My people, we hatch from our shells all alone, left to survive the wilderness and find the way to our kin. It’s a harsh and barren land, especially for a child.

Many don’t make it, but those that do are welcomed as Blood and taught our ways. That is our way. We teach each other. We raise ourselves up.

First though, it is the land we learn: the rule of tooth and claw.

We are, each and every one of us, wild at heart, warriors through and through.

That wildness in our blood is what brought me and my brother to the mouth of that tunnel, in those lands lost before we were born.

The war in our hearts is why we looked at each other and laughed in the face of their paltry army.

We who only offer blood,

We who are only given blood,

We have returned.

The promised land is ours again.

***

I first fought the humans as a youngling, thin and short and curious.

I only had one name: the same name I was given when I stumbled into a village for the first time, confused and overwhelmed. The wasteland had made me feral, and afraid of even my own kind, but they welcomed me, taught me to speak, to hunt, to see, to think.

The first years in that village I felt truly alive and at peace for the first time in my life. Whereas before I was only an animal, in the village I learned how to be a person. Those days were special, and I loved almost every moment.

I remember a game we played back then, called Blizzard: A relic from the lands to the north, and the legends of frozen water and terrible cold.

Some children would be defenders, standing in a ring around a mountain of stones we called snow. Some would be attackers, starting in a place called home, far from the mountain and its guards.

The mountain and the home were connected by a little lane drawn in chalk, no wider than the space between the guard farthest to the left, and the one all the way to the right: 3 meters usually.

To win, the attackers had to make it all the way to the mountain, take a stone, then return. The defenders won by stopping the charge and keeping anyone from returning. They threw snow, and if you were hit, you were 'frozen'.

It was a tense and painful game. Most charges that failed did so spectacularly. With guards lobbing snow high and low, there wasn't much room for error, and if attackers made it, there were only two things they could do.

The goal was to take a stone and return, but that never worked if the guardians were still standing. You had to clear them out, or someone had to stay, provide a distraction.

Neither side could truly win without a plan. Every defeat was full of pain. This game was rife with conflict and vexation. We were never taught why we played.

It's just what was done.

Lessons would finish and the teacher would point through the window. "Break time! Break time! Go and play some Blizzard!" She would say.

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I didn't like this game, didn't understand.

But I learned, as we all do.

When I was old enough, I was sent north. I met Jisr Aleazm: the dead lands. They were indeed full of bones. They were also full of mines, razor wire and puddles, where the land was torn apart by mortar shells.

This was only the appetizer.

The great wall stood between us and what we lost. Tiny shapes strutted across it at all times. Giant artillery batteries pointed to the skies. Human flying machines strafed back and forth, raining death.

When I saw it firsthand, I stood frozen.

I thought of the fights with my schoolmates and wondered if maybe Blizzard was too easy a game. I wondered if we were too lenient on our youngsters, even as I charged alongside my bredrin, on that deadly bridge of land, putting myself in the hands of fate and the instincts of a child's game.

We threw at that wall a force made of adolescence, raised wild and taught war.

I didn't like it.

No one explained why we should take back those lands. We lost them. They could keep them. I was comfortable with what we had.

I didn't understand in the beginning, that what we had was so little, and could only take us so far.

Humans paraded their metal boats across our coasts. The planes they flew over our villages would never stop. I hadn't learned that it didn't matter if we could make do in the wastelands.

My people don't make do with anything.

We will go as far as we want.

Blizzard taught me this: you can reach anything, if you have the right plan and the right force to keep it going.

Our plan in this case is simple: we crack their weak-skinned armies like eggs, before their plans hatch, and they ruin the underground roads we’ve made. We push and push until they have no choice but to negotiate, and then we may stop. Maybe.

Our force is far from simple.

We stand tall over the humans and their allies. There are those like me, sharing the shape of the humans, but with more… everything. More claw and tooth, more scale and feather, more tail- by god, they have none of that.

There are also those like my brother: the serpents who never stop growing, spitting fire or acid, crushing the enemy and its machines like sand sculptures, sowing terror in their ranks.

We are the force.

The distance the Hashd-Almadu goes in these lands lies on our backs.

We will not disappoint the queens.

This is what I think, when I venture into the old world.

I step out into the light of the moon, the fires, the stars. The old world welcomes me as an old friend. I lean my head back, close my eyes, and let the breath leave me with a long hiss.

This connection I feel, as I breathe in again, goes beyond all the stories I’ve heard of plains we used to walk and rivers we used to swim. Beyond the dreams I’ve had of glory beyond our borders. Beyond those transient, distant things.

My brother slithers beside me, tongue tasting the air high above.

“Beautiful,” He says.

“Yessss…”

Yes.

The stars are dim behind the smoke and glow from the ground, but I know they wait for me to see: a different glimpse than what I know. A splendor I’ve only heard of.

There’s no light coursing along the ground- nothing molten at all, to be honest. No vents billow toxic clouds. No steam rises off the earth. And it’s so cold.

There are no obelisks. No one has carved honor into the world. They left it blank, blind, empty of any sign this place is lived or loved. I’m no great sculptor but I know that even after the battles are won, I’ll bring out my chisel to help fix this.

The ground at my feet is a little rocky, but beneath the bodies and the debris, between the scars where fire burned and trauma churned, I see grass. Grass, just grown freely, stretching past where my eyes fail. That’s one legend proven true. Grasslands.

There’s more out there. I can see it already: the distant shape of the horizon in the night. There will be new mountains, new valleys and new things to feast on until I’m drunk with flavor.

All in good time.

The warm wind carries battlefield scents: the old smells of bodies turned lifeless, greasy fires and raw blood. They pale beneath a new chemical stench that hangs heavy everywhere…

I’m in the middle of sneezing, when the bomb goes off.

It lifts my feet off the ground, throws me back into the tunnel I crawled out of.  Crushed against the hard stone, I cover my head with an arm. Dust and debris rains around me, some of it wet and red, smelling sweet like rotten fruit.

My ears are ringing as I scrape the mess out of my eyes. I stumble through the cloud of smoke that lingers, and burst from the tunnel once more, this time panting, staring around.

I take in a new crater, meters from where I stood.

I meet the giant eyes of my brother, whose scales are steaming, whose long body winds back and forth, head close to the ground.

We share a lot with that one look.

And we laugh.

What else will you do, when the prey kicks you, after your fangs are already in its neck? You laugh, and finish what you started.

We laugh, and we charge.

We fight with everything we have.

We can't return, until we've taken what is owed.

For the queens.

For the Devourer.

For the Blood.