I went over the valley head and the moorland pass dropped away-reddish spots were Insects roaming randomly on the slopes. I hastened on, frightened for my friends. This reminded me far too much of 1925.

Slake Cross town sat in the distance, the lake beyond it. A massive misty funnel of black spots was rising high and thin in the air above the lake. It was drifting slightly with the breeze but twisting with a slowness unlike any whirlwind I’d seen. And there was scarcely a wind anyway. I couldn’t tell what it was; I stared at it until my eyes hurt. The great spiral towered over the lake and specks cascaded from it like water drops or debris. They rose and fell like soot specks coming off a fire, but they must be huge if I could see them at this distance.

Below me another defence-a ‘field of holes’-was full of struggling Insects. Pits had been dug close together over the whole valley floor. Each was two metres square and five deep, straight-sided, concrete-lined with sharp, tar-painted stakes fixed upright in the bottom. I looked directly down into them; some were half-full of Insects skewered on the stakes, in the base of others lone Insects raised their heads, convergent compound eyes glittering. They would try to dig their way out until they wore their claws to stubs.

Further still and I was over the zigzag trenches running parallel with the river. The trenches were square-based, cut in chevrons, so that trapped Insects could be more easily dispatched as they slowed down to scurry round the corners. The trenches trimmed across my field of vision and Insects looking no bigger than ants scuttled up and down them, bristling.

I approached, with a feeling of trepidation like facing the cold wind that precedes a storm. The swirling flurry in the sky was more than five hundred metres tall. The whole sky was mottled with specks bumbling around each other, some over the town, some now between it and me. I concentrated on these, and as I came nearer the space between them seemed to increase. From looking at lots of motes plastered against a blank grey sky I was soon aware of them as individuals hanging in the air. I picked one and closed in on it.

The dot resolved into a dark crescent moving at my altitude with both points facing downwards. Closer still, I could see the crescent had three segments. It was bulky, not streamlined like a bird and I couldn’t understand what was keeping it up. Then it turned towards me and I saw its bulbous eyes. It was an Insect! An Insect flying!

I yelled, pulled my wings closed and fell below it just as it swept over my head. Its buzzing nearly deafened me even above the sudden roar of the air stream as I went into freefall. I forced open my wings, looked around, saw I hadn’t fallen more than twenty metres, and performed a slow roll so I could look down the length of my body and see it behind me.

A flying Insect?

I couldn’t believe it was real! It was heading away and starting to turn. I could see its ten bronze-brown abdomen plates, its tail curved and hooked under like a gigantic wasp. Its legs were bunched up under its body, the knee joints sticking out. Above its thorax was a continuous flickering-one, no two pairs of long translucent wings, beating so fast they blurred! They protruded from under its thorax’s first lamina, attached by a narrow joint that seemed flexible, like a hinge. What were these things?

Another one underneath me altered its path, rising up diagonally, but I jinked to one side and it missed. I looked forward, realising what the rising funnel above the reservoir was-a flight of Insects. Thousands upon thousands of winged Insects.

Their massed humming caused the sky to vibrate as if struck, resounding from all directions like the sound of flies on a corpse. It drowned out my own beats.

I have fought ground-bound Insects for so long I was bewildered; I couldn’t believe they were doing something different. Are these the same animals? Insects have always had tiny wings. Where have they suddenly got long wings from? And why now? One struck my foot a glancing blow-I dived hastily.

Below me, normal Insects swarmed over the whole valley bottom. They floated dead in the moat, scurried on the road, tore tents down and dragged them over the heather. Trebuchets stood abandoned. Warning beacons blazed on all the peel towers but I could see no other sign of life. A convoy of wagons by the town wall had been chained together to form a laager but every soldier inside the enclosure was dead. The Insects were raining down from above, bypassing our defences, overwhelming everything on the ground.

Arrows pulsed out of the towers’ overhanging belfries and irregularly from the covered walkways along the walls of Slake Cross. I thought of Lightning-surely he must be alive, directing the archers? I had to find out what was going on.

I passed over the town and towards the Insect flight. Like a single being, it threw off graceful wisps as myriads tumbled from the apex. Its base was russet with them ascending from their side of the lake.

Every sense was alive as I dodged past the Insects hurtling towards me. I flew low, dropping underneath the main concentrations. I would never see down through the flight if I went above it. I stared out towards the Wall and what I saw took my breath away. On the far side of the lake, against the panorama of the muddy valley bottom, thousands of Insects, no, tens of thousands, were crawling out from irregularly spaced breaches in the white Wall. They blanketed the ground, scuttling slowly and purposefully over the bare earth before the lake. Ranks and ranks of Insects were flowing out. Each had four transparent wings, so long that their wider rounded ends overlapped each one’s abdomen and dragged on the ground behind it like a bride’s train.

They stopped on the bank. I picked one and focused on it. Its elbowed antennae twirled, even more active than usual, and its head was raised, alertly tasting the air. It turned its head, separated its drooping wings with a mandible and a stretched back leg. It began to twist them up and down with beats. The wings beat faster into a blur and the Insect’s back began to arch. It was being tugged up. I could see its feet shifting position and rising until just the tips of its claws touched the ground, then they lifted off and with a tremendous birring the Insect slowly took off from standing, rose into the air and joined lines, skeins, then great clouds of them spiralling up above the Wall.

Hundreds of metres above, the multitudes were converging. Insects clung together in clusters; enormous aggregations of chitin plates and thrumming wings. They were tussling to touch the tips of their abdomens together. They rolled as they fell, losing height rapidly and separating again. When their abdomens retracted I saw sticky strands of mucus stretched between them. They reminded me of ants in…in a mating flight!

With this chill realisation I flew a circuit around the rising funnel, risking being attacked, but the insects paid me no attention at all, totally intent on each other. Their numbers seemed to increase and ebb in waves. Individuals in the spiral rose and fell, dropped height and struggled up again, as if with fatigue.

I glided and watched spent Insects tumble out of the spiral, still trailing strands of slime. They righted themselves and descended, drifting south with the wind, around the town and over it. They fell into the town, onto the wreck of canvas outside the walls, onto the glacis between the walls and moat. The moat was completely full of thrashing, hopelessly tangled brown legs and abdomens.

Some landed in the reservoir, or in the river, where they didn’t resurface, and I saw the current turning them over and over as it swept them downstream.