[ WP ] `` At first they came back with nothing , and then they did n't come back at all . ''

Cam came online at 2140. Blasted lands, flat and scattered with thin cracks and tiny stones, with the great, dark suggestion of the mountains haunting the skyline. The sky was a sickly, swirling green, the emerald clouds giving birth to the occasional orb of sudden, too-close starlight. Things moved in that alien vastness, tiny skittering bodies that scampered from shadow to shadow on far too many legs. 
 
 Audio came a few minutes after. `` Yeah, I know. I do n't seem to have a sense of taste on this side, either.'' I could feel the bob of Master Sergeant Graves' head, an irritating half-second behind the actual resolution of his words. Biometric data resolved on a smaller screen, all normal. Graves' vision swung to catch the side of Young's face, a thin-chinned white boy chewing something with frustrated determination. Seconds later ( well, seconds and a half ) he spat out a wad of gum with a quick, `` God damn''. It struck the ground with a pebble rattle, and almost immediately a small, multi-jointed limb sprang from the shadow of a stone and snapped up the bright red blob. 
 
 `` Terra, you're online?'' And we were. We did the sound-offs, actual and technical; there were no losses going through. The camera swung around to gauge the horizon, stopping at a big, curved pillar of black rock that split a distant mountain range in half. Down again, to where a compass was spinning uselessly in a gloved hand. `` Figured,'' muttered Graves, and then, `` All right. We'll call that north.'' The camera panned up to where his finger was pointing at the shadowy, stone parenthesis. `` That's our destination. We go until we ca n't. Muttaqi, you're dropping the signal boosters.'' 
 
 `` Trail of breadcrumbs,'' came a murmur from outside the camera range. I read Graves as shrugging. `` Terra, how's our egress holding up?'' 
 
 I looked up. Above the rim of my workstation, an impossibility glowered. A circular hole had been ripped in reality directly in the center of the cave. It was a flat, perfect black, and an almost-perfect circle, apart from the wobbling at the edges from where reality was desperately trying to reassert itself. A thick, insulated line of cable led into the breach, disappearing as soon as it crossed the midnight horizon. Twelve hours was the estimate - but it was n't like we had anything like a complete set of data to extrapolate from. 
 
 We were, in a real and figurative sense, treading on fantastic soil. 
 
 For the last two hundred years of human history, the Old Gods have been trying to reassert themselves. In basement temples and mesa heights, through mad insight and slavish cults, they have leaked their inhuman thoughts and pressed their monstrous fingernails through the barrier between our world and theirs. Always failing - our worlds are too different, their biology too alien, our reality too simple. They had made some headway in the 1920's and 30's, and the artists, the musicians - they have always been susceptible. But they had always been repulsed, always, by the very mathematics of our plane. 
 
 Well. Almost always. 
 
 One year ago, the Old Gods found their purchase. As the arcit ice receded, the tentacles reared up, spewing salt and bright water as they grasped the remaining pack ice in a thousand-limbed embrace. Seawater sucked through a vast and invisible hole into their reality, and madness wandered in waves. But they had waited too long - or time meant less to them than it did to us. We had greater weapons, now, and greater understanding. 
 
 Six weeks ago, the great rift in the arctic had been shuttered. The limbs and thoughts and dreams had been cut off at their source, and the Old Gods defeated, sent back to the mad reality that had spawned them. But with every trauma, there are aftershocks. And we are clever enough to use them. They may have retreated; we're making them run for it. 
 
 We'd kept an eye on the old cult sites, once we knew that they had meaning. Now and again, a hole would pop up - an old breach shocked into relevance by the convulsions of a greater neighbor. Some were sudden, quick and quiet - others, like this one, were more stable, to a certain degree of stable. 
 
 The team of six were walking towards the emerald horizon. Someone was trying to light a cigarette - Young, probably - but the fire was n't behaving light it ought to have. I kept hearing flicks of the flint, swearing, and finally the subtle pat of the paper striking the soil. Two men were ahead of my POV, their backs laden with survival and survey equipment. One was far ahead, trying to jam a spike of carbon into a crack in the soil. Dancing away from the little hopping things that came surging out with every strike. 
 
 The data we were getting was distressingly normal. Oxygen content was maybe 10 % higher than Terra base - the fire should have took, there was nothing in the atmosphere or the gravity to suggest any sort of problem. There was the occasional little rumble in the soil, like earthquakes, but at intervals so rgular that they could be timed down to the second. The little creatures, small and nondescript, actively went out of their way to avoid our soldiers - and actively tried to snatch at whatever they left behind. When Muttaqi was rolling out the cable, he occasionally had to chase off a few of the small, black things as they raced to pick up a section of line he had just dropped. 
 
 No one reported any aberrant thoughts. No one's biomonitor showed any sort of heightened emotional response, apart from what was normal for six trained soldiers on an exploratory mission in an unfamiliar landscape. The Old Gods had killed 1.6 billion in their emergence, and fully three-quarters of that number were from induced mental aberrations. 
 
 It was too normal. 
 
 Two hours in, and the black spire was looming closer than we had thought it would. We were excited to find a potential non-Euclidean event, but Kaychuk came from Saskatchewan and apparently that sort of illusion is common in flatlands. Two hours and fifteen and it was looming over Graves, a leaning spire of cracked shadow. He reached out to press a hand against it, and the biometrics registered that it was warm. 
 
 Kaychuk bent to the base to take a sample. The tremors were worse there, but his knife bit easily and carved away a curling slice, as if the rock was as soft as a rotten tooth. Half the base was eager to have it back as soon as possible - we had n't sent a mobile lab in with them, and could only do preliminary tests on the substance out in the field. It was dark and malleable, seeming to be made up of innumerable small fibers that stretched in the same direction and peeled apart as easily as paper. The pillar itself speared into the pale greenish-white soil, buried in it, as if it was placed down in ages past and forgotten about entirely. Kaychuk bent to take another sample from under the soil. 
 
 There was a rumble, a shiver - a loud *crack! *. The earth began to shudder in earnest, and then it began to heave. My POV went all over the place, and from all the speakers scattered around the portal base came a dozen simultaneous, half-second-delayed reports of six scared men bracing to the ground. 
 
 I could see the earth moving, the distant mountains growing small and distant as the plate tectonics carried them away at an impossible speed. 
 
 I could see something come up from behind the curling spire, something big and glossy and white. Something scampered around the base of my skull, a keening pain all too similar to the despair that had buffeted me during the year the Old Gods spewed their diseased thoughts onto my home, my earth, my Terra. 
 
 I could see something bearing down on Graves, down on my own POV. A lunar curve of champagne blonde, growing like a waxing moon. 
 
 I could see the wide black iris of a single, slit eye. Looking down, down at Graves, down at *me*, a half-second before the feed cut out and the breach sighed and shrank back to normal space. The cable snapped in half at the point of contact, and my screen was a flat black mirror, reflecting my own ashen face. There was still data spooling across a few bright blue monitors, gauging background stability levels in the cave, analyzing biometric data from the soldiers, what data they could mine about the spire stone. 
 
 Turns out, it was primarily keratin. A single, gargantuan hair.
