion times." He held up his hand, fingers spread. "But I'm going to introduce her anyway, because my mother raised me right." He turned toward the curtain. "Ladies and gentlemen, Mithyan."
Ruby grabbed Jason's arm.
The curtain parted, and a small woman stepped into the light.
She was not what Ruby had expected. The viral footage had been chaotic, dust, screaming, shaking cameras, and at the center of it all, a figure of impossible strength holding the world together. Ruby had built an image in her mind, towering, imposing, radiating power like heat from pavement.
The woman crossing the stage was maybe five foot five. She wore a simple but elegant dress in deep forest green, her brown hair falling in soft waves past her shoulders. She moved with an unhurried grace, as if the standing ovation thundering around her was a gentle breeze she was strolling through. She was, there was no other word for it, beautiful. Not in the airbrushed, manufactured way of magazine covers, but in a way that seemed to come from somewhere deeper, something behind the skin.
And then there were the ears.
They rose from the top of her head, brown-furred and distinctly lupine, swiveling gently as she took in the roar of the crowd. A matching tail, thick and bushy, swayed behind her with an easy, relaxed rhythm.
Ruby's breath caught. She'd seen the ears in the footage, of course, but shaky cell phone video didn't compare to this, high definition, well-lit, undeniable. A woman with wolf ears and a tail, walking across a late-night talk show stage in America, and the audience was on its feet.
"Oh my God," Ruby whispered.
"Language," Jason murmured, but his eyes were fixed on the screen too.
Mithyan reached the desk and extended her hand. Colbert took it, and for a moment the comedian seemed genuinely at a loss, his mouth opened, closed, opened again. Then he laughed, a real laugh, and gestured toward the guest chair.
"Please, sit. I, wow. Okay." He dropped into his own chair and straightened his tie. "I had a whole opening bit planned, and I have forgotten every word of it."
Mithyan settled into the chair with the ease of someone who had been sitting in chairs since chairs were invented, which, Ruby supposed, she probably had. Her tail curled around the side of the seat, and her ears tilted forward, attentive and relaxed. She smiled, and it transformed her whole face, warm, amused, patient.
"Take your time, Stephen. I've got plenty of it."
The audience erupted, and Colbert pointed at her. "That's funny. You are already funnier than most of my guests, and you've been here for ten seconds."
"I've had a long time to work on my material."
Ruby laughed out loud. Beside her, she caught the corner of Jason's mouth twitching upward.
Colbert leaned forward, elbows on the desk. "Okay. Let's start with the obvious. You are, and correct me if I get the terminology wrong here, you are a spirit? A god? An immortal being who has existed for, how long, exactly?"
Mithyan's ears shifted slightly, a subtle rotation, considering. "Approximately one million years. Give or take a few millennia. After a certain point, the exact count becomes somewhat academic."
"A million years." Colbert sat back. The audience murmured. "To put it in perspective for our viewers, when you were born, there were no humans."
"Not as you would recognize them, no." Her tail swished once, slowly. "But your ancestors were there. I've been watching you grow up, in a sense."
"Like a cosmic babysitter."
"Something like that." The warmth in her voice carried through the speakers, and Ruby pulled the pillow tighter against her chest. "Though my role was always more... guidance than supervision. Your species has a remarkable capacity for figuring things out on its own. Sometimes in ways I never could have predicted."
"And sometimes in ways you wish you could have prevented?"
The humor in Mithyan's expression softened into something more serious. Her ears flattened, just slightly. "Yes. Sometimes."
"Now," Colbert continued, shifting to a lighter register, "I have to address something. You lived in Cincinnati."
"I live in Cincinnati," Mithyan corrected, and her tail wagged once, a quick, emphatic sweep. "I have for almost two hundred years."
"Two hundred years in Cincinnati. Voluntarily."
"It's a wonderful city, Stephen."
"I'm not disputing, okay, yes, I'm slightly disputing. But here's what I really want to ask." He leaned in conspiratorially. "You are a being of immense wisdom. You have watched civilizations rise and fall. You have seen empires crumble. And you live in a city that puts chocolate and cinnamon in its chili and serves it over spaghetti."
The audience groaned and laughed in equal measure. Mithyan's ears perked straight up, and her tail went stiff, a posture Ruby recognized from every nature documentary she'd ever watched. Alert. Ready.
"Stephen." Mithyan's voice was calm, measured, and carried a weight that suggested civilizations had, in fact, risen and fallen in the time since she'd first tasted Cincinnati chili. "Skyline Chili is an excellent regional cuisine, and I will defend it with every year of my million-year existence."
The audience roared. Colbert threw his hands up. "She's doubling down! A million-year-old wolf god is doubling down on Skyline!"
"It's a Mediterranean-inspired spice blend on pasta. The Greeks and Macedonians who created it were drawing on culinary traditions I have personally watched evolve over thousands of years. It is not Texas chili. It was never trying to be Texas chili. It is its own beautiful thing, and I am tired, tired, Stephen, of the disrespect."
Ruby whooped and slapped the cushion. "She's right!"
Jason rubbed his forehead, but he was smiling now, an actual, full smile. "She's not wrong."
