Life-Cycle (short story)

 was the seventh story in The Book of the Enemy.

Pre-Narrative Briefing
Briefing H

Story
Fen, Cousin Darius, and Cousin Jezebella traipsed through a post apocalyptic Kent before seeing a misshapen figure in the distance. They moved towards it, through ghosts of the long dead, ghosts of a timeship graveyard. Before finding within the graveyard a scattering of eggshells, humanoid figures, twisted and malformed, with pale pink faces. It speaks into the mind of Fen, that they are Vermis Superior, "merely part of a whole", she saw a timeship, a higher dimensional entity, a cube as large as a field, but as thin as paper, and inside were corpses sandwiched between layers of dirt, with worms burrowing through the dead. "They feast on the soldiers of time, and given time they become us. And we become them." Then, were-crows descended from the sky, eating the Vermis, as Fen ran. When they consumed the last ones, they took back to the sky, forming backwards words in the air, and her eyes saw an aspect of the Enemy, feeding off of fiction, reality flicks to the left and Fen vanishes.

Characters

 * Cousin Jezebella
 * Cousin Darius
 * Fen
 * Vermis Superior

Continuity
to be added