They came with politeness. Chitinous cicadas of smooth, elegant build, etched in runes whose meanings have long since faded. Their limbs folded with care. Their eyes glinted with ancient wit. They emerged from cocoons not their own—borrowed, bartered, or stolen—and with dry, unhurried certainty, they gave their warning: Encirclement had begun.

So it was that war came to Riat. The hives were shattered, then burned, then frozen—along with all that once drew breath. The cries of queens and drones alike were silenced beneath layers of ash and crystal frost, their bodies frozen mid-thrashing, suspended in glassy defeat. Even the air stiffened, crackling with a brittle finality. Two legions contended—not good and evil, but evil and that which came after evil, a thing twisted too far to wear any name.

They warred like mad queen bees in a dying garden. No victor claimed the field. One fell—bound to an eternity of minute, unspeakable agonies, always dying, never dead. The other retreated, not in defeat but derangement, leaving behind her offspring to glut themselves on the carrion of her former kingdom, sinking into a madness of lust and autophagy beneath her crown of bone and spidered silk.

When the mountain fell, it did not simply collapse—it chose to fall. As if the earth itself had grown weary of its burden and pressed downward with the hand of a buried god. The ancient insect-kinds, the armored crickets and low-crawling things without names, rose to feast on what remained: corpse or child, beast or prophet, all were dragged down screaming into the cracks. From the soaked and broken loam, something alien grew. A vine without root. A blossom that bled light. Carnivorous, sentient, murmuring only to those with wings. This thing—unknown before, accursed ever after—now anchors the Gorge of Riat like a weeping wound, from which spill the kingdom’s woes in thick rivers of black ichor. They say the ichor has a taste: bitter ash, old marrow, and dreams that do not belong to the dreamer. This must be sealed. It cannot be sealed. We are too few. And the chasm yawns too wide.

The north gate of Riat is no longer a place, but a memory dislodged from time. It hangs in the canopy of colossal trees that rose in mere days—too tall, too wet, too veined. Their bark pulses. Their branches drip with nectar the color of bruised skin. Above, hanging in the gloom, glassy pods twitch with unseen life. And through these unnatural groves move the veined ones—man-sized, insectoid, slow and unblinking. They do not eat. They remember. Soon they will fly. Their wings are stitched from flesh—not dead flesh, but flesh that was made to sing before it was flayed. Once-virgin. Once-human.

Now something else. Something profane. Something made for the annihilation of memory itself.

They seem to be resting. But the wings are dry. And the sky hums low.

May they all head north.

We cannot do this again.

We cannot survive it again.

We did not survive it the first time.