Darkness was no stranger to the Polovian Climtwoods, south of the Trenton lands. Long before Angelfall, it had quartered in those ancient groves. Darkness slept in the unwashed corners of the minds of men, in those who saw it as a place of fear and mystery.

But now, something new had come to the Climtwood and stolen the forest's sounds. Silent were the nightingales, the whippoorwills, and the mourning doves. Gone were the hums and chirps of insects in the branch-dappled light. Gone were the quiet critters that stealthed along the old growth's bark. No deer wandered across the moss-pelted loam.

Yet, still, something moved.

My grandmother had told me the stories, the old tales from when mankind was young and the Polovian lands were still filled with magic and ill-boding mischief. Those were days of courage and violence, when savage warlords ruled over the brutish pagans behind the protection of palisades and earthworks, or from the somber, stony halls they'd built atop stalwart granite tors. Legends were thicker back then, and as wide as a sunset on the sea. They spoke of tutelary gods of wolves and pines; they spoke of the perfect dark of a new moon's night, and the terrors that watched from the Climtwood; they spoke of hungering things all tooth and claw that lurked in caverns' gloom, to make music from spoiled children's bones.

And then the Crusaders came, jealous and afraid, bent on stamping out the old magic. They were the first, but others would follow. Each time, it was the same: they marched with the Angel's Light at their backs. It blew through their banners, and shined at the edges of their blood-slicked blades. The First Crusade carried Lassedile Light south and south, all the way to the Pillars of Haim, then across the Strait of Edrùg to the deserts beyond the sea. The Empires and those that followed spoke of time as mere echoes of Trenton's capital. History rippled out from Elpeck like waves from a water-dropped stone. First came the Faith, then came the laws and their State, and later still, steel, and the steam engine and the electric motor; then the mini-mall, then the mag-lev Expressway.

Through it all, the village of Little Velszit had nestled in the Climtwood, sleeping for forever and a day. The place was older than soap; the stony churches in its ancient meadows and the devil-built bridges over its deeply hewn streams spoke to the village's age and memory. Overhead, an Expressway swept and soared—a highway in the sky. Its trestles cut through the forest, straddled on either side of an old, metal-shadowed road. A mini-mall sat atop an asphalt cushion next to where the Expressway let out onto Little Velszit's streets. The place suckled from the subterranean power lines like a kitten did from its mother, providing the juice for a car recharging station, a junk-food mart, and Polovian branches of several DAISHU restaurant chains. The emptiness that filled the asphalt parking lot made the fluorescent lamps seem even brighter. They shone on the streets like they shone in shops and restaurants, even though no one was home.

Yet, still—somewhere—something moved.

Little Velszit's silence was all-encompassing. It was the village's final holiday, and nearly all the townsfolk observed it with the utmost faithfulness. Their cold corpses observed it in their beds, and on the town clinic's floor, and in cars that had careened through a storefront's glass windows, and where the corpses melted into an infected tree's rotting trunk where the forest was encroaching upon the road. Fungal tumors, mottled and plump, had grown out from the village's sewers, upturning manholes as they reached for the Light. In the haunted wind, they waved at their brethren cresting from the raven-pecked bodies lying in the pitched stone streets, or leaning against open car doors, or even in the ravens themselves. The scavengers had fallen like feathered hailstones, bloating with growth as the fungus remade them. Bloated balls of twitching flesh littered the streets and the many pitched rooftops, twitching again as supped on fresh meat, or dissolving through the masonry. The horrors grew roots that spread along the ground, reaching out for companionship and assimilation.

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Even the land was beginning to change, to be remade in the fungus' hellish vision. A watchful eye might have noticed the dark growths that ran along the tree trunks, swelling like sealing foam between the cracks in the bark. But there were no eyes to watch. No human eyes, at any rate. No one to see the twisted roots wriggling out from the soil. No one to see the cadaveric things that prowled in the silence; the raptor-legged five-arms; the limbless, beheaded wolves, with their sweeping, membranous wings. Unnatural amalgamations crept across the changing landscape in a potpourri of dying life, feasting on dead mankind. The fungal tissue ripening in the dead, infected flesh was mortar for the horrid gestalts. It kept them whole and grew them large. Green spores puffed with the creatures' movements, and from belching smoke-stacks that crested from their bodies, their shapely fruits, and the blossom-things that crowned their rewired heads. It trailed from them robes and wisps and waves and snow-drifts. The spores glistened like embers as they caught the Sunlight as it died behind the trees.

The golden eyes came with the coming of the Night. As evening covered Little Velszit in its blanked, golden wyrm-eyes poked out from the shadows, to peer at the ruins, or up at the lambent moon. Here and there, windows and doors had been ripped where changing bodies long and large had wrestled their way to freedom. In the darkness, the serpentine forms lingered over corpses, taking their flesh and minds before slithering around cars that seemed… so small. Every so often, snouts turned skyward and bellowed, and their polyphonic lamentations resounded in the death-dusted air. It was an alien sound, born of confusion and fear. The different pitches layered together, a choir in their mouthless throats.

The wyrms thought they were alone.

But they were not.

Deep within the Climtwood, in a forlorn copse, a visitor had come: a silver pyramid, as large as a house, and ornate as a lily. For days, it had lingered, half-buried in the trough its desperate crash had carved into the ground. Felled trees collapsed onto the visitor's metallic hull. The trees wept, shedding leaves and dark ichor.

By now, there was little left of the visitor. The fungus had claimed it. From the visitor's cold, dry corpse, the pestilence sent up its fruiting bodies, radiating out the souls it had stolen in a silent cry.

The wyrms of Little Velszit heard those cries. It seeded souls within them. The souls spoke madness; they spoke of worlds unknown and beings fantastical: of a ship, a journey, and a quest.

The wyrms could do little more than sing of what they'd heard. They hoped others would hear it, and understand. Their songs carried far across the land, day after day, without any answer.

I'd heard it, myself, without knowing what the Incursion truly was.

Then, one evening, something finally responded—only it wasn't the response they'd wanted. No: it was an answer to a question they hadn't asked.

The Moon rose high, drawing the wyrms' eyes up like the Sun that had come before. In between the galaxies of spores that caught the moonlight as they drifted through the skies, they watched shimmering fibers, luminous snowdrifts, whirling lights, and a thousand million forms and colors beyond name percolate out from the void.

They hadn't seen it before. Their eyes hadn't been ready, then.

But now?

Slowly, the wyrms rose, their magic sheathing them in wingless wings. Up they rose, up to the face of heaven, bearing a mournful requiem.

And then, something pulled. An unknown hand. An unseen puppetmaster.

The invisible light-stuff whisked upward. Open split the wingless wings as the wyrms' magic unraveled. Upwards drifted the beckoned powers, past the spore-auroras, past the rivers and the churning streams, up and up, high above the blighted earth, and higher still, away from the plummeting wyrms, into the darkness above—into the mouth of the star-eater.

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