So.

This would be how I faced the end.

The oasis was beautiful and lush. As the wind grew to a grating shriek tall grasses bent and islands of reeds clattered against one another like rattling spears. Waves began to roll across the calm waters, and filled up with the colors of the distant Elsestorm, the reflections of distant horizons drowning within my depths.

The creatures, the small and strange things I’d found or made, were hidden away in their burroughs. Gone to ground in the desert sands.

The ruins above shielded us from the worst of the sandstorm, which crashed incessantly against the walls in huge, thudding impacts and howling rivers that poured through the hollow windows.

The sky was twisting into knots of broken reality and violent winds. A central column formed, full of lightning, and slowly pushed through the desert towards us.

Even then I was proud of myself. Of the way my waters flowed through raised columns of rough red stone to fill rocky pools and muddy troughs at the edges of the oasis. Of how shelves of flat, smooth stone led down into the depths, until at last they gave way, and what remained was a hollow shaft of blue clear water leading down.

Of the Goddess who stood beneath the crystal bell, whose ringing refused to drown in the storm.

I felt the last seconds ticking away. I felt the presence of my enemies in the wastes beyond.

In seven days I’d built this. Drawn life from sand, bled water from the depths of the desert. The world was no longer dead. Crouched in the grass, waiting, my lemurs, strange and frightful creatures with yellow eyes like moons and hands that extended into cruel black hooks.

Perched in the ruins above, my birds, shadow and sun.

Ramses and Lazarus waited in the waters, my last line of defense. Shine-Catch stood with them, her whole body bristling with a nervous poise as her fingers drummed the spear's shaft, her eyes gazing out in the storm.

It was a column of storm-light and airborne sand, climbing upwards to unfold like a crude, dark tree, whole worlds held in its heights. Rifts in space through which I saw chaotic scenes. Where the different cracks in reality collided, a strange and unsettling kind of light was born, flickering unsteadily. Smaller tears were cannibalized as they fell through larger ones. The storm was eating itself as it crawled towards us.

Had I done enough? I could see where I'd given up chances for cold efficiency. Time I'd spent exploring my capabilities, or searching the world, or simply- living. Others might have created far more deadly menageries. Forged every living thing for miles into a blade to turn against the enemy. There were ways in which I lacked a certain ruthlessness. Certainly, few generals would spend their last day of preparation chasing a single lost soldier.

This was true. I refused to regret any of it.

The Divine Protection has weakened.

They can hurt us now.

Are you afraid?

I was taken aback. The messages came from a second mind within me, a split and purposefully crippled portion of my consciousness. It was meant to stand as a translator between me and the Pale Beyond, its own thoughts too limited to go mad from seeing what lay within, just barely intelligent enough to relay some small glimpses of the vast sea of knowledge to me in an interpreted form.

But over the last few days I'd started to think its lavish praise sounded sarcastic. A capacity it should never have had.

Today, I realized I felt fear its in voice.

I wondered what it might see. I had the happy ignorance of thinking of our enemies as flesh and blood.

It’s strange eyes would see them as, what? Shadows threatening to devour the world? No, that was too tame, too safely wrapped in metaphor. I expected our enemy would look far worse in the Pale Beyond.

“Yes.” I admitted. "It’s terrifying thinking that in an hour I could just be gone, and all this wiped off the earth. And I have to-” I paused.

“Well I’ve got no magic words to make that better. I’m sorry, It is scary. Scared is the right thing to be. Fear is just your soul saying how very badly it wants to live, and I guess if we’re lucky, if we fight like mad, we can hope that wanting to live will mean something. We'll make it mean something.”

I felt the bit of me that was the voice shiver. I sighed, and used a tiny spark of energy to send it to sleep.

When it woke up - if - this would be over.

Lightning fell in the distance. Thunder fell like a whipcrack across the desert. The clouded mass of the Elsestorm’s peak was a spiral now, reaching arms out across the night, collapsing as rift after rift fell into one another, the storm cannibalizing itself.

The sound was like water going down the drain, nails on a chalkboard, all at once and all too much. A sound that scraped without end at the bleeding-red of the sunset sky - until it simply stopped. There was a final volley of lightning before the last rift crumbled in on itself, and the column of rising sand collapsed outwards in a wave of dust.

The world was blotted out for a moment as the air turned thick with sand. My creatures shielded their eyes, Shiny coughing, and the storm poured past them leaving the gardens buried under heaps of red sand.

The sky opened up with a last sweep of the wind and the desert sand drifted down.

In the absolute calm of the storm’s end, the dark sky pinpricked with stars and the full eye of a silver-green moon, the thud of the enemy’s footsteps was deafening. They advanced from the shadows, walking slowly, saying nothing.

They were insectoids. Things like crickets given the shape of men, allowed to lift onto their backwards-bending hindlegs and hold themselves aloft, with twin pairs of arms, one set thick with muscle and the other thin and delicate, held close to their chest. Gossamer wings full of bright color descended from their backs like capes, their shoulders covered by mantles of silky white fur.

Their bodies were black but banded with gold, covered by a hard, flexible exoskeleton that fit together in seamless lines. The most perfect set of armor that could be forged, cradling them from birth to the grave. Their eyes were dark and segmented like jewels, set under long feathery antenna that lifted up like horns. Their mouths were two sets of pincers, one small and meant for eating, one an enormous trapjaw pair of blades extending forward, meant for killing.

They were beautiful, actually. Beautiful and sad.

The one in the lead lifted his spear, a thing made of what looked to be the same kitin as their shells. The rest followed suit. A gesture of solidarity.

“My name is Kanla’Quarat. I was a scholar! Remember me!”

“I raised seven children!”

“I was a jeweler!”

“Wheelwright!”

“A poet, a damn poet!”

It was the strangest damn warcry I’d ever heard. The lead soldier lowered his spear, his hand shaking. His wings extended outwards, fully five men wide, and began to buzz as he crouched down, his whole body wracked with tremors. Poison bile ran down the blades of his outer mouth and dripped to the sand.

As the rest followed, the high-pitched vibration of their wings made the air seethe like a nest of hornets.

“If we should die tonight, remember us with pity, for what we were before!”

And they stormed forward, feet blurring as their wings carried them on a half-glide, half-run that brought them across the ground at terrible speed, their stinging spears ready to meet my defenses.