Everyone stood still for a moment.
Then they moved.
Slowly at first, then faster, and the song of chaos began again. But it was different now, quieter, like a hymn sung by people who had stopped believing in the words.
The black xenomorph ants marched down the mountain. The mountain no longer looked like a mountain. It was crumbled and broken, blooded, and shaking under its own weight. Sinkholes of flesh and blood and mud had opened across the slopes, black and brown and red twisted into each other, and ripples spread outward through them with every footstep, growing and growing.
What was left of the soldiers ran past burning helicopters.
Each breath went in and out like a lit match dragged down the throat. Bodies were hot and wet. Skin was torn open along with the metal and the fabric over it. Everything in them screamed to give up, and still they ran, for a day or an hour or a second, with the stubborn irrationality of things that want to live.
Some of them stopped.
They tossed the bodies of comrades back into the mud while those comrades screamed, please, don't leave me, and the others behind trampled over them. Bones broke. Flesh burst. The screaming sank into the ground and mixed with every other sound: fire changing pitch, wind howling, and under it all the screeching, the scratching of countless legs on shaking earth.
The dust almost hid it.
Almost.
But if you looked, you could see the black sea pouring down behind them, playing at cat and mouse. It could have caught them at any moment. It didn't.
Above them, far above, at the very top of the mountain, there was a cave.
Inside it, energy had gathered and moved like water. It glowed in the dark with a dark light, bright blue, swimming and swelling, and watching it you understood that water and energy were the same thing here, and that both were alive.
It formed a perfect circle, flat, like a painting hung on the air. Behind it lay another world of endless dark tunnels. The angles were clean. The corners were cut. Nothing in them had been shaped by wind or time or rain.
Whatever this was, nature had not made it, and neither had the thing that lived inside it.
A path led down.
On it you could bear witness to the ants in great numbers, broken and scarred but still moving, smoking, their dust mixing with the black of their own blood, all of them going the same way.
And walking down the path among them, small enough to be lost beneath their legs, was a child.
Dark-skinned. Short black hair, tightly curled. Black eyes, with red veins running from the edges toward the center like cracks spreading in glass. He wore black and silver armor shaped like a knight's, much too large for the body inside it.
His eyes were heavy. His breathing was loud. There were small wounds on him, a great many of them, and nothing on his face but tears, as if he were pleading with someone.
No more.
The ants did not touch him.
At the center of the tunnels, the crystals stood enormous and glowing blue. A screech tore out of them in every direction at once, a sound like laughter, laughing and laughing, and then it stopped.
Nothing.
The tunnels held their breath.
The crystals watched the child walk toward them.
Ash.