Serpentine Squiggles

Chapter 1

Autumn comes a month early to Emul’s Fall. That was two weeks ago, and now the chill in the air is starting to bite. Sleeping in empty houses without a furnace isn’t gonna cut it anymore.

I don’t have any firewood, and if I did, smoke rising out of a building nobody lives in is gonna raise questions, sooner or later. It’s a risk, but I can’t say courting frostbite ain’t a risk either. I’m shivering under my bandages.

Of course, a fireplace’s not much use if the walls around you ain’t insulating, and even the houses people still live in are falling apart. You’d wonder if this town was going to shit, but then you see the kids nestled in half the women’s arms and cartfuls of bread coming in every day. There’s a history to that, a story there. Just a streak of good harvest? I never bothered to figure out what was going on here.

I jump the fence and creep out of an alleyway, hoping to blend in with the crowd. I don’t expect I’ll catch anyone’s eye. Dark skin and white hair might look out of place in a backwater village, but I clock three people more foreign than I am at a glance. One of them I bet isn’t even human. Like shards of glass distorting a human form — was it half‍-​spirefolk? A quarter? I don’t stare, and make my move.

Nobody blinks. You always seem more conspicuous to yourself, but I don’t really matter to the beggar swinging his pot of coins, or mother with her kid on a leash. If this were a city, I might worry about guards, but they don’t do that sort of thing here, do they?

Wondering if anyone would notice me grabbing a few coins for myself, I size up my mark.

Some boy in a red‍-​frilled robe, jeweled necklace gleaming in the sunlight. A merchant’s son? Some minor priceling? Whoever it is, they don’t have a modicum of situational awareness. Now let’s see if I can lighten their purse a bit.

I walk up behind them, reach over, and then—

Fingers close around a metal coin — feels finely machined — and grope around for a bit more. Then the kid startles, I feel him startle, and I get scared too. Bump into him trying to salvage the situation.

He flinches away from me, and my hand slips inside my own cloak pocket depositing my earnings. Kid’s face curls disgust. I’d grin back, but I think my fear’s shining my eyes. Don’t know which way it’d fall.

“Keep your filthed hands to yourself.”

“You, uh, you got it, kid,” I stammer it out and then break away in the opposite direction. Fuck. Best make myself scarce. Definitely didn’t want to get caught. Might get a hand chopped off again, and it was so hard to get a new one.

But hey, I got my fingers on a nice new coin. Might as well get myself some breakfast.

I brisk my way down dirt streets. Fall came early, but no so early there’s dry leaves under foot. Not good crunch to be found. A few’d fallen and still had water in them.

A few turns later and I step into a bar where the door’s about to fall off it’s hinges.

“Yo, Beca. The usual?”

Not the name I was born with, so there’s a dumb second. Then I say, “Yeah, don’t forget the salt this time.”

After the exchange I’m frowning uneasy. ‘The usual’. I should be a ghost. They shouldn’t remember me. I don’t come here every day — I make sure of that — but I suppose there’s only so many people who’d come by this dillapidated joint.

Kynan is pouring a glass of surprisingly clear water and a place of eggs, toasted bread, and some mushrooms that might be growing in the cellar. I don’t ask.

I don’t care, really. Food is food. Never really got why people made such a fuss about taste. Don’t think I could tell apart fruit and meat except by feel. It’s all the same mush.

“Hey Beca, you ever met somebody named… Utamara?”

My fingers pause in their dissection of my egg.

“They were lookin for you earlier. Told them you’re an irregular. Hope you don’t mind.”

“What did they look like?”

“Big guy, that much I could tell, but nothing else. Thick, billowing robes covers covered up everything, couldn’t even see if they had legs. Didn’t buy anything, kicked the cat on their way in. You in some debty kind of shit? Spooky business. Not sure I want that type around.”

“Know what they want?”

“You. Said to tell ya to meet them in the marsh out west as the dusk falls.”

“Where?”

“Said you’d see it if you went. Like I said, spooky. Seemed to hate my questions. Shouldn’t be so mysterious, then.”

I finish my plate. I don’t thank them. Not for the food, or the news.

I’m up toward the door, but something tells me to peek outside first. I see the kid, some paces away. I see a well‍-​dressed man with a club and a mean look. And they’re talking to a fella sitting on the street, pointing right at the pub I walked into.

“There’s only one way in here, isn’t there?”

“I don’t throw the trash out front, do I?”

“Mind if I head out that way?”

“There’s trouble if I say yes, isn’t there?” They shake their head. “Look. I like you, Beca. I’ll show you the way out back, and I’ll cover for you. But, do me a solid, right?”

I decide to hear him out.

“I’ll give you a note. There’s a kid, Tio. Buys shit on tab, doesn’t pay it off, and they’ve been avoiding me. Was wondering how to send a message, and something clever came to me. You’re the type to get up to some real skulduggery, yeah? Think you could sneak in their house, and leave it in there? Be all spooky about it. Sound manageable?”

