The cloud of mites--forming the shape of a larger gembound, shifting and blurring but generally consistent in its appearance--had found Tunnel M.

In and of itself, the tunnel was uninteresting to most: it held little, only musty darkness where it met Pisces, and a long, treacherous stretch of ice as it stretched to meet Fornax's warmth. Though the newly-unearthed gemstone pillars might have been of interest, Legion--the name the swarm had given itself--had found something else to draw its many eyes.

Where the tunnel opened to Orion's glittering stars, there were slender beams of silver light stretching their stilled tendrils into the tunnel's dark.

The swarm slipped forward, the shape that of an animal, tan, glinting here and there with phosphorescent shades of blue and green. Its single apparent pair of eyes were wide with awe. As it moved into the light, its individual mights shimmered with sparks of refracted silver.

Legion began to thin, to fade--shedding its chosen shape to become the swarm, a cloud of dust only vaguely resembling a Gembound, a cloud that began to slowly surge in and out among the shafts of silver light. Like a glittering cascade of ice particles, each one shining, it weaved to and fro. It was taken, rapt, by the shining glow.

Were anyone to enter the tunnel, they might see it: the creature-shaped cloud, now like a four-legged Gembound, now like a shroud of a thousand tiny stars, drifting through the light.