On screen, Colbert had regained his composure. He straightened his note cards and adopted a more serious tone. "Okay. Let's talk about something important. You and others like you have been living among us, hidden, disguised, for centuries. Millennia. Why? And why come forward now?"
Mithyan's posture shifted. Her tail settled, her ears oriented directly toward Colbert, and the playfulness drained from her expression, replaced by something ancient and considered. Ruby could almost see the weight of years settling over her like a cloak.
"We withdrew from human affairs approximately two thousand years ago," Mithyan began. "Not all at once, and not without disagreement among ourselves. But the consensus was clear, humanity had grown beyond the need for gods. You had your own systems, governments, religions, philosophies. You were asking questions we couldn't answer, and resenting us for it. Our presence was becoming a source of conflict rather than comfort."
"So you stepped back."
"We stepped back. Some of us sooner than others. By a thousand years ago, almost all of us had withdrawn from public life. We hid. We blended in. We watched." Her ears drooped, and the sadness in the gesture was unmistakable, even through a television screen, even to a twelve-year-old girl sitting on a couch in Ohio. "And we watched your species do extraordinary things. And terrible things. And we debated, endlessly, whether to intervene."
"What changed?"
Mithyan was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was lower, and the studio had gone utterly still.
"I was standing on a street corner in Cincinnati when a parking structure began to collapse. And the debate, all the centuries of careful deliberation and philosophical argument, became irrelevant. Because there were people underneath it. And I could help. So I did."
Ruby's eyes stung. She remembered watching the footage for the first time, the concrete buckling, the dust billowing, and then this small figure under it, arms raised, holding the impossible weight while people ran and crawled and were carried to safety. She'd watched it forty times. Fifty. She'd lost count.
"And once you stepped forward," Colbert said, "there was no going back."
"No. And I wouldn't want to. The age of hiding is over, Stephen. Not because we decided it should be, but because the world you've built, cameras everywhere, information traveling at the speed of light, made it impossible. And because..." She paused, choosing her words with evident care. Her tail wrapped around the chair leg. "Because we are watching your species approach a crossroads. Climate change. Political division. Weapons capable of ending everything. You are facing challenges now you cannot afford to face alone. And we have knowledge, experience, resources. We want to help. Within your systems. Not as rulers. Not as gods. As... partners."
Colbert was quiet for a beat. Then, softly, "Guardians."
Mithyan's ears rose. She tilted her head, considering the word, and then a slow smile spread across her face. "Guardians. Yes. I like that very much."
"You heard it here first, folks." Colbert tapped his desk. "Not gods. Not spirits. Guardians. I'm coining it. That's mine. I want royalties."
Mithyan laughed, and the sound was rich and free and startlingly human. "You'll have to take it up with my attorneys. Though I should warn you, I was one of my attorneys until very recently, and I'm quite good."
Ruby tugged Jason's sleeve. "Dad, didn't you—"
"Yeah." He shifted, rubbing the back of his neck. "Jenny Thomas. Senior partner at Thomas and Associates. I testified in a few cases she defended."
Ruby's eyes went wide. "You know her?"
"I wouldn't say know. She cross-examined me a couple of times. She was..." He paused, searching for the word. "Thorough."
"Dad. Dad. You were cross-examined by a million-year-old wolf. How are you so calm about this?"
"It explains a lot, actually," he muttered.
On screen, Colbert was standing. "Now, and I cannot believe I'm about to say these words on network television, you can... transform? Into a wolf?"
Mithyan rose from her chair with fluid ease. "I can. Would you like to see?"
The audience noise swelled into something between excitement and nervous energy. Colbert took a visible breath and stepped out from behind his desk. "The crew has very kindly cleared an area for this, because apparently my stage is now a habitat exhibit. Yes. Yes, I would very much like to see."
The camera pulled back to reveal a wider section of the stage, cleared of furniture and equipment. Mithyan walked to the center of the open space, her movements unhurried. She turned to face the audience and the camera, and for a moment she was simply a small woman in a green dress, standing alone under studio lights.
Then she changed.
It didn't happen all at once. It wasn't a special effect or a jump cut. Ruby watched Mithyan's form ripple, stretch, expand, fur spreading across skin, limbs reshaping, her body elongating and growing and growing, and the gasp from the studio audience was a living thing, a collective intake of breath from hundreds of lungs simultaneously.
Where Mithyan had stood, a wolf now filled the stage. Not a wolf the size of a dog, or even the size of a horse. Thirty feet from nose to tail, shoulder height nearly touching the studio lights. Brown fur, thick and lustrous, the same shade as the hair and ears of her human form. Golden eyes the size of dinner plates, sharp and ancient and impossibly intelligent, surveying the audience with calm curiosity.
Her tail, massive now, a great plumed banner, swayed once, gently, and a gust of air ruffled the hair of the people in the front row.
Ruby forgot to breathe.
The studio was silent for three full seconds. Then someone in the audience started clapping, and it spread like fire, building into thunderous applause mixed with shouts and a few audible sobs. Stephen Colbert stood ten feet from a wolf the size of a city bus, his mouth slightly open, his note cards forgotten on the floor.
