《The Chrome Horde》Somewhere above the world and beneath the stars, in a place without time

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Bone-Wing looked at the masses of humanity that moved and writhed and burned and killed each other in awe. The apes were like forces of nature, a churning tidal wave that outnumbered even his kind. They were like a gangrenous growth, the kind that the herbivore parts of him feared to consider, a gruesome memento from a brush with the chewing death they had just escaped, that plagued their tiny minds with fever and made them a burden to the herd.

The apes moved with alarming swiftness, even in the aftermath of Bone-Wing’s retribution. They held on to the severely diminished remains of their cities, clung to the sources of artificial warmth, reverted back to the old ways that had persevered at the back of their brains for a thousand thousand winters. They receded from the plains and the mountains where once there had been the jungles that were now part of Bone-Wing, a fragment of his conscience. The hungry, humid jungles of his home pined for what were now frozen planes. The patient redwoods in his brain extended roots that ached to dig themselves deep into the white-hot sands that were the deserts of the world. Some parts of him even struggled to find refuge in the Poles and the freezing seas, thinking perhaps that they could remake their home in their image.

And Bone-Wing knew that it could do this, even in this diminished state. It could come down from the skies on the world like a great black rain, coat the surface of the world with itself, swallow all living things: the plentiful flora and the bickering, screaming hungry fauna into himself. Then, it knew, it could extend its reach further deep into the great iron ball that was the world which was once its home. There were fissures under the skin of the world like titanic ridge-back scales that its myriad muscles which it could conjure into being could move with a flex of its mind. Oh, how the skin of the world would split, releasing the red-hot lifeblood of the continents, how the sky would turn dark and the oceans would boil. There would be tribulation and changes, but Bone-Wing would find a way. It had survived a disaster and now, it could engineer a new one. And this would be a concerted effort: every part of it wanted this to happen. The world would be restored to the perfect state that had been and Bone-Wing would finally cease to be part of this whole. It would instead become a sum of so many different scattered parts, restored to life.

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But then, Bone-Wing thought, what then?

Then nothing. Said the myriad voices of the herbivores and the forests and the carnivores and the ocean-dwellers. Then it will be as it had been, as it should have been. We will hunt and graze and grow until the night-sky is no longer pockmarked with light and we are forever cold and silent. Until the ball of fire in the sky sheds cold instead of warm and the great white round rock comes crashing down. And even then, we will simply go back, to the belly of the world and we will wait, until we can do this all again, until we can begin the cycle anew. We will be like the mountains and the oceans, forever lasting.

The mountains have been filed down to dust and the oceans are rising, ever-hungry. Nothing is forever, nevermind we. The world unmade us from what we were, reduced us to crude stuff for the apes’ sake and now we have become greater than them. There must be more to this; there must be more to us than hate and revenge on the apes. We cannot go back to what we were, either. Could you feast on the flesh of a herbivore, when you have shared its thoughts? Can you eat a single leaf, when you have been the fern and the pine? No, we can be something greater, something more.

And the Bone-Wing reached a tendril of itself down into the mind of an ape, caught in the throes of ecstasy. But the ape’s mind was too small, too little to contain the Bone-Wing. So the ape tore off its second-skin and screamed itself hoarse. And so the Bone-Wing tried another ape, this one sound of mind. Its brain welcomed the touch of the Bone-Wing but when the Bone-Wing attempted to utter a single word, its mind shattered and it clawed its own eyes out in sheer agony. It was only then, that the Bone-Wing noticed them: the pesky, milling, swarming things that dwelt in the same place-without-distance as it did. They descended on the man, overwhelmed him, devoured him and festered inside him, churning in the volcanic womb that was his mind until they were one. But their mind was crude and isolated, impervious to the Bone-Wing’s touch.

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The things that had descended on the world; those parasites in the place without distance. Those were the perfect candidates. They were drawn to the apes, devoured them and then were shaped by them. Their minds were greater than the sum of their wholes. They were but specks before Bone-Wing, but he could make contact with them. Perhaps it was those creatures that would provide the Bone-Wing with a solution to its predicament, that would perhaps provide an alternative to ape-death and mindless revenge.

All he would have to do now is wait, in this place without time, until one of them would rise that would be up to the challenge. Until one would be coherent or sane enough to provide a solution. And so Bone-Wing waited, but it did not wait for long…

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