I wanted to do a story that had a joyful, positive spirit for once. Usually, I like to tell dark stories, so it was a nice change. The idea itself came from my attempt at finding “the source” of a powerful, positive feeling. I thought of and gathered things that have been good in my life, and my mother was top of the list.

With Ankuin I wanted a protagonist who was intelligent, powerful, and savvy. I wanted the reader to find pleasure in watching her work, as she outmaneuvered an enemy who ostensibly had every advantage. Sure, Ankuin raises ethical questions, but her story is so heartbreaking and her revenge so intoxicating that those questions don’t really land until the story is over.

One of the main themes of this story is how our feelings about ourselves are intrinsically tied to that self and are not something we can separate. While Sarah undergoes this inexplicable transformation, her feelings about it seem to parallel the transformation somewhat. But how much of her numb acceptance at the end is because she’s mostly sand, and how much of is her actually coming to terms with it, whatever that even means? I don’t think there’s an obvious answer to that.

That’s something I hoped for this story interrogate: how do you look, to someone who doesn’t share your frame of reference? When you or I think about, say, zombies, we tend to think that what separates them from normal people is their amoral mindlessness, their bottomless hunger, and the fact that they will instinctively slaughter pretty much whoever happens to be in front of them. But for a prey species, like a deer, that’s just a description of a human.