Ants at the End of the World

by Martin Dabon

We first encountered them as they arrived from the direction of the Greater Light’s ascent. They resembled sisters but we fast found they were not our kin and in fact were foreign. Their scent betrayed this to us during that initial exchange, and likewise our respective foreignness to them must've been revealed to their own senses at around the same time. 

Concealing as best we could the direction of Home and where Mother resided, we then informed them that they were getting too close to what soil that was ours. In kind they responded that it was in actuality we who were getting too close to the soil they called theirs. The situation may have escalated at that moment, but instead we and they mutually chose to sidestep out of the other’s way. The land still offered at that time an ample bounty, whether of beasts to hunt, of seed to harvest, or of dew to tap. We were not inclined to share any of it, but neither were we in any shape for conflict. The exact boundaries between us and them would have to be negotiated over the course of the coming cycles.

However, it soon became obvious that a long-term coexistence was impossible. We were intending to expand what we controlled, as Mother was producing for us a revitalized flow of younger sisters. That meant more stomachs needed to be filled; with even more on the way… yet after a change in the season our sisters in the field could only forage enough to sustain the present number of us. As cycles passed they increasingly returned with less. We fell on the notion that this sudden scarcity was on them. They were a threat, those invasive “un-sisters” who began appearing in our lands more frequently not long after we had met them, depleting what food could have been ours.

There were no alternatives. We made ready for war.

Our initial moves were subtle. Before the latest batch of younger sisters could finish growing into their weapons we needed to locate the enemy’s nest, the enemy’s mother. Scouts were sent out towards the general direction of the enemy’s origins as we understood them to be, based on our first contact with them. Sisters who came back reported to the rest of us a variety of findings. 

First in the reports was that the terrain under the control of the un-sisters was being transformed. The thin flat stems on their soil, which in our lands we maneuver beneath or climb atop without giving much thought, were being cleared. Our foe would cut them down then drag the felled stems away, presumably towards their nest. None of our sisters who returned took the risk of trailing such processions to their end to see what purpose this widespread clearing served. 

Meanwhile, they were also seen to be presiding over hundreds upon hundreds of these strange small creatures which were spread over the thicker stems. These said creatures looked to be feeding off of the residue inside, their combined bodies covering them almost completely and forming a whole layer of them. According to the sisters who got to examine this more closely the un-sisters would coax out of these animals’ rear ends a liquid sweeter in smell than any naturally occurring dew.

What was most concerning though was what was witnessed by one sister who was by herself on a particular cycle. The enemy had slain a huge beast as it was slumbering in its den. It was of the type which are short a pair of limbs, have smooth wet flesh, and wield a mighty all-consuming maw. Yet the un-sisters overcame that monster, swarming over it after catching it unawares, and butchered it as if it was common prey for them. The meat of that beast by itself would have filled our food stores for countless cycles, would have fueled entire generations, had we been the ones to chance upon it as it slept… instead, they claimed it. It would fill their stomachs, feed their youngers, and drive their mother’s births. All the while our soil was growing only more barren.

Their expansion would outpace our own, that much had become evident, if we weren’t already lagging behind them. Should they be allowed to continue we would eventually be conquered. At that point we’d already slain a number of the enemy’s own scouts who had approached the entrance to our Home too closely, threatening its discovery. Meanwhile, we were yet to locate their nest. All the same it was imperative that we struck them soon; with a blow that was decisively lethal.

But then our preparations for the coming war were interrupted by a sudden occurrence. As the Lesser Light sank away from the Greater in the expanse above, while the Cold Darkness fell back in the wake of a fresh cycle, a column of us ran into an “alien object” along our path. It hadn’t been there before. 

Sat atop a clearing where dirt turned to rough cracked stone was a rock shaped like a singular eye. We called it a rock as we spied the thing from a distance, but we still immediately understood that it couldn’t have been. Though its body was comparable to an eye’s it was flat on two faces, its surface so smooth it was free of any flaw, while possessing a roundness with such an immaculate precision in its curves we would have thought it impossible if it wasn’t in front of us. 

Its patterning bade us to be cautious on our approach. It was encrusted by mostly a stark blankness, then spinning into itself were all these shrinking stripes with a coloration that resembled the life fluids of a greater beast’s, like that which the enemy had bested earlier. Some sisters mistook the whole thing to be moving in response to us in a circular pattern, though in actuality it laid still.

