Meanwhile, crack teams of ants led raids on the dinosaurs from all quarters. Their preferred tactic was to launch their assaults from deep inside, which terrified the dinosaur public. Dinosaurs took to wearing masks at all times, not daring to remove them even while they slept, since the minuscule ants could sidle in and out of their most private spaces like a nightmarish crew of malevolent interns.

The ant world did not escape unscathed, however. Far from it. Ant civilisation took a severe beating from the dinosaurs. Almost every ant city was decimated, and the ants were forced to retreat underground. But they were not safe even there, for their subterranean bases were often unearthed by the dinosaurs and then destroyed. The dinosaurs made heavy use of chemical weapons and sowed a toxin that was harmless to dinosaurkind but deadly to ants everywhere. This not only killed innumerable ants but sharply constrained the scope of their activities. Individual ant colonies found it more and more tricky to maintain contact with other parts of the Formican Empire; because they lacked long-distance vehicles of their own, they had previously relied on dinosaur conveyances, but this option was no longer available. Communication became increasingly difficult, regions of the ant world became isolated, and the Formican Empire fragmented.

This was not all. There were more serious consequences still. Because the dinosaur–ant alliance was the foundation stone upon which Cretaceous civilisation was built, the crumbling of that alliance had a pernicious effect on societal structures in both worlds. Social progress ground to a halt and there were clear signs of regression. The survival of Cretaceous civilisation hung in the balance.

*

Though both the ants and the dinosaurs gave their all to the global war effort, neither side was able to achieve absolute supremacy on the battlefield, and the fighting degenerated into a protracted war of attrition. Eventually, the high commands of both empires came to recognise the reality of the situation: they were prosecuting a war that could not be won, a war whose ultimate outcome would be the destruction of the great Cretaceous civilisation. In the fifth year of the conflict, the two belligerents began armistice negotiations, and pivotal to these was the historic meeting between the Emperor of the Saurian Empire and the Queen of the Formican Empire.

The meeting was held in the ruins of Boulder City, on the former site of the imperial palace, where, five years earlier, the fateful summit that had triggered the war had taken place. All that now remained of that once colossal imperial seat were a jumble of shattered, fire-blackened walls. Through the cracks, the smoke-stained skeletons of other buildings were visible in the distance: the desecrated city was sinking back into the soil, its stonework colonised by thickets of lush green weeds and a lattice of creeping vines. The encroaching forest would soon swallow it up altogether.