There were no other hives left, but hers.

There was only one thing the Queen of Almost Everything did not consider part of her dominion, though her sisters, and her mothers, and their mothers before them had tried for many, many turns of the world to claim it.

The Godshell.

Even though her hive was built upon that hard and impossible thing, and all her sand and all her brood crawled over it, the Queen had never found a way into that dark and profane place.

For hundreds and thousands of cycles, the Queen had watched over the Godshell. With nine-thousand eyes, she watched it. With nine thousand antennae, she felt at its edges, searching and chewing and gnawing at the impossible structure. Never making a dent.

With thirty thousand legs, she marched her brood over the shores and the shifting sands, carrying grain after grain to build this hive, to push back the crashing waves so that she might yet claim the Godshell as her own.

And in one idle moment, a deity had appeared. How had she not tasted its presence?

How had it flown so swiftly?

And, most infuriating of all, why did the Door That Does Not Open … open for this thing?

The Queen’s arms and legs and a few of her heads were lost, inside those iron jaws. But, at least, the deity had not escaped unscathed. It had shed part of its body - a hulking, metal thing - at the Door That Does Not Open, and the Queen’s brood dragged it back into the depths of her hive.

Once, there had been thousands of nests, just like hers, across the endless scrublands. They built their towering monoliths of sand deep in the arid places of the world.

Once…

But now, when she sent her legs and her wings ranging far and wide across the sands, all the old nests were empty. And across the great deserts, where the sanded dunes became flats of glass that marked the edges of the world - nothing could live there.

Even the waters were sparse these days. The fat, fleshy things that swam in the waters no longer visited her shores. Nor any shores.

So, where had this thing come from?

...were there more of them?

Some things can never be known. The Queen of Almost Everything accepted this. But there were simple truths, too. The sun always rises. The sands always change.

And the gods… There was only one thing to do with them.

Just knowing one was near made her burn with need. It crept and shivered and stung, from the base of her abdomen to the desiccated bulk of her brain. It throbbed through her every thought, and bled into all her brood.

Every leg, every mouth, every muscle, itching with the same fury.

Die.

The Queen of Almost Everything couldn’t remember why she felt this way, only that all the mothers had felt the same. Their ancestral memories, passed down for hundreds of generations, were faded and hard to understand.

Wait.

The longer she mulled over it, the more it came back to her.

That’s right. It wants to die. Isn’t that right?

In fact, a part of her wondered if this wasn’t her true purpose, the sole reason for her life: to consume the deity. To take its living body, and eat the flesh from its bones, and hang its ragged skeleton high for all her brood to witness the glory of what once was.

I will rip the flesh from your bones. I will swallow your immortal strength.

Yes, that’s how it was. She would eat the deity, and she would have the power to restore life to the whole world. Through her, the stars would shine bright once more. And the Sun would repent its relentless gaze. All the algae would flourish, and the oceans too, and the bristled plants that once covered these deserts would cover them again.

Why, then, did it hide from her?

The other one did, too.

This one hid inside that ancient shell.

Why did it hide?

A challenge, the Queen of Almost Everything thought. To see if I am worthy, of course. To make me stronger.

So, she would be stronger.

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The Queen of Almost Everything was not at her peak. All the other Hives had gone empty. And so, she had let her strongest brood die off long ago, and she had replaced them with weak, brittle ones. Smaller mouths, and more delicate pincers.

Because strength was costly, and the farms were dwindled. And the seas dried to salt. And all the beasts of the world were gone.

But this was worth everything.

This was worth even life itself.

The Queen of Almost Everything had twenty-seven heads. They were the heads of mothers, some as old as her, some much older. They were drying out, but they still spoke to her. And she could still speak with them.

That was how she had pried the last deity out of the Godshell. Back then, she had more than a hundred heads. How many cycles ago had that been?

Now, there were so few.

The number doesn’t matter. The Queen of Almost Everything thought to herself, It worked before, so it will work again.

This was her purpose.

She would taste the flesh of a god, once more.

And she would take its power this time. And make the world anew.

***

Maybe the gates worked, but there was no light in the reactor.

And all the repair drones had been hacked to pieces.

Even the printers were gutted - what few scattered pieces she could find were broken beyond repair. If she could just print the replacement parts… but, no. Of course not.

The Ship had crashed, and whoever woke up inside had taken everything apart. It was almost impressive how methodical they had been. Impressive, and maddening.

Why?

What could you have possibly been looking for?

And to make everything so much more frustratingly worse, something kept pinging her implant - the one wrapped around the side of her skull.

