A nightmare of Luna, of that which waits below, of disaster and wreckage and inexplicable warm camaraderie tangled together. It leaves behind a journal page with familiar handwriting to mark its passage.

Six of us went down into the Pit, and only one crawled out. That is how it was, and that is how it is.

I have not wanted to look back at that time, but lately it has become prudent to examine what is and is not known of the Darkness.
I know Darkness. I have been trying to distinguish the Darkness from the framework the Hive use to shape it for long and long, but they are deeply intertwined. The Voice in the Darkness answers some things, but not all.

I think: The Great Disaster. What did we know? Was there anything besides terror and the swords of the Hive?

I think: What was in the Pit?

The Lunar Pyramid was here all along, as we now know. Since the Collapse, its Darkness has seeped into Luna, into all that surround it. Could one write a treatise on the subspecies of Hive, on the differences written in the various plates of chitin? Have the Hive been here long enough, overrunning our Luna, that a recognizable change in them has evolved?

…I digress. There were times, deep in that dark pit, when I thought: Ah, Sai means to break left. And then she would, knives like lightning, as true as if she herself had told me she would. Or: Ah, there is Omar, beside me, and though he was not, his presence rang comforting in my ears like struck metal.

Synergy, I thought. The closeness that combat creates. We were pinned together in the dark, and so we learned to read each other perfectly, for to do otherwise would have been to die.

To die sooner.

Anecdata? Perhaps. Always the quiet voice that says to temper my expectations, that it is wishful thinking to imagine that they lie beside my heart, instead of Nightmares floating in my wake. But in all this time, all of this lingering, I am surer of what I felt then. Not only necessity; not only the edge of the blade.

I know more of Darkness now. It is not violence. It is something more: something that hums and flows and resonates, knife or song by equal measure.

I have not been able to bear the sound of silence since that time. Too long among the screaming Hive, I thought once. Now…

Cacophony is almost a comfort.