When we came into enemy territory, there wasn’t much time before they mobilized.

We knew the Army of Man could be deceptively quick, for something so corpulent.

We knew it could be surprisingly fierce for something so cowardly.

We knew it could be wise, only when it came to bloodshed.

It’s best not to let it get those chances.

Our job was simple.

We were there to fight.

While tunnels were dug, temporary bases built, and forces gathered for the great offensive, my brother and I held the enemy off.

Again.

And again.

It never seemed to end.

***

This is the war that humans wage. Bodies blown apart. Intestines spilling out. The sky collapsing in. The ground exploding up. Flashfire and bright sparks. Sharp-edged fragments. Thunderous cracks. Violent bursts. Rumbling in the earth. Ringing. Static. Noise fit to deaden the heavens. Shit smell growing stronger every second. Gunsmoke and gasoline. Mustard gasses. Cold and Numb. Shivering. Shaking. Disconnecting. Burning and bursting open.

The look of it, the sound of it, the smell of it, the feel: you get used to it, I suppose. The humans created this warfare, sowed it everywhere, then made it the law of the lands. Their morbid crop has taken over.

Personally, not impressed.

I’ve seen it all before.

“Aaaah! Aaaaaaah!” A little human comes screaming at me, from the ruins of a smoking building, its body a pyre, arms waving wreathed in fire.

“Go ahead.” I say. I step to the side so it can blaze its way past and collapse on the road. Then I step through the shade of the doorway it came from.

The building is mostly dark, spotlit from holes in the walls and gaps in the damaged roof. Daylight shines on broken beams and shattered wood, off twisted metal and glass shards. The dust in the air glows with motes of light.

Everywhere else is covered in shadows. The shadows don’t move. This place is already dead. If someone’s here, they’re hidden well.

The floorboards gasp and groan, dying under my weight. The scales on my tail scrape across the ground. There’s no chance I’m keeping quiet, so I just stomp through, snapping broken pieces of wood underfoot, knocking tables piled with dust and ash and metal tubes over.

I sweep the room with the barrel of my gun, eyes on every pile of rubble I pass.

I taste the air and listen.

There’s a clatter, and a breath in the dark.

I dodge just in time, as the human comes out with its weapon primed, screaming with its hoarse voice, a cornered beast that found its roar.

The gloom is shattered by a stream of not-fire. It burns beyond heat, flaring with strange light, acrid and hungry. Everything it touches comes apart. Detonations rock the room, while I hit the ground, my balance gone. My vision ruined, I roll off a bed of broken beams, in a rain of shrapnel that glows faintly.

The enemy stands in the middle of carnage, small, as the humans like to make themselves. It’s wrapped in the heavy armor they wear, decked in rubber and fake thread, with one of their breathing masks, the glass face cracked, broken.

On its back is a ruptured metal tank that leaks gouts of not-flame, and in its hands is a weapon that glows red-hot. The blast of unnatural fire turns the place where I stood into an inferno.

The human ignites the room blindly, sweeping jets of not-fire across the rubble and the walls. Smoke curls around me like claws, choking the air from my chest, dragging a cough into the scorched air.

The human hears it, and turns my way. But even as it does, the spines from my gun tear through its armor. The holes they leave leak light and smoke instead of blood. The edges of them spread glowing cracks. The human grows brighter. It stumbles away, screaming.

A glow pours out its eyes and mouth, burning bright. Blinding.

“Tch!” I spit at its feet.

I drop my gun to leap for the roof and scramble at the broken edges of the hole before the human blows up. I manage to sink my claws into the slate and haul myself out just in time.

The explosion blasts a burning cloud after me, and the roof buckles, posts snapping like breaking bones. I run and leap off the edge, then hit the ground hard and stumble a few steps. I look over my shoulder to see the walls crumbling.

Theuban slithers around a street corner, hood already flared, fangs shining in the sunlight. He casts a long shadow up the street.

“It’s fine,” I watch as the building finishes falling.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Dust billows across the street and fills the air. I try to wave it away.

“Is that all of them?” Theuban scans the street, then the rooftops, then whatever else he can see with his head waving above the buildings.

“It better be. I’m not going back in there.”

The burning building is raising that strange, god-touched smoke that streams into my eyes and lungs like it’s going for the kill. Damn humans and their gods.

“Lost my gun… Hsss!” I hiss, so the human gods and ghosts and whatever else is listening can know I’m not amused.

Spiker’s are my favorite… actually, everyone’s favorite. Getting my hands on another won’t be easy.

“Let’s get out of here.”

We wander the ruin of the town, through the wreckage of wooden walls and pastel colored plaster.

Half of the ranches around the town have collapsed.

As we go farther in, tougher buildings still stand: 2 and 3 story, brick-faced, glass-eyed homes with smoking mouths. Brick walls are fallen in the streets. The humans’ cars crowd the streets and crowd the intersections: crushed, overturned, burned out.

The air tastes like melted rubber and charred meat. Smoke hangs between the smoldering shells of buildings, like curtains. Embers burn beneath our tails as they sweep the streets. Glass crunches below my feet and Theuban’s underbelly.

The sun is climbing higher now. It’s too bright. Don’t know how these diurnals can stand it, that blinding glare just hanging there all the time. I get tired just looking at it.

Another day without rest and I won’t even be able to stand anymore. Already the world seems like it’s moving in slow motion. Or maybe I am. Either way, I’m bound to come crashing down. Just a matter of time.

“Hm?” I stop to listen to a monotonous, familiar sound. One of those machines that fly on spinning blades is somewhere in the distance.

