The Last Light (The Wandering Inn, #5)

by Pirateaba

These weren’t devastating numbers. The Hive had suffered worse, and always come back. New Workers and Soldiers were always being created. That also meant each day they were also dying. If not by the hundreds, at least a dozen. Each day. Each day, a dozen Soldiers like the ones who lived on the walls of the barracks in paint died. Each day. Pawn could barely fathom that. No—it was because he couldn’t imagine such a thing that he was still able to function at all. Workers died. Soldiers died. They died and their bodies were turned to mush that other Antinium ate. Each day. If you dwelt on that, you’d curl up and die, like the Workers who never woke up and were carried away. Or worse—you’d become an Aberration. That was how they were created, surely. Pawn had come close, once. He felt that had to be why. It was when you couldn’t make sense of it all, when the death and emptiness crushed you down and left not even loyalty, not even the shred of…of anything. That was when it happened.