Shards of the Mosaic I

What might have happened, might be happening or might have happened. Each paragraph is its own thing, don't get confused.

This cannot be happening. Not again. And then she remembers. The failure, the pain and, after it all, oblivion.

By first snow, the plague had almost mired them. Then along came a strange man with a strange solution.  

He took it all in. The darkness, the light, the heart of everything that had ever been. And he screamed in the nothingness that surrounded him.

Vin Belowt they called her, after the dozens of their brethren she had slaughtered, and although the reveled in it, the little girl in her wept herself to sleep each night.

Peace at last, they thought. War at last, she knew.

For the first time in an aeon, they stirred in search of something once given and many times lost.

They slept, they slept, they slept. Sequestered in a crysalis of their own design, their last desperarate effort against the tides of the great unmaking.

The pawns moved, herded across the board by the rook and knight, and the king smiled.

A sister. How unlikely. But the path was set in stone and could never be diverged from. There was nothing else. Not any more, no matter how much it wished to be something else. 

To trust meant to risk. They all knew that. Yet the impossibility of the task ahead seemed even more daunting.

A thought floated above the icy flood. It had been called, and so it left the rest behind and nested itself comfortably where once its home had been.