The corpse crawled with the patience of something that had already died once and found the experience insufficient.

Its fingers—Zelda’s fingers, long cold—dug into the muddy ground of the original night and pulled. Each movement dragged more of the original quiet with it, the formless absence clinging to the dead body like a burial shroud made of revoked possibilities. The split in the tether hung in the air like a vertical wound, edges still bleeding light on one side and pure revocation on the other. Through that wound the living mansion flickered: torchlight, blood, the distant roar of a pack that had not yet realized the war had changed shape....