Chapter 30

I'd had a dream once. A very bad dream.

In this dream, my Pack was in ruins. Our camp was devastated. I returned home from a hunt beside a group of males whom I could not recognize, only to find the ground torched, the tents razed, and all manner of objects littered around the area, broken and abused. A place not only of decimation; but one of supplication.

And I beheld the sanguine orgy of corpses and of the pests that fed upon them, fed on rot. The corpses of my Packmates... The bodies of my friends.

I remember staring at that scene with a nauseating kind of detachment, a clawing and scraping malignance as my very soul tried desperately to escape the harsh resin cage my flesh had become of it. I was in agony.

This dream had faded quickly with the waking hours, but the feeling behind it remained: the omnipresent fear that I should fail where another might've succeeded, and that my Pack would pay the ultimate price for my hubris. Ove