A man begins an ordinary morning with a chilling certainty: they're coming for him tonight. But behind the coffee, the radio baseball, and the shave lies a stranger truth—he belongs to an ancient race that survives by inhabiting chrysalids, bodies that sleep, endure, and carry consciousness across impossible spans of time. What seems like a private unease is really the pressure of a hidden civilization waiting for rescue and a return to its true course through the universe. As the narrator reflects on his people's history, survival has hardened into culture, conflict, and bitter division. Outsiders call them monsters and sorcerers, while they themselves split into two factions: the trusting Watchers, who guard the sleepers, and the Insurgents, who reject authority and fear control. In this eerie, cerebral science-fiction tale, shape-shifting becomes a tool of infiltration and espionage, and the legend of werewolves grows from a deeper reality. Sharp, unsettling, and deeply allegorical, the story turns fear, segregation, war, and propaganda into a meditation on how the instinct to survive can become an endless struggle for power. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.