Once we were able to touch it we were immediately hypnotized. Its smell and taste maddened us, both properties burning themselves forever into our minds and memories in a single instant when it had been wholly absent the previous moment. We bit into it as we thought to test how fit it was to eat but its shell proved harder than the carapace of any creature we had ever brought low. Still, we kept trying to penetrate it, eager to claim this alien object as a food source.

A minority of sisters were able to rip away from the intoxicating experience of being in proximity with this thing for long enough to report back Home. Whatever this was the enemy had to be denied from seizing it.

In time the Greater Light reached its zenith as that cycle wore on. It bore down with full intensity on the object, the surrounding stone, and we sisters who stayed. Others of our kin arrived at the scene wanting to experience the rumor that had rapidly torn through our entire family. At around this point, the object accomplished its most bizarre feat: it softened. In some places it would become nearly viscous, sticky even, but once its exterior weakened enough that we could tear off chunks from it we did so and finally sampled it for ourselves. The effect was immediate.

Most dashed off into random directions, or some in circles, driven into a wild energetic insanity after ingesting merely a piece. This frenzy tended to subside after a short period, a few collapsing into tired heaps. What was instilled into every sister who partook of this thing’s meat though was an overpowering hunger for more of it. We were only beginning to grasp its full value to us.

And then without warning a sister beheaded a fellow sister. And then another wrestled a different sister onto the ground whilst one more came up from behind to dismember the one stuck in the grapple. And following that, the characteristic form of a warrior rushed forth to tear three other sisters in half. More such killings rapidly ensued.

The first assumption was that somehow the object had implanted into the minds of some of us a raging madness, but the truth was far worse. The enemy was on us. We true sisters formed ranks amidst ourselves as we recognized the danger, sobering up in the heat of a sparking battle.

Amidst the unraveling chaos, it was revealed how this had come to pass. The object had indeed implanted a madness in us, but a confused one, where we failed to realize un-sisters had fallen among our company. Our foes too though were impaired by the object’s influence, so preoccupied by how it manipulates the senses that they did not notice we were not their kin. It was unclear who first discerned the shared blunder, but neither we nor they had any intentions of relinquishing this strange treasure.

The fight had come to us, despite our unpreparedness.

We had an open battlefield, and since we discovered the object first our numbers were greater than the foe’s own. That advantage proved not to be much of one anyhow, for the un-sisters were larger than us, likely from being better fed. It took three of us in tandem to lock one down for a killing strike. That being the case, we stuck to a tight defensive formation where each one of us was able to reach at least two nearby sisters. We managed to keep the object safe behind our lines.

A few sisters ran back for Home to call for aid and to announce the arrival of war. While the location of the enemy’s nest was still an unknown, it had to be far from the object’s location as we were still well within our soil. That fact seemed to not matter as more fresh un-sisters charged us, replenishing their numbers both quicker than we could kill them and quicker than our own reinforcements were able to trickle into the gaps.

They forced us to steadily surrender them ground, leaving behind our dead while our wounded were captured… but we did not give up the object. Our goal shifted from holding this clearing to retreating with our prize in tow.  It was much heavier than its size would suggest, but a few dozen sisters working together were able to drag it backwards in the direction of Home while the rest of us focused on the fighting.

As this was happening, word got around that other engagements were springing up across our lands, the battle seeming to have escalated into a full-scale invasion with news of un-sister hordes scrambling onto our soil. The cycle went on, and around when the Greater Light was in the latter half of its journey down the expanse did it become clear how far outmatched we were on the grand scale. Reports of multiple defeats traveled across our family. Before long, roving bands of the foe were moving without challenge, attacking foragers, or waylaying our warriors en route to the frontlines.

Still, the detachment defending the alien object refused to give up. Our sisters carrying it back were close to being encircled and had suffered countless casualties. Yet that boon was kept out of the enemy’s grasp, at least for a time.

All that valor proved vain in the end. As the Cold Darkness came, word broke that we had been found out. The location of Home. Enemy scouts had uncovered it and already there were un-sisters making to breach it. We had to abandon that hypnotic, eye-shaped, mind-altering, alien thing to the foe. What strength was left for us to gather refocused to making a stand in our own tunnels. We all retreated back in a rush.

