Life-Cycle (short story)

Fen, Cousin Darius, and Cousin Jezebella traipse through a post apocalyptic Kent, seeing a misshapen figure in the distance. They move towards it, through ghosts of the long dead, ghosts of a timeship graveyard. Within the graveyard they find scatterings of eggshells, humanoid figures, twisted and malformed, with pale pink faces. The gestalt speaks into the mind of Fen, that they are Vermis Superior, "merely part of a whole". They drag Fen and her companions to 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.