EXCERPT For ages they had been without heads. Headless they lived, and headless they died. How long they had thus flourished none of them knew. Then something began to change. It happened over unremembered generations. The signs of a transfiguring were being writ ever more deeply into them. As their breed moved forward, they began crossing boundaries whose very existence they never suspected…and they trembled. Some of them eyed their surroundings as they would a strange land into which they had wandered, even though their kind had trodden the same earth for countless seasons. And after nightfall, they looked up at a sky filled with stars and felt themselves small and fragile in the vastness…