At first, it was a small sound, and she chalked it up to some glitching piece of hardware deep in the ship’s bowels. But as she dug through the scrap, the sound was getting louder. Shriller.

“You don’t hear that?” she asked Finder, for the dozenth time.

He didn’t know what she was talking about.

At least the water recyclers were still working. And there was more food in the storage bays than a whole city could eat in a decade. Every variety, too. As long as she didn’t get sick of vacuum-sealed, freeze-packed rehydration packets, she was set.

If only it weren’t for that damn ringing sound.

Finder had been digging through the ships logs. There were thousands of hours of the previous inhabitants. Joira, and the one with black hair - she still didn’t know his name.

There were from a biologist’s conclave. Some planet she’d never heard of. Somehow, they hitched on an architect’s ship. A gate walker. The ship’s main purpose was to rip across the clusters, planting gates.

Normally, gate walkers were autonomous. Ships shaped like spindly skyscrapers, the gate walkers’ hulls were wrapped in their own kind of gates that allowed them to wander from one star to the next in the blink of an eye.

But, instead of the usual drone bays, the upper deck of this ship had been retrofitted with a habitation area. Cabins, living spaces, and a cramped cryospace filled with a dozen cold chambers.

As soon as they found out about the cold chambers, Khadam rushed up the slanted ladders of the decks. She found the coldchambers in the back of the habitation area.

Ten of the coldchambers were still functioning, dark and cold even from the outside. Two were empty. As she approached one, its information panel lit up.

She took one look inside. And then, she walked out.

“What is it?” Finder asked over her shoulder. “Are they in there?”

Khadam shut the door behind her. And locked it.

“They’re gone,” she said to Finder. “They’re… They’re not human anymore.”

“Oh.”

Best to let them rest. They would be fine. Even if the ship lost power, each coldchamber had its own core that would last for thousands more years. Maybe longer.

Unless its already been thousands of years, Khadam thought. She still didn’t know what year it was - how long she’d been under.

Khadam sifted through the other rooms, making her way back down the decks. One of the decks was filled with laboratory gear. Biologists. Empty vials, carbon sequencers, glass terrariums, sunlamps, heavy soil recyclers and nutrient grinders the size of industrial refrigerators.

But there was nothing alive inside the ship. Nothing, apart from Khadam and the microscopic bacteria she had brought with her.

Khadam was sifting through the cabins, looking for answers or tools or anything to help her out. Joira and the other guy were playing out on our visual implant, a small holographic video playing in her left eye.

Something about watching them life just sitting in the middle of a ship. Neither of them talking. Going about their business. Something about it was comforting to her, about the way they just sat there and lived and breathed.

The ship had databanks filled with entertainment that would last anyone a thousand years, but right now, she much preferred this. It was like they had just been here. Somehow, it made the ship feel fuller. More complete. Like there were other people around her, to keep her company.

It also made it hard to ignore the pieces of their lives they had left behind. Was this pile of rags Joira’s dirty clothes? Which cabin did he sleep in?

Who had taken all the machines apart? And why did they leave this place in such a mess?

Finder was following her around the ship as she went from room to room, gathering everything and anything that looked like she might be able to fashion it into a kind of tool. These thin metal rods, if she could mark them, would make decent calipers. And those could easily work as spark joiners, as long as she wasn’t running power.

The ringing in her ears had all but faded.

On the screen, Joira was staring at something on one of the terminals, deep in concentration. His counterpart, the one with the black hair, was wrestling with one of the printers.

Khadam paused the screen.

“Finder, look at his hand.”

“What is it?”

“He’s got a gauntlet. A shipwright’s. I’m not sure what model it is, but it looks professional.”

The gauntlet was bound to his wrist, and the liquid metal wrapped over his hand, rippling and changing shape every time he moved. It looked like he was struggling to get it work - he probably hadn’t attuned to it correctly. Or at all, she thought.

“That’s what I need. If you can find that, it would solve everything, and I could get to work.”

Finder chirped something in the affirmative, but Khadam couldn’t hear him. Because just at that moment, there was a swell in her ears. In her temples. A piercing sound, like the shriek of metal.

Only, it didn’t stop. It swung higher and louder and Khadam almost collapsed with the pain. Her hands were on her ears, and she was shouting.

A deep, warbling voice echoed, resonating from inside of her brain.

“There… Are… You… God.”

Finder’s hobbled over to her, dragging his bulk with his claws. He was asking her what was wrong, but she couldn’t hear him over the waves of ringing, washing over her. Knocking around in her skull like a bell, crashing over and over. Sonar waves slamming against her mind.

“Who are you?” She said, though she didn’t know if it could hear her. “What is this?”

The response was a single word:

“Die.”