The ending that walked toward them did not look like the others.

It wore no single face. It wore topography.

Where the hardest alternate endings still held human or wolf shapes, this one carried hills in its shoulders, riverbeds in the crook of its arms, and the deep mineral weight of the southern grounds in every step. Black-vein script formed its tendons. Old pack-blood formed its eyes. When it breathed, the collapsed battlefield tasted of wet stone after rain and the iron tang of the training yards at dusk. It was the mansion’s claim given ambulatory form—an ending in which the land itself had risen to ensure the bloodline account...