I spent a stupidly long time wrestling with the last paragraphs of this bloody thing — write two grafs, delete one, write another, delete both, write one, delete it, replace it with the two previously deleted, wipe the first one out but leave the second, etc — before I finally hit something I was willing to hit “save” on.

But “Serpent, Wolf, and Half-Dead Thing” is finally complete, at 3100 excessively difficult words. I suspect there’s some interesting theme buried in there, that I can try to unearth when I go back to revise, but for now, we’ll call that a draft.