Jane realized that, like beauty, fear was in the eye of the beholder. And when she gazed into the face of the snarling wolf, she felt none. Instead, what rose like bile in her throat was shame, as those steely and unmoved blue eyes asked a question she had no answer to.

“Why do you get to rule over us?”

Standing before the mother wolf’s pack of thirsty fangs, humanity’s dominance made less sense than it ever had before.

“I don’t know.” She whispered, throat dry.

Her growl lowered with something like disgust. And Jane felt unworthy of even taking up her air.

But the she-wolf chose to let her breath it, chose to allow Jane to leave with throat and lungs in tact. Perhaps she knew that this was the greater torture, to keep taking up space, knowing you shouldn’t, disappointed in your existence, cursed by your supremacy.

Dead, Jane was only so much more spoiled meat that would do nothing to nourish the starving pack. Left alive, Jane now became the walking dead of humanity’s hollow dominion.

These days, we live to tell the tale. But it isn’t because we heeded the warnings of red capes swallowed whole by wolfish grins. We follow the path of mutual destruction, undeterred and unharmed in the pursuit of earth’s loneliest final act.