Excerpt: Random Shit Until I Drop

I stepped into unspace and sideways. The world disappeared.

I let myself change.

Shifters can go between forms anywhere, but shifting during a raw traversal of unspace is like a supernova of the most intense drug trip you've ever had. There's an overwhelming and indescribable energy influx, as if your body is reforming out of the raw material of unspace itself. (Maybe it is. Lots of people think so.) For a brief moment, you are eternal, all-encompassing, and then by the time you manage to parse the experience it has passed, leaving you feeling as though the meaning of life was just on the tip of your tongue -- and then, when you focus on that, you know you've lost it, and by then you'd be on your knees retching if you knew where your knees and your stomach were, and suddenly you're begging to black out and end the pain but that moment of cosmic unity returns and there's nowhere you can run to escape yourself and it's just dsvopih! until consciousness recedes back into a body that wasn't yours a minute ago.

Some shifters will change just for the rush. They're fucking nuts. I won't deny the experience is worth it, and worth doing over again, but it gut-punches you too hard to be any kind of addictive.

Being a shifter, on the other hand? Addictive? Absolutely yes. Returning to your true body after being human is like filling your lungs after holding your breath for a while.

And then spreading your wings and lunging out into the darkness? Bursting back to reality with a triumphant bellow near the ceiling of the clouds, rocketing down to kiss the ocean waves, swooping upward into a coiling loop-the-loop, slicing through the sussuration of the sky?

Totally worth it.

Even worth letting the Floridians know they had a dragon in their midst.