As had become usual, dawn found Jeria up a tree, his face turned to watch as the sun appeared over the horizon, lighting the forest, reflecting off the sea of green made by the forest canopy. He watched the sunrise and imagined he could see the soul of Gruzz rise with the song of the birds, the lonely cry of a hunting eagle in the distance, the light pouring down from above, his accompaniment to the afterlife. He thought he caught the moment Gruzz' soul entered the realm of the Earth Mother, to hunt and wander for eternity amongst the plants and animals he had loved as a flock of birds headed up and disappeared into the sunrise. He sat awhile, in silence, his thoughts on what Gruzz had spoken of and taught him. Once he was back on the ground he moved to where Gyv tended a small, smokeless fire and Mekior sat wrapped in his thoughts.

Mekior looked up, giving him a wary gaze. "Spoken to your family from up there?" The Fiend Hunter's voice was low, anger and sorrow evident within. "Did you let them know where to find us next? Where they should send their minions to intercept us?" Mekior stood up, belligerent, provocative, pushing his face into the face of the half-fiend, his shorter height no hindrance to him in his attempt to intimidate Jeria.

Jeria looked at the Fiend Hunter and saw the haunted look in his eyes. "It was not my doing. No more than it was of your or Gyv's doing. I grieve for Gruzz. He taught me much in the short time we were together." He stepped back from the tension created by being in close proximity to the hostile Fiend Hunter.

"I grieve, Mekior. It was not my fault, nor the fault of any other that stands here. Gruzz himself warned against the unknown, the seemingly random actions that the devils perform, their plans and strategies beyond those of us mere mortals. Do you understand them, Mekior? Do the actions of the fiends make sense to you when they don’t make sense to us? Maybe you know why an altar exists in the middle of a forest far from everything, because I can make no sense of it."

Gyv quailed inside and kept her face hidden as she leaned over the pot of boiling water to which she would soon add oats. Am I blameless? Did I somehow lead the enemy to us? She gazed into the water, into the rising bubbles, wishing that, like the bubbles, her memories would float to the top of the surface of her mind. What happened to me out there? It takes a week to get to where I was, so where was I the other seven days? I have to know! Where was I? Am I blameless? She peered into the bubbles, wishing she could speak of her fears. But her mouth remained closed, her will to speak taken away. And as she looked, the face appeared in the water, laughing, winking at her as it disappeared in a rain of oats.

***

The companions journeyed onwards. Gyv moved to the lead, as the one most familiar with the outdoors and the only one of the three that knew how to survive away from the rock and stone of the great cavern. They travelled in silence, the desultory conversation that rose to the surface on occasion always bitter. Mekior blamed Jeria for Gruzz' demise and Gyv, too absorbed in her own fears, her own world, failed to try and defuse the growing tension.

They walked for three days. Clouds gathered, growing laden and heavy with grey, growing darker each day as winter approached and the snow gathered overhead. At each dawn and at each dusk, Gyv looked at the clouds and saw how they gathered, the red tinge they cast when the sun passed through them. On midday of the third day, she looked up, looked at the clouds, and drew in her breath.

"Mekior, look at those clouds, tell me what you think?" Her voice carried an urgency that grabbed both men's attention, sending their gazes into the sky. Mekior frowned, not understanding what he was feeling, what it meant. Jeria looked at the clouds and felt comforted, as if the clouds called to him, to his blood, summoned him home.

ekior's voice was soft, barely audible. "I feel it. They are wrong. But how can anything so huge be in the sky? Whatever those clouds are hiding takes up the whole sky. What is that large?"

Nothing. It is not that something is hiding within the clouds, it is the clouds themselves. I have heard of this, but never seen it near here. Travellers from the south, bringing tales from warmer lands, have told us of rains, rains that fall and burn. We must find shelter. If the rain is as lethal as the stories have described, we must not get caught in the downpour." Gyv started searching, desperate to find somewhere safe, somewhere they could secure themselves against the coming storm.

It was Jeria who found them shelter, following the hard to see markers that Gruzz had shown him, at the time nothing more than an interesting bit of outside lore. The signs of an underground tunnel of a man-ant colony, the entrance through a dried out, dead tree was subtle but easily found by those with the knowledge to do so. He pointed it out to the other two, and they worried they might come across the strange, hybrid creatures, but the tunnels were dry and completely devoid of any signs of habitation or use. Throughout the tunnels the smell of old, dried sand mixed with some strange, bitter smell,

They moved deeper within the tunnels, turning corners, relying on the navigational sense of the two cavern dwellers to lead them back later. They descended a short ramp and wandered through corridors that wound round in a wide spiral, eventually coming to an area of rooms. Here they found signs of devastation; doors ripped from their hinges, holes gouged into walls, areas of sand that cracked underfoot, fused and melted from some intense heat. They wandered through the rooms, finding nothing more than the signs of some great conflict, the war that had destroyed this nest.

