Town was being torn apart. Smithiner could feel it and hear it, They moved away from the places where waves blasted from. The icy mist roiled. Flashes of light blind the eye as they sear out in the clouds. And then in a rush the ice blew away. Shredding around smithiner and the huddling half frozen forms of field workers in white ribbons.

The avenue of Town were blasted clear in the wake of a rocket detonation. Or at least Smithiner thought that was the case at first. The defense weapons were bombs and rockets, He thought for sure that was what this must have been. But there looming in the black of the void far out from town’s towers was a clump of twisting and sweeping shapes.

As he looked he realized it was a pack, a few dozen at most and amongst and around them he could see wreckage and ruin from tall towers and buildings. Big heaping brickworks and armoured plating from the defensive towers.

They were concentrated densely together, looping around the city in searingly fast arcs. He did not know or understand why. But then there was a flickering light through the clouds of mist and sputtering heat glow splashing over one of the dark delta shapes.

A missile screaming with a plume of venting smoke sweeping in from elsewhere. And then realizing what was coming Smithiner turned away from the missle just in time. His skin prickled and he felt the short light and long light scream howling pain down upon him under the flash of detonation. He felt like some of his insides had been deafened by the volume of it.

By the time he looked back but the sweeping back had changed posture, they swooped out in ones and twos and then unleashed lancing attacks of their own. Bands of painful bright light bursting in electric arcs where it ruptured the vapors along their path. And then buildings crumbling and bursting with fresh horror.

Smithiner was only saved from being blinded by munitions or some other terrible new weaponry by the intervening buildings blocking the terrible glare.

These things, had just launched weapons equal or greater to the mustering of the entirety of town. The work of hundreds of millions of field workers and hundreds of thousands of clerks such as himself. His children and peers. And as he looked out into the ruined wreckage of buildings he did not even know how many gnome families would be tossed out from their safe crevices and walls in this wreckage.

He dragged, pulled, jerked, yanked. He tumbled away from the horrors to try and seek the shelters. With the freezing mists rising he saw little clumps of people swinging into motion around him all over the avenues.

But all the more distressing were all the frozen clumps of starved field workers and stumbling blinded or worse clerks. There were the deflated bags of traders that had ruptured from some impact, uneven heating or something else, their viscera and internal ecocosms vented out into emptiness leaving their corpses adrift.

He shoved and cajoled his friends forward, but he could barely feel his own voice, the damage from unshielded detonations in so many lengths of light felt like it had burned and scorched some of his insides. He he might be mute, or deaf or both!

He saw similar pain and confusion in some of the still mobile field workers. He saw another stumble and waver their symbiote dieing in seizuring failure without a chance to restore itself in their panic.

Another cut to his side, the sting of jamming the viscera of a friend into his own so that they could survive, not thrive, not without suffering but at least last long enough to reach the shelter.

He felt like he was budding with new children for all the cysts of his friends jammed into his circulatory system. He felt short of breath.

Weak and shallow.

But there would be a shelter though.

He just had to reach one, down deep, dug into the old bones of past reef growth. Buried away from the star sun and the dangers of the void and invaders.

Something wrong, he could not hear words, he felt out of sorts. Mist was clearing up, diffuse. He turned his eye all around, buildings close and far were shuddering and quaking around him, impacted by dark deltas rocketing through them or perhaps searing bright spears of weaponry.

The flanks of the structure next to them lurched and heaved from an impact further up its spine before shreds of it snapped all around in violent metal and stone viscera.

The flailing panicked wriggling forms of a family of gnomes burst into the violence of the void as their world ruptured and blew past, many splattering in freezing droplets when they impacted the opposite building.

There! Shelter, the sign for emergency, field workers and survivors dazed and panicked following by rote the old dictates, go deep, hide in the shelters, seal safe and whole. Wait for rescue.

He stumbled and ended up drifting too high, lost grip of something flailed and was shoved by a passing panicked stranger back into the crowd. They latched onto one another, becoming a woven mat of pained shocked individuals glasping to each other as they funneled into safety. Some buzzed in their fingers with touch song, sign words, hum speech.

“-seen my sister? Anyone seen my sister she was right with me!--”

“-The silos, they cut open the silos, all the harvest, harvest-”

“-caravan! They snatched up my caravan! Eat all the tuggers! My beasts! My mothe-”

“-Saw one, saw last one, can’t see now, it burned but they didin’t-”

“-sprayed acid, it swam like mist but eat them, eat her, she was eaten by the goo like-”

Smithiner wanted to ignore the tide of torment and fear and horror but he had to do his part, pass on the messages to those that he joined hands with in the chain. Crude with his stubby inarticulate and weak fingers, but he could manage a pidgin of the dialects and languages passing in currents through their fingers. And he could not be a dead end in the chain, it was a duty in these times to pass on the messages as they came. To spread word and reunite lost loved ones and bring news of elsewhere.

He found himself starting to add slowly his own witnessed horros, the things he had seen, the findings.

This was not the shelter he had been planning to reach, the town was in upheaval, but he had some sway and recognition here. He could pull some attention. And everyone was fellow friend and family now anyway.

Home was beset and besieged! They would share whatever they could. He felt woozy, out of sorts, he lost the thread of the communication. He couldn't focus. He fumbly bumbled? Bumble mumbled?

He was so tired. Just worn down, he was desperate for a fresh breath, his insides burned for it, caustic painful exhaustion he had not known since his youth.

Since he tried to work the fields.

He needed, Need to? Something... Needed to get his friends to symbiotes! he could taste bitter starvation in his blood. He tried to yell for attention but realized his voice was too burned by the fires of the bombs. He was too sparse and reedy. In this tumult he would be lost, He squeezed a pattering inarticulate fumble of panic and tried to get attention. He was not sure if the woven chain of other hands carried his message.

Everything was going grey and dark around the edges. He was so tired, he needed to get his friends help. He needed.

Something.

He burned and yet felt at peace.

It was so quiet and soft and warm being so close to everyone.

They were in the shelter?

Yes he thought he felt a fumbly message and his eyes might be seeing the right thing. They were in the shelter, he had gotten his friends to safety.

That was good he had made it now he just.

Had to do something?

Something-