Ghost Fragment: Hive 2

At the doors to the Temple he fell for the last time. He fell, and I could not reach him.

My own Light flickers.

They took me down into the dark, past tiers of massed Hive, more than we believed could exist. Past grisly nurseries hung with pupae. Past writhing worms that they swallow whole. I saw the armaments of war.

I am weak, so weak.

They have clamped me to this spire while a black foulness eats my Light. The Wizard comes now and then to probe with her scaly claws into my systems, to inquire about my making, the City, what I have seen. I erase and dump as quickly as I can - they will learn little from me - but I am studying them, I know - pain.

Always pain.

I have seen chasms beneath the surface, falling away to green nothingness. I have seen black seeders prepared for invasion.

Their strength is not their own. They draw from another force, something that corrupts, that distorts, that eats and will not be satisfied.

The Wizard is near. I feel her presence as a rip and a knot in the world. She tells me things that I immediately forget. I am too small to hold the vastness of them, or the terror.

I am fading. I have no more that it can take.

With my last light I say to the City: War comes again from the Moon. This time they want Earth. Prepare.