They continued down the spirals; the scorched areas increasing in frequency, with more and more of the sand-fused-into-glass areas occurring. Eventually, they reached the bottom of the spiral. The chamber was huge; the centre taken up by an elevated dais, pillars reaching high into the gloom, their tops lost in the darkness above. They wandered through the room, finding the scratches and chips made from weapons crashing into the walls around.

"This was recent." In the silence of the hall, Mekior's voice seemed loud. "There is no dust as yet, but the rooms here have earthen walls." He walked round the room, trailing his finger along the walls, scuffling at the dirt by his feet. "The walls are well made, sealed; probably with the saliva they use for building. I would still expect some dust if this was long abandoned." He stopped suddenly, bending down.

The others watched as he felt around the floor, evidently trying to find something. With a look of disgust, he gave up, turning to Jeria. "Come here half-fiend, make those devilish claws of yours useful. There's a crack in the floor here, get your claws in there and heave."

Jeria came over, sticking his claws into the crack, feeling a hidden switch towards the back. A bit more effort, and some skin scraped off his finger, and there was a distinct *click*. By the dais, they saw a trapdoor fall away, leaving stairs going down. Gyv immediately raised her bow, making sure that the area would be covered if anything approached. Mekior, too, had turned to face the dais as the stairs were revealed. Only Jeria, raising himself from the floor, thought he saw flames dance within Gyv's eyes, shining briefly in the darkness. He shook his head, convinced that he must have imagined it. After all, Mekior had said she was free of taint, and would a Fiend Hunter make such a colossal mistake?

Time passed, and, convinced that nothing was going to suddenly jump out at them, the three moved forward, looking down the stairs into the depths below. From below came the stench of burnt, rotting flesh, something bittersweet mixed in with it. The eyes of Jeria and Gyv penetrated the darkness, though Jeria admitted to it and related to Mekior that they saw stairs going down into the gloom until they turned a corner. Mekior took the lead and he descended, headed into the darkness with his sword at the ready, trying not to breathe too deeply as the stench assailed his nose. So it was that he was first to see it, the first to face the horror that the hive had become.

The pile of bodies was immense. What had once been a room filled with warmth, a womb within which eggs grew to maturity and hatched their contents under the watchful eye of nursemaids and breeders, was a vast charnel pit. Every egg was broken open, the contents spilt and left rotting on the floor. In some, they were too new, too young and there was nothing more than the liquid of the egg. In others, they were almost fully formed babies, their antlike hindquarters still soft, their babyish, human faces sublimely peaceful in death. Over all this, the bodies of the adults had been thrown, a pile of those who sought to protect the heart of their people. The bodies had been burnt, dismembered, or simply cut down. They ranged from those of healthy warriors who had stood up to the invaders, to the old, the babies and small children. Piles of corpses of all descriptions, amongst them a little boy clutching a toy sword he had thought to use against the fiendish soldiers. On top, lay the mother of them all, her massive body carved up, dismembered, cruelly placed over a pile of dead babies. The queen of the hive was disfigured, defaced and mocked in her death, a message to all that came this way, a demonstration of the cruelty of the fiends above.

Mekior saw the carnage and charged back up the steps, heaving along the way, not wanting to defile the chamber with his weakness. Tears streamed down Jeria’s face as he gazed on the scene. He followed Mekior up the stairs, rage building within, and his hatred against those who could perpetuate such carnage fuelling his desire to strike back. Gyv stood, looking at the carnage. She wanted to feel the sickness of Mekior, the sadness and hatred of Jeria, but instead she heard the laughter, the face leering at her, challenging her, she felt a strange elation, as if the sight of such wanton destruction fed something within her.. She ran, past the two men who were ascending the stairs, into the hall above, sinking to her knees, waiting for something, but not knowing what. All that come to her was the laughter, the smiling face that leered at her through her horror.

They sat out the storm in silence, occasionally one of them going high enough to look out, to see if the storm had abated and passed them by. Jeria sat staring out for a long time and watched as the red tinted water fell from the sky. He watched and saw how those plants free of taint smoked, their leaves browning and shrivelling under the deluge. He watched, and his thoughts turned the bodies within, the fiends without, and the hopelessness of fighting when the world itself turned against life. He wondered how many plants would survive this deluge untainted and how the cities could survive if the whole surface became corrupted and a tool for the fiends.