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world. Autarchies had been shattered, hermit kingdoms destroyed. Almost a billion had died in war, plague, starvation, and madness. But worse was yet to come, as what passed for civilization on this world guttered and faded beneath the penumbra of a darkness deeper than eternal night.
    The few surviving warriors of the Host of Air and Darkness hibernated in caves beneath the plateau on the murdered continent. They had been there a long time. The once-natural network of limestone vaults and water-worn grottos had been extended to provide an underground fortress for the western defenders of an empire. Since the war, it had been pressed into service as a deep survival bunker. Dispersal bays near the surface, close beneath overground blast doors, were occupied by the hibernating bodies of the Host’s aviation group. Shafts spiraling down into deeper bedrock housed the stasis cocoons of armored cavalry; deeper still, access corridors drilled by civil engineering magi riddled the plateau, leading to slave barracks and supply depots.
    The members of the Host were not exactly human, but neither were they entirely alien. Picture, if you will, a human primatologist’s eyes widening in excited recognition as they see the twitching ears and elegant features, then utter the fateful words:
“Another species of gracile hominid, only with hypertrophied pinnae
—
”
before horrified recognition sets in (followed by a swift and gruesome death). The word they use to denote their own kind in the High Tongue might best be translated as People. But in form and in mind the People were no closer to a contemporary human being than to a Neanderthal.
    Most of the sleepers lay in an envenomated coma, wrapped in cocoons spun by purple-bodied spiders the size of fists. They hung in rows beside the huge gauzy cauls of their war-steeds. Here and there among them festered a browning chrysalis, its occupant deceased. The rotting husks of hominid skeletons, mummified lips drawn back from silently screaming jaws, were a mute testimony to the desperation of this gambit: hibernation was far from foolproof, especially on the scale of an army group fleeing across a gulf of centuries. The Host had already lost many of its number. Before much longer the survivors would be forced to awaken for the last time, to eat and recover their strength, lest their sleep deepen into eternal death.
    This desperate flight into the unknowable future had been forced upon the All-Highest by the total logistical collapse of the Morningstar Empire. It had started when the acolytes of one or another of the Dead Gods had performed a ritual that shattered the moon, opened the way to the realm of demons, and plunged the entire world into chaos. Famine, war, and nightmarish alien intrusions had spiraled out of control in every nation, wrecking the intricate hierarchies upon which civilization depended, leaving only chaos and death behind. Only a few far-flung military outposts had survived around the world, untouched by virtue of their remote locations and deep defenses. And this base was now the last surviving remnant of the Morningstar Empire.
    When the full scale of the disaster had first become apparent, All-Highest resolved to wait out the collapse of civilization, to carry intact into the future the last surviving army on the continent. But the collapse had been deeper and more catastrophic than anyone imagined – not merely the wreckage of empire but the actual looming extinction of the People as a species beckoned. Death and madness from beyond the stars claimed everybody who still lived on the surface of the world. The skeleton staff who stood watch down the years waited for some indication the sleeping Host might safely emerge to recolonize the surface: but as the years stretched into decades, and decades into centuries, conditions on the roof of the world became worse and the warehouses beneath the bone caves slowly but inexorably emptied. Now they held barely enough