“The enemy?” I hope not. Surrounded by buildings, I can’t make anything out, so I ask Theuban: “Do you see something?”

Theuban stretches his head up, and scouts the distance. I can see a few other Afeaa towering overhead, keeping constant watch. Some slither over buildings on patrol. Others are just coiled on the structures that can hold their weight.

“We would be signaled.” Theuban says.

“Mm.” I grunt. It seems he places too much faith in our capabilities. We can be surprised too. We make tactical errors. We face ambushes. We aren’t perfect. Not that it matters. If more come, well…

Nothing to do about. I guess it’s only more work. Could be worse. We could be them, having to fight me.

“Hehe…”

“What’s so funny?”

“Mm…”

We weren’t getting sleep anytime soon anyways. We’ll be up until midday at least. These humans and their allies, usually so quick to run into the light, they’ve been hiding in shadows recently.

They break ranks, desert, mutiny. Whenever their gods don’t plop victory down in their laps, they’re quick to give up.

We’re forced to hunt the stragglers and strays. I’m just trying not to get caught by the bullets of those lost souls.

Though… I don’t think there are many of them left here. It’s the ones outside the city I’m worried about. They like to strike during the day, when we’re tired.

“Hold on.”

We pass a pair of the armored vessels the humans use. I circle them. The metal plates are dented, and the glass broken, the wheels and the weapon mounted on top torn apart.

The enemy dead are still there, fallen in a ring around the wreckage, like the plucked petals of a flower.

I start to pick up weapons and toss them aside, trying for a decent one.

Theuban lays his head on the roof of a vehicle while I search. The metal groans and he sighs, letting his eyes fall closed.

“Don’t get comfortable,” I say. He blinks at me. “Won’t take long.”

I grab an enemy who’s slumped over a steering wheel. This one isn’t human. It’s fissure folk.

“Ugh.” Spores puff out as its skin splits. Now I’ll smell like food all day.

I drag it out enough that it falls half out the window, helmet banging against the ground. I take the heavy gun from the passenger seat, then a drum of ammo. It’s small and unwieldly, but it’ll do, until I beg the quartermaster for something better.

“Done?”

“Yeah.”

“How’d you lose yours?”

“My gun? That human. It called on one of their gods.”

“Ah.” Theuban says.

“I found a human in that building back there. It was using that foul fire. You know the stuff.”

“That’s where that blast came from?”

“Blew right the fuck up. They do it all the time now.”

“It’s what they do when they’re desperate.”

“Going to get one of us killed. For all their arrogance, these humans can’t seem to fight their own battles for shit.” I spit, then I grind it into the road with my foot as we walk on.

“Hmm.” I get a look from Theuban. One of his eyes focuses, the pupil like a giant crack in a golden gemstone.

“What?”

“We can rest soon.” He says. “I’m sure…”

“No we cannot.” The time for rest is still far away.

“The town is clear.” He says. He’s right. Probably.

As we return to the heart of town, we pass through the shattered streets, the battered buildings on both sides, the corpses of enemies piled out of the way by our hardworking, underappreciated allies. Some of us are still patrolling. Others are carrying our dead away.

There are a lot less of us left than there should be. And those of us still standing, are doing so on our last leg.

An Afeaa slithers out of a broken window to our left, orange scales glowing in the sunlight as he crosses our path. Unlike Theuban, he has a rattle on his tail, and it vibrates slightly as he goes. He’s older than Theuban, much bigger. All scale and muscle and agitation.

Worn down just like the rest of us. It’s getting to be a little much, holding on until the tunnel finishes and reinforcements come up. They’ve already delayed a day. Any more and we might as well lay down and let the humans kill us.

We can’t keep going.

Theuban and I enter the square where the biggest building once stood. The humans who lived here used it to store their money, and the soldiers we fought had barricaded themselves inside: a firing squad on the ground floor, snipers hidden behind the highest windows, mortars planted on the roof. Two smoking carcasses of tanks still sit at the base of the stone steps. The building itself was reduced to so much broken brick.

Our leader set his command up in the square before that red, rocky mound we made the humans’ tomb, standing by a stone table with spiked legs, under a scale tent that casts little shade. He’s a bit smaller than I am, but he’s got a similar scale pattern—bands of brown and black down his arms and back, not my black and grey.

When we come close, he drags a claw down his snout and it comes away with a spray of pale flakes. He looks worse for wear, hunched and holding his side, missing an eye, covered in bald patches like a descaled fish.

He was caught by a bomb full of poison gas days ago. He’s still wheezing, coughing even as he smooths the corners of the map out on the table and weighs it with stones carved like crescent moons. He eyes us when we come close, then looks back to the map.

“Where have you been, Cavern Keeper?”

“Clearing the town, Leader.”

“You’re finished.”

“Seems that way.”

He coughs blood onto the map. I lean away as he wipes it with a cloth.

“Leader?”

“You’ve been selected for new simat. Both of you.”

He continues his labored breath.

I see the hitch when it catches and hear the fluid in his lungs bubble up. He hawks a mouthful of bile to the side, wipes his mouth on his arm.

“The bone doctor?” I ask.

“Is waiting on you. Once your surgery is done, rest, then report to me. You have a new assignment.” He looks me over with his remaining eye. “An urgent one. As soon as you’ve recovered, find me.”

“Yes, Leader.”

“Yes, Leader.” Theuban adds. I feel him hovering at my back, see his shadow bobbing its head on the street to the west.

The war leader has already dismissed us. I watch him drag the broken end of a claw along the map. What he says next, I almost miss.

“This is a time of change,” He whispers. “Great honor is being heaped upon us. We will not waste it.”