The Outliers of Creation Sample

"All that Dreamborn amounted to was a tangle of intentions. Subconscious substance. Bodies of Somni. Limbs of memory. 

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Glass welded to the flesh at the joint, soldered to bone, and sprouted tendrils into the muscle like fibrous roots—consuming anything that remained unfed. Live with it long enough, and it became just like anything else with a body: something to endure. ​

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Sometimes Cleo wondered if she even needed to breathe. Whoever dreamt her had already forgotten to include a few crucial things, namely blood, but also her back molar teeth, a few tendons in her ankles, and her right thumbnail. Her limbs fit together as if they had been plucked from different bodies—disjointed and mismatched, with differing knuckle widths and one leg longer than the other. It wouldn’t shock her if, even after all of her gasping and choking, air was purely cosmetic. 

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She breathed anyway."