Tormented Tarns Show me the foothold from which I can climb.

The mountains rose to impossible heights, vanishing in to the mist of a day slowly drifting away. Night was coming; the sun was beginning its descent and as it went, the shadows grew long and cold. The tarn sprawled out around him and he crept along the edge, watching his silvered reflection with the backdrop of black. Every few feet the wolf would slow his pace - or stop outright - and stare down at that reflection, as if unsure of what he was seeing. A flash of unfamiliar gold bridged his muzzle; shades of platinum had come to dominate the slate gray of his coat but he couldn't remember when it started; the lengthy, pale fur of his chest was a tangled mess. He'd hike a few feet and then become distracted by that glimmering laurel crowning his face — a face he didn't know. A face he stared at, but would forget within moments.

And he slowly made his way.

The mountains rose behind him but they reflected in the lethargic water. Sometimes when he looked, he saw someone else. A rugged silver-coated man twice his size. Just a glance — no gold, nothing but ice and stone and hard edges, so familiar but so very unrecognizable. The wolf began to think of this face as the stone. The other, with the gold, he called yellow belly — because he couldn't look at them for long.

He couldn't remember why he was so fixated on these faces. Who they were - who he was - everything was a jumble. So he paced, he gazed, transfixed by a seemingly endless narcissism. The truth was obvious. He just couldn't remember.