...it was upon him, all fangs and claws and fur, the priest rolling and reeling in the sand in a battle for his life. He felt its breath hot upon his face and neck, felt the sticky wetness of its drool on his parched skin, and he looked into its glowing rage-filled eyes. He rolled it over, rolled it again, and suddenly there was just him, under the night sky. Stars looked down on him. There was no wolf, and never had been.
Bloodmoon? But... I haven't eaten of that in...
He sat up again and re-crossed his legs, blinking furiously. Hallucinations were said to be a symptom of going without water for too long, in the desert heat. But he had his water-skin.
What can this mean?
The wolf had been terrifyingly real, hungering for his mortal flesh even while he thought of the Divine Bloodstars and pondered what they might be in their essence. Even as I search for the immaterial, the material still comes for me, a wolf in the night.
Or was it? There was no wolf, after all. The material proves to be immaterial after all.
When dawn came he stood, and gathered what he could of his things. A map of the region had been in his possessions, but he had torn it up irrevocably in struggles with his vision. No matter. He set out again anyway, realizing that perhaps the destination mattered less than the journey itself. It was good to be away from the turmoil of high politics, even if in the back of his mind he worried about how it would all turn out without him. And a part of him, growing with each step, considered resigning from it all. The Light of the Maddening. The Duke of the First Temple. The Elder Council. All of it.
Lest the wolf's jaws close upon my throat.
