Marcus was screaming again. Silently, mouth full of blood, with frustration beyond anything he’d experienced before, he cried for his own death. He wanted nothing more. Only for everything to be over, for him and for the world itself.

He was so caught up in that that he kept screaming as the cell around him dissolved. He felt himself falling, but he thought it some part of the Harvester’s torment. He fell through flesh that disintegrated as his body pushed through it. He flailed. He lashed at the air like a drowning man. His tail searched for purchase that wasn’t there, and still he plummeted. He hit the ground hard, in a rain of filth. Himself, and a thousand others. The living and dead. Foul things, thudding to the earth on and around him.

Arms raised protectively over his head, Marcus squirmed upright. What had happened? he asked, and he beheld it. He saw it. Heard it. Felt it. Understood it. The Harvester had disappeared. All the beings trapped inside it fell to the earth in whatever state of life or death they’d been in. He watched other monsters vanish as well. A hog-like thing as large as a bus raised its head and bellowed as its legs disappeared. The rest of its body vanished before it hit the earth. Worms writhing on the ground undulated themselves into nothingness. Lumbering monsters became insubstantial mid-stride. Many of them howled as they vanished, but they may have been the lucky ones. They weren’t of this world. They were, Marcus thought, being transported to whatever hell they belonged in.

Not so the mutated humans. He could spot those because no matter what form they took they didn’t vanish. Instead they writhed and bellowed and trembled as their bodies shifted back toward what they’d been. The agony of the transformation was clear. It was ghastly, watching them, but in so many ways it was beautiful, too. Humans were becoming human again! The air had a clarity it hadn’t had since the horde arrived. Creation itself shimmered. The world glistened like the entirety of it dripped with the newness of … creation. Marcus blinked in the sudden brightness. It was glorious. Amazing.

Yes, he caught glimpses of even more massive and horrible creatures fading as the day brightened. They were the things that would have come, the leviathans of the other dimension, bigger even than the Harvester, but they had no hold here anymore. They faded to nothing as the world—the world Marcus knew and loved with a sudden, complete devotion—came back to its own.