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without another thought, I slept, naked upon the steaming
floor, a smile snatched from hope lining my lips.

***

I dreamed I was one of countless wolves, breathing fog
into a cold, black sky. We were ravenous. Something else
came among us, in us. It entered through the gates of our
hunger, drawing us together, building a single ravening
void out of individual starving spaces, until all shared the
same endless hunger. Its memories raced through us like
lightning, its mind emerging from our collective bottomless
guts. Composing our thoughts, it wove them together into a
single and terrible awareness. All but lost within the crush
of this new, coalescing existence, I glimpsed, if only for a
moment, the thing I was becoming. I was old as reflection,
taller than fear, colder than death. My voice a sudden
interrupted breath, my name the silence of conscience. I rose
from the earth as the sum of wolves, and the world trembled
beneath my gaze.

***

When I awoke, I had the distinct impression something
vast and monstrous had moved over me while I slept, the
portentous echo of its passage still shrinking into the distance.
Compelled to scan my surroundings, I detected nothing
amiss. But I couldn’t deny the change now daring to be
discovered. The matter took only a moment to resolve—the
world had become lighter, slight but appreciable, alleviated
perhaps only by the removal of a layer of finest dust. What
it signified I was unsure. But one thing was indeed certain—
the dream of wolves was the cause. There was something
else as well, confided to me through sleep’s last breath—a
whispered promise of changes yet to come. The intimation
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