Pact of Blood
They felt small, weak, and desperately human.
The reality he had believed in for his entire life had dissolved in the span of ten minutes. He knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the marrow, that life would never return to what it had been.
The human chapter had closed. The war, which they had hoped to leave behind in the ruins of their cosmic past, was now their permanent reality.
And as the sky began to heal over the hole where they had disappeared, Dave realized that he, too, was now part of the history they had written—a silent, scarred witness to the fact that their war had only just begun.