"That's..." He swallowed. "That's really something."
The wolf lowered her enormous head toward him, and her ears, each one the length of his arm, pressed forward with a gentleness that seemed impossible for a creature that size. A low sound rumbled from her chest. Not a growl. Something warmer. A greeting.
"Can I..." Colbert raised his hand, tentatively. "Is it okay if I...?"
The great wolf dipped her muzzle closer, and Colbert placed his palm against the broad plane of her forehead, between those golden eyes. His hand was tiny against the expanse of fur.
"Oh," he breathed. The microphone barely caught it. "Oh, you're warm."
The wolf's eyes half-closed, and her tail swept the stage in a long, slow arc, the unmistakable body language of contentment. A sound came from her then, deep and resonant, something between a hum and a purr, and the vibration of it was visible in the slight trembling of Colbert's suit jacket.
"This is..." Colbert looked into the camera, and his eyes were bright. "I have interviewed presidents and popes and rock stars and Nobel laureates, and nothing, nothing, has ever compared to this moment."
He kept his hand on her forehead for a long breath, and the audience was utterly, reverently quiet.
Then the wolf huffed, a warm blast of air that sent Colbert's tie flying over his shoulder, and the spell broke into laughter. Mithyan shifted again, the great form shrinking, condensing, resolving back into the small woman in the green dress. Her ears reappeared, her tail resettled, and she smoothed the front of her outfit with both hands as casually as someone adjusting their jacket after stepping out of a car.
"Thank you for allowing that," Colbert said, and his voice had a roughness to it. He was blinking rapidly. "Truly."
"Thank you for asking." Mithyan returned to her chair, and her ears settled into a relaxed, forward-facing position. "Consent matters, Stephen. Even between species."
Colbert reclaimed his seat and took a visible moment to gather himself, shuffling his recovered note cards. The audience was still buzzing, and Ruby realized she was gripping her father's arm with both hands, her fingernails leaving little crescent moons in his skin.
"Sorry," she murmured, loosening her grip.
"S'okay." Jason's voice was oddly quiet. He was staring at the screen with an expression Ruby couldn't quite read, something between disbelief and reassessment, as if a case he'd been building in his mind had suddenly acquired new evidence.
"So," Colbert said, visibly pulling himself back into the rhythm of an interview. "Guardians. Partners, not rulers. You want to work within human systems. What does that actually look like? What are you hoping for, specifically?"
Mithyan's ears angled forward again, and her posture straightened, not stiff, but attentive, a professor about to deliver the lecture she'd spent a career preparing for. "Three things. First, legal recognition. We exist. We've always existed. We need to be recognized within the legal frameworks you've built, as citizens, with the same rights and obligations as anyone else. That means amnesty for the identity fraud many of us have committed simply to survive in a world built on Social Security numbers and birth certificates."
"That's reasonable."
"Second, transparency. We will share our knowledge, sciences, histories, skills accumulated over millennia, openly and freely. No secrets. No hidden agendas. Everything we offer will be offered through your institutions, your universities, your governments. Subject to your oversight."
Colbert nodded slowly. "And third?"
Mithyan's tail stilled. Her ears flattened slightly, and when she spoke, the warmth in her voice was threaded with something harder. Not anger. Determination.
"Third, trust. And I don't mean that you should trust us blindly. I mean that we want to earn it. We are going to prove, through our actions, every day, in ways large and small, visible and invisible, that we are here to help. Not to dominate. Not to replace your leaders. Not to play god." The corner of her mouth curved. "We've already tried being gods. We'd like to try being neighbors."
The applause was different this time. Not the explosive, giddy ovation of her entrance, and not the stunned silence of her transformation. Something steadier. Something Ruby could feel in her chest, like a second heartbeat.
Colbert stood and extended his hand again. Mithyan took it, and he covered their clasped hands with his free one.
"Mithyan," he said. "Guardian. Neighbor. Welcome."
"Thank you, Stephen."
The band struck up, and the camera pulled back as the credits began to scroll. The audience was still on its feet.
Ruby realized her face was wet. She pressed the back of her hand to her cheek and it came away damp.
"She's amazing," Ruby said, her voice barely above a whisper. "Dad, she's actually amazing."
Jason didn't answer right away. He was still staring at the screen as the image shrank into the Late Show logo and the network cut to a commercial for laundry detergent. The sudden banality of it, a cartoon bear concerned about fabric softness, after what they'd witnessed was almost physically jarring.
"Yeah," Jason said finally. He let out a breath, slow and long, different from his sitting-down exhale. This one carried something heavier. "She really is."
Ruby hugged the throw pillow and pulled her knees to her chest, her mind spinning with wolves and green dresses and a million years of patience. The commercial played on, cheerful and oblivious, and the living room returned to being an ordinary room in an ordinary house in Cincinnati, Ohio.
But something had shifted. She could sense it the way you sense a change in weather before the first drop falls, a pressure, a charge, a new possibility humming at a frequency only the young and the hopeful could hear.
Guardians.
She liked the word. She liked it a lot.