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"What do you want?" I call down, wondering if the creature even has the ability to understand speech. "Stay away from my beast – he’s dangerous."

It makes a noise then, a thin high-pitched piping whistle from that tiny slit-like mouth. The ‘saur reacts badly to the whistle, lashing its heavy tail, but the mutant ducks under it, and vaults lightly on the beast’s sloping back. I watch it scramble up to me.

Seen close to, it’s really an appalling sight. It’s difficult to believe such a thing could be born of a human being, with its huge spherical head and flat black eyes and tiny slit of a mouth. Its arms are long and covered with shaggy hair, its hands more like talons. I again fight down the urge to take my sword out of its scabbard. After all, the mutant is maybe half my size, naked, and unarmed.

"What do you want?" I shout. "You shouldn’t be here at all. If they find you they’ll kill you."

The mutant leans close and pipes again, almost in my ear. In the shrill tweeting, I can suddenly hear one word, repeated. "Morgana", it says, and again, "Morgana."

That name. I turn around as far as I can to look, twisting the reins brutally to keep the ‘saur from bolting. I can feel its muscles ripple at the touch of the mutant. ‘Saurs are stupid, but they aren’t as stupid as I am, to get so close to a mutant. One never knows what a mutant can or will do.

"Morgana?" I peer at the mutant. "You mean the Morgana? The queen?"

"Qheen," it chirps. "Qheen, yis. Morgana."

I swallow hard. This is more than I had quite bargained for.

I had come out to look for the reason behind the pulsing white glow in the sky. Nothing like that could possibly mean anything good for us, the last surviving humans, the rats in the walls of the city that now belonged to the trolls.

 "Go," the Hivemaster had said, "and may you return with success." And though I was officially deemed a Hero, the only surviving one in the Hive, and although I had come out like this many times, and returned safely, I had seen in his eyes that he was bidding me goodbye.

It wasn’t really surprising, for ever since the trolls had come upon the world from whichever mysterious realm was their own, nothing had been able to stand against them. None of the old weapons had hurt them, not one of the armies that had marched against them had ever returned from the battlefield, and they seemed to grow stronger even as we grew weaker and weaker.

The mighty scientific minds of the world tried first to find a weapon to beat the trolls; then they tried to find something that would protect us from the trolls; and now, those that were left, tried only to find ways to help us stay alive as long as we could. It was a losing battle.

I was still almost a boy when the trolls had first come, and we had been spared their attentions for a long time. We had heard of them, certainly; had heard of their advance through China and Canada, and of their conquest of Australia in the span of a mere few days. I was a very young man when the final battle had been fought, and lost, in the ruins of Berlin; and after that I had, like everyone else, learned to try and live in a world that now belonged to the trolls. Those were the days when I had many times come close to despair, and all that had kept me going – all that I had in the world – was one person, one hope, one light in the darkness. I still feel tears in my breast when I think of her.

And then, one day, she was gone.

They had gone foraging for the Hive, a whole team, while I had been sleeping after a scouting mission that had lasted the night. When I had woken, it was all over. None of them had ever returned. The trolls had got them.

The trolls.

Even now, after all these years, I still burn with hate for them, hate for their helots, hate for their lords, and hate for their queens – Constanza, Elia, Morgana, Iada, and the rest of them, of whom we had heard. Hate, not for making us rats in our own world, rats surviving on scraps, not for turning this lovely planet into a blasted wasteland of mutant gargoyles, but hate for that one act of theirs – robbing me of my love.

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