The Crawlers did not think.
At least, not as men understood thought.
They moved with the storm, an ocean of chitin and hunger that rolled across the land with neither pause nor pity. Where they surged, grass vanished, earth churned, rivers blackened with bodies.
And yet, there was pattern.
It was Masen who first spoke it aloud, three nights after another fruitless count of corpses. He stood at the edge of the burning fields, lantern light glinting against a wall of dead carapaces. Thousands, tens of thousands, piled so high the trench groaned beneath the weight.
"They keep coming," he muttered, spitting into the mud. "But they don't scatter. They don't rout. Always in a line, always pressing."
Lucy, standing beside him, hugged her cloak tighter. "Like an army."
"No," Masen shook his head. "Armies break. These things don't. It's… something else."
Logos listened when Masen brought the report. He listened without interruption, quill scratching across parchment as the old man described the patterns:
How the Crawlers never withdrew, never sought shelter, never even fed upon their dead.
How their ranks seemed endless, as though one tide bled into another, driven by a signal no eye could see.
How, despite losses in the tens of thousands, the next wave always came at the same angle, the same rhythm, the same intent.
"They are not a warband," Masen concluded, knuckles tight on the table. "They're a hive."
Logos looked up at that, eyes narrowing. "A hive without exhaustion."
He tapped the quill against the map.
"If so, then somewhere—something directs them. Not like a general. Like a queen."
The biology of the Crawlers had long been whispered in taverns, but few dared to speak of it openly. To most, they were demons—hellspawn that gnawed on flesh and iron alike. But in the fortress of Laos, the corpses piled too high to ignore.
Smiths cracked their shells for chitin. Apothecaries dissected their organs. Masen boiled the meat for stew. And Logos, cold-eyed, noted every discovery.
Carapace: layered like woven metal, harder at the crown, softer at the joints. Resistant to fire, brittle under frost.
Blood: thick, black, clotting instantly in air. When distilled, it produced a foul-smelling resin that burned longer than oil.
Mandibles: serrated, capable of sawing through timber beams with mechanical precision.
Stomach: filled not with food, but a pulsing slurry of spores, as though their nourishment was drawn not from what they ate but from something shared within them.
And most unsettling of all—their corpses never rotted. Days passed, weeks, yet the flesh blackened but did not stink, as though corruption itself refused them.
"They are not beasts," Logos declared one evening, his voice echoing coldly in the war tent. "They are a system. Every limb, every mandible, every body—expendable pieces of something larger."
Lucy shuddered. "A system for what?"
"For persistence," Logos answered.
Across the western front, Sous Angelus faced the same enigma.
Knights returned with reports of battles that felt less like wars and more like floods. Refugees spoke of villages swallowed whole, not by strategy, but by inevitability.
Sous himself, after cleaving his hundredth Crawler in a single battle, looked upon the writhing swarm and felt a chill unlike any blade had given him. He stood upon a mound of steaming corpses, White Tiger dripping black ichor, and saw not hatred in their faceless tide—only function.
"They don't stop," he said quietly, as if to himself. "They don't even fear death."
One of his knights laughed bitterly. "Then we'll kill them all the same."
But Sous's eyes lingered. A swordsman could cut down an enemy, but what blade could sever inevitability?
In Laos, Logos began experimenting.
He ordered a dozen live Crawlers captured. It took fifty men, three iron nets, and the sacrifice of a horse to drag them into the pens. There, Logos observed them for days.
They did not eat. They did not sleep. They only battered themselves against the cage, mandibles working endlessly, legs tearing their own joints raw in blind fury. When one broke its limbs entirely, another would climb over its body, resuming the same relentless assault.
Even separated, they pressed in the same direction, toward the west.
"It is instinct," Masen muttered.
"No," Logos replied, his gaze sharp. "Instinct would make them search for food. Instinct would make them scatter, forage, survive. This… this is command."
He sketched lines on parchment, arrows that traced the direction of every observed swarm. They all converged westward, deeper into the Kingdom. As if guided by an invisible hand.
Lucy frowned. "Then the fortress is only… a stone in their path."
"Precisely," Logos said, voice flat. "And what beast moves stones from its path?"
Eight weeks of war had broken lesser men. Lords retreated behind their walls. Villages were abandoned to ash. And still the Crawlers pressed, endless, tireless, their corpses piling into hills.
Yet rumors began to spread.
Whispers of tunnels—vast underground passages where the Crawlers swarmed unseen. Whispers of a nesting ground, a chasm where eggs the size of wagons lay pulsing in the dark. Whispers of a Queen, titanic and unseen, whose will radiated across the swarms like a drumbeat none could silence.
Sous heard these tales by the campfires of refugees. He dismissed them as fear-drunk invention, yet in his heart the words festered. For he too had seen their persistence, their endless, unnatural cohesion.
And Logos, ever the cold scholar, did not dismiss them. He wrote them down. Every rumor, every sighting, every superstition.
"Somewhere," he murmured, staring at the ink-smeared parchment late at night, "there is a center. And if there is a center…" His lips curled in something halfway between a smile and a grimace. "Then there is a way to break it."
But until then, the horde pressed on.
A tide without hatred.
A hive without end.
A hunger that was not hunger, but law.
And in the face of such law, the Kingdom trembled.