They came for us at dawn.
Following the first light, while the world was still cold.
How could we have known? We’d never seen them before. They were just shapes and loud noises; vast things that moved beyond the walls, shaking the earth and crumbling our homes.
Still, we kept on; retreating back where they couldn't see, and building our homes deep down, further than they could reach.
We might have been safe if we'd stayed there.
That morning began like any other. Free from their eyes, before the sun had cleared the horizon, we took the old trails out. We moved silently, old ways and old habits of familiar rituals played out over countless times before. We could forget, but the trail always remembered, forged by those of us who'd walked them before, they lead us to what we needed. They lead us back home.
But there was nothing for us out there that day. The hollows were barren, the alcoves picked clean. Anything we found were just remnants from yesterday, not fit to sustain tomorrow. And so, we pressed forward, the front-most scouts forging new paths and making new trails. Our hunger made us desperate, the insistent needs of the colony drove us further.
Beyond the places we knew, they had changed the very earth beneath our feet. Their homes were endless plains of pale stone, bounded by sheer cliffs and rigid lines. We passed beneath the shadows of their great structures, in silence and and single file, carrying our hunger into the vastness. And there we found grace, nourishment scattered before us in pale fragments against the earth. It was more abundance than we’d seen in weeks. Our desperation drove us out into the open to gather around and gorge ourselves before gathering as much as we could carry.
We didn’t see them until it was too late. A vast shadow shifted, a great presence fell, and the ground trembled as they descended upon us.
We scattered.
We lost almost all of us, I could hear them fall around me; overtaken by the shadows, crushed and obliterated, lifted into the air and kicking helplessly before those vast shapes closed again. I couldn’t stop, and those of us who managed to escape into whatever cracks and crevices we could find could only hide and wait in terror, fleeing for the colony when the sun had dipped back below the horizon. In our panic, reeling from abandoning our find and our dead, we didn’t sense them there in the darkness, hovering over our trails. We thought we had escaped.
We didn’t mean to show them the way home.
The sun was rising again when we finally made it back home, slipping into the familiar dark tunnels and warm chambers beneath. It was alive, thrumming and comforting, filled with the constant murmurs of the colony. We returned with the news, with the nightmares, and they colony received us like they always had before.
They rejoiced.
We’d survived the barren world. We’d found our way home. We believed ourselves fortunate. And while they fussed and cleaned and scraped the meagre findings we’d manage to hold onto to, the first vibrations shook our home.
We’d built our homes far beneath them, believing that nothing from the sky could touch us there. But when death came, it rolled like liquid mist, filling the chambers and descending upon us like a wave of silent terror. We tried to flee, but the darkness offered us no refuge. The mist changed the air, changed the scents, filling our bodies and stinging our skin.
Those who ran ahead did not return, and those who turned back were met with walls of bodies. There was nowhere we could go, and nothing we could do, and the tunnels that were once filled with that gentle murmurs and hums now echoed with screams.
They destroyed our home, crushing it under they feet. All our tunnels and chambers, filled with generations of scent and memories, erased like they had never existed.
I’d been lost, and trapped. Drowned under my own people who perished above me in waves while I was pressed into the damp earth. When I finally emerged, crawling over the bodies of those who had brought me nourishment and carried me home, there was nothing but but emptiness and quiet.
I raised my head and my hands, calling out, searching for the familiar scents of my people. There was nothing, and no one, and even as I pressed my antennae into the earth, I knew - there was no trail left to follow.