Two Tales of Transformation and Loss

In the first story, "The Dragon, the Scarab, the Wolf, the Dragon" by Rianon Rasmussen, a landless tenant named Anar kneels in a ceremony that will bind him to House Vilkas of the Wolf. He is scarabkin from the undercity, and the honor he cannot refuse comes with a curse: the wolf form he will assume will eventually twist his gestures into something less than human. He tried to refuse, but the sovereign offered him land, care in old age—a life he could not otherwise afford. "Plenty of veterans passed in the arms of drink, winter, or the corpse blood of the god dragon that ran through their streets," the story tells us. "Easy to imagine dying alone, nameless, and broke. Harder to imagine being a monster of muscle and fangs, dying in bed."

What makes Anar's situation more complicated is that he has already drunk the dragon's blood himself. He was present when the sovereign beheaded the god dragon, and he remembers the creature's eye opening after its head fell, "big as his head," showing him his own reflection. The dragon's corpse still leaks blood through the throne room, and Anar feels that maddening hunger again—the same hunger that drove him to slay a god. The ceremony is meant to make him forget, to give him a quiet retirement far from that memory.