During the carnage we thought of our younger sisters, of Mother, of our soil. In our Home’s tight corridors the fighting was one-on-one, which was to the advantage of the brawnier un-sisters. Still, we dared to lock weapons with them. The corpses of our kin and of theirs blocked up passages but the foe simply stepped over any dead. Their intent was to annihilate us with this single stroke.

When the battle reached the lower chambers, we few who remained were exhausted but had no option but to carry on. The enemy stole away a great number of our younger sisters, or simply devoured them where they slept. We considered evacuating Mother through a back tunnel, to take a chance that our family might continue someplace else, but where could we possibly take her that they would not follow?

It was when we found ourselves in that desperate corner that there was a sound of thunder. The soil all around us shuddered from a mighty pulse. Most of the tunnels above us then collapsed in a violent cave-in, and we were buried in the ruins of our Home.

Our family survived, despite what had transpired. Mother remained in her chamber, her birthing paused, while plenty of sisters both grown and younger were still well. The food stores which had been largely spared from the attack were sufficient to last maybe a season for those of us left once we did the accounting. A few of the enemy were still here too in the remaining tunnels, but it was only a chore to single them out and finish them off.

We tended to what we could while the healthiest of us got to work digging back upwards. Meanwhile, the soil’s shuddering did not cease the whole time we labored. An ever present quaking threatened further collapse, but that did not come to pass.

When we arrived at the top we were greeted by an unreal landscape.

Previously we’d expected to encounter more un-sisters on the surface, as their armies had us besieged, but they were gone. Missing. Like they’d evaporated into nothing. In fact, the environment around our Home was in utter desolation. Flattened of all life. Once, our soil had been teeming with scores of stems, but they were vanished like the enemy, as if some angry god had reached down and plucked them all at once by their roots. Neither were there any signs of surviving beasts, who normally could be heard and sometimes seen from the entrance of Home. There was nothing but the Cold Darkness.

And despite that present darkness we watched as a multitude of Greater Lights sprang into existence all at once in the expanse above on every side of us, lingering before they faded. They did not portend a new cycle’s coming, but what they left behind were plumes not unlike the ones we often would see floating above when it was bright outside… but these plumes seemed wrong. Blackened and predatory, with terrible roars bellowing out from them that shook the world. They hung in domed shapes which had a silhouette that was reminiscent of the pale growths we often found in the shadowiest and dankest of corners.

The majority of us that saw the surface in this state were keen to go back under. The rest that stayed for any length died. Not of any evident wounds. Neither did they starve. We just next found them as unmoving bodies with no indication of what ended them. An invisible killer was stalking the surface, and it gorged itself on sisters that ventured out of the Home’s tunnels. Few returned at all from any excursion to the outside while whomever did wound up perishing anyway, even long after it felt like safety from the unseen killer was assured.

The False Greater Lights all petered out soon enough, and the soil stopped shaking, but the Cold Darkness never receded, only weakened, even when a new cycle was meant to be due. Worse yet, it soon began to reach into our tunnels by its own will, freezing sisters anywhere near the reopened entrance in a deathly grasp. 

When Mother signaled to us that she was going to resume birthing, we foraged by digging downwards as it was the sole direction that made sense given the crisis. No matter the distance we dug though that effort bore us dust. Our failure in this mattered little, for Mother’s newest batch of younger sisters came out misshapen and dying if not already in the process of rotting.

This was our existence since the end of our battle with the enemy.

Inevitably our food stores neared emptiness. Despite all the deaths reducing the number of stomachs we had to fill, we were still depleting ourselves whilst being unable to gather even a solitary morsel. Desperate, we remembered back to that alien object we had discovered seemingly lifetimes ago. The enemy, the foe, the un-sisters had made off with it before this catastrophe.

Had they managed to bring it all the way back to their nest? Was it out there somewhere on the surface? Maybe it was the lingering madness that it had infected us with inspiring folly in our minds, but we got to thinking that some property we hadn't been able to ascertain of that most otherworldly artifact might be able to see us through to the next true Greater Light’s rise, to when a new cycle might return life to our tainted soil. It was at the very least edible. And it was hardy, perhaps enough so that it was capable of enduring whatever terrible thing had engulfed our land. 

The enemy was destroyed, we were all but sure, so the only thing guarding the object was that rampaging unseeable killer on the outside. Maybe it could be avoided. Our options were to take a risk up above or decay away below.

With the tens of remaining sisters, we dared to enter the wasteland.