A frigid white wind howled across the vast white lands, hollow and beastlike, sweeping everything before it into a wall of noise.
Against that current, a man walked. Layers of specially woven polar fabric encased him from skull to boot, the thickest gear his budget and the association's funding could afford. It bought him roughly an hour.
One hour to explore, find what he came for, and retreat to the aircraft base before the cold killed him.
Wilfred knew this was reckless. Antarctica was not a place that forgave curiosity. But he was a scientist, and a scientist's hunch always won in the end. No amount of danger could outweigh the chance to be the first to discover a supposedly extinct species of ant that might have evolved beyond human comprehension.
Not much was known about the species except that Antarctica's extreme climate would have forced upon them biological and physical adaptations that Wilfred could not wait to see with his own eyes.
He trudged across the snow, each step sinking to the shin, binoculars pressed to his face as he scanned the ground with every stride. Ants were small creatures. Easy to miss in favorable conditions, let alone a place like this.
The wind had cut his survival window down to minutes. He knew it but kept walking.
'All I need is just one… a single one of them.'
He pushed deeper into the storm. The white wall thickened until nothing existed beyond it.
He couldn't even see where his boots were landing.
Still, he walked.
His skin went numb first. Then the shivering started, violent enough to throw off his stride. Frostbite was settling into his fingers and the bridge of his nose, and every gust drove the cold deeper.
Wilfred stopped. He turned slowly, scanning for the path back, but the white wall had closed behind him too. He had no idea which direction led where anymore.
That was fine. His team at the Station would see the biometric sensors spike long before he collapsed. They were probably already scrambling the rescue sled.
'Perhaps I should just take this little time to look around and confirm for myself, hehe…'
Even now, with his suit's thermal limit ticking toward zero, the thought of finding an ant made his hands steadier than they had any right to be.
He raised the binoculars and turned in a slow circle. Then stopped. Reversed. Something had moved in his peripheral vision, a flicker against the white.
He traced it through the lens.
"Ho…oooly..."
His breath locked in his chest. His heart slammed so hard he could feel it in his temples, in his wrists, in the roots of his teeth, and for one dizzying second the cold that had been killing him simply vanished beneath the flood of adrenaline.
He pulled out a silver tweezer and a hand lens and dropped to his knees in the snow.
"Oh… my goodness. What an absolute beauty you are."
The ant was unlike anything he had ever seen. A whitish-blue body encased in a glassy exoskeleton that caught the diffused light like a sliver of frozen sky.
Will picked it up with the tweezer, fumbled the hand lens back into his pocket, and brought out a specimen bottle. The ant went in. His fingers were shaking, and not from the cold.
He pulled out his recorder, grinning.
"This is day 142 since I theorized the existence of the Ceratomyrmex ellenbergeri. The extinct species of the Cretaceous Hell Ant. Although I have not exactly found the Hell Ant, what I have found may be far more interesting than that."
Smoky breath curled from his mouth as he turned the bottle in his fingers, examining the creature from every angle. Its elbowed antennae swept through the air while thin legs, like sheets of frozen glass, pressed against the wall of the bottle.
Will could have watched it for hours.
The frostbite reminded him he did not have hours.
Then he noticed something. The ant gripped one of its own antennae with its fore limbs and, with its tarsus, tore it free. Then the other. Both antennae, ripped out and discarded. The ant retreated from the wall of the bottle.
Will's brow creased.
"Hmm, that's interesting. I wonder what that could mean?"
He shrugged and was reaching to tuck the bottle away when a tremor punched up through the ice and into his bones.
Will went still. He raised the binoculars.
What he saw made him stagger backward.
From every crack in the ice sheet, white lines were pouring out. Not lines. Columns. Ants climbing over ants, spilling from fractures he hadn't even noticed, and the cracks were widening, splitting further with tremors that shook through his boots. What had looked like thin seams in the ice were becoming rivers of pale glass bodies flooding across the surface.
He spun. Behind him, the same. White floods pouring from fissures in every direction.
By the time he turned to run, they had closed the circle around him.
Wilfred gritted his teeth, leaped over the nearest stream of ants, and broke into a sprint.
What happened next, he was not prepared for.
The flood began to rise. Thousands of ants climbing each other, then millions, and the mass swelled upward into a wave tall enough to swallow the wind itself. Several waves rolled toward him from every direction through the white fog like tidal surges of frozen glass.
"Help! Rescue here! Help!"
The wind ate his voice whole.
They were not just behind him. They were forming ahead too, and Will did not realize it until his right leg refused to move. He looked down. His boot, his calf, his knee, all buried under a crawling sheath of white bodies climbing higher with every heartbeat.
He stomped. He kicked. He clawed at them with his gloves. It was all useless. The wave crashed into him from the side and sent him tumbling across the snow.
The moment his back hit the ground, they flooded over him.
His polar gear, the thickest money and science could buy, lasted seconds. Their jaws shredded the fabric like wet paper, ripping it away in pieces, carrying the shreds off in organized lines even as the next wave poured in to reach his skin.
Wilfred fought until he couldn't feel his arms. Then his legs. Then his torso.
Through the swarm crawling across his face, he watched a single ant drag the specimen bottle free of his pocket and carry it away, traveling across the backs of thousands of its kind.
They were retrieving their own.
At that moment, only one thought filled Wilfred's mind.
'Magnificent… superb… all of you, are the perfection of nature. The most complete creature to ever exist in this world.'
A warm smile spread across his lips.
'This is a well-deserved death. I couldn't have wished for something better. My only regret is not being able to understand you lot more intimately.'
And as the ants crawled into his nose, his mouth, his ears, that warm and loving smile stayed frozen on Wilfred's face.