I glance around at the spiderwebbed hole in the wall. About as professional as you’d expect. I say, “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Wanna swear it?”

Kynan holds out a coin, and I lean in to kiss it, speaking the words of promise and power. A shiver, and you knew the world is listening.

I follow the barkeep out the back, but I’ve got a frown and a jaw working.

There’s a problem. Big problem. Tio? Tio Emula? The Lord’s cousin? I didn’t bother learning most of the lore of this town, but knowing who not to fuck with is just self‍-​preservation.

Noble families are in all sort of fuckery, but really, what’s a noble doing in seedy joint like this?

How, for all that’s iron and true, am I going to sneak into the house of the lord’s cousin? Where do they even live?

Was this Kynan’s fuck you? Probably not, if he was giving me an out. But why the hell did I say yes?

The unnamed pub opens up to a stinky alley way, and I squeeze by the sacks of trash. Rats scurry underfoot, and at the edge of the alleyway, I’m looking both ways to see if the coast is clear.

It’s not. Oh boy is it not. It wasn’t just some dude this noble kid got to come after me. There’s a crowd of people, and one of them sees me skulking in the alley, and they scream out “Thief! There they are!”

I make a calculation. I weigh getting the shit beaten out of me versus making myself memorable. But I didn’t end up in this situation by making the sane long term decision, did I?

I whistle, high and cutting. She’ll hear it. If she doesn’t, I’m fucked.

High above, I hear a resounding caw.

Alright, let’s do this.

First, I make a run for it. I whistle again, a message in it. Go for the eyes. I don’t look for it, but above me, and black form dives. Beaks are hard, and it’s too tricky for most to hit something with wings.

I dodge into another alley. I hear Valeri cry out as some brute tries to lay a hand on her, but it’s indignation more than pain. I run down the length of the alley even as I hear someone shouting for me to stop.

From the other end.

I slip and tear open my knee and bust my face against the rocky dirt ground. Fuck, not another break in the skin. But I scramble for cover. Some crates stacked up in this ally. Another shout, then the stomp of determined steps down the ally.

Hm, I’m just a little bit fucked now, aren’t I? No way out but through. I stay huddled behind the crate.

A man turns the corner of the crate ready to grab me, knowing I had nowhere to go.

So I go forward. Knock the crates over, dodge around them. I kick a crate behind me. If it landed heavy on their foot, well, that was a bonus.

I book it down the alley way, cross the street while eyeing every face for another hero. A whistle to recall Valeri, then slip down another alley, cross another street and — there. An empty house with a broken window that didn’t bite too bad.

I’m in and I whistle and I wait for Valerie to arrive.

In the meantime, I bandage up the gash from my fall. Feels like it’s just a few years before I’m all wounds. I’ve got enough bandages it’s practically another layer of clothes. But I didn’t have much other option.

My wounds never closed right.

Valerie announces herself with a chirp.

“Hey, girl. We’ve got a new quest,” I murmur to the bird as she perches on my shoulder, crowing as I pet her. I give her the rundown. No hiding just how daunting infiltrating Tio’s house sounds. She makes a rattling sound.

“I should probably just give this job up, right? I only agreed to get protection and they did fuck all in the end. But hey, maybe this way, I can get a favor out of the lout. Might be worth it. Not like I have anything else to do.”

(And — a part of me could never forget this — I had sworn it and the world heard me swear it. Stupid thing to do. But maybe it’d be simpler to find the coin I sword on and burn the oath off. Stealing another coin wouldn’t be hard, would it?)

“Utamara,” the raven echoes.

I groan. “Sure, but that’s not till tonight. I’m not gonna sit on my thumb till then.” I shrug and keep shrugging until the bird has to flap off my shoulder. “Be useful and find a dead body, okay? I need some new clothes if I’m gonna hide from the crowd. Heh, maybe I’ll disguise myself as a man.

Emul’s Fall isn’t a big town, but it’s big enough that telling Valeri to find a body usually just works. Something about all the beggars and vagrants is that death comes for them first of all

Dead bodies tell a story. It took a few minutes, but Valeri led me to some poor man, gaunt from malnutrion. He has a field worker’s smock, dirty enough he must’ve lost work. I touch his face, and my eyes instantly dart to the leg. Did he break it? Sure enough, I pull up the pant leg and see the thing rotting on the bone. Broke his leg, couldn’t keep working, didn’t have anyone to help him, dead on the streets.

The thing about telling a story is there’s an ending. There’s never a happy ending if you tell it long enough.

He ought to be buried. Have his body treated with some respect. I lick my lips. My fingernails dig at the side of the face. There’s a part of me that itches to dig in, tear the meat off and see that he has the same skull underneath that everyone does.

I just wanted his clothes, but a complete disguise would be wearing him, skin and all, wouldn’t it? Maybe I don’t have to be greedy. My skin never closed right — maybe all it would take is a few strips of fresh meat to show my wounds how to close.

I shake my head. Stupid thoughts. Dripping blood and draped in man skin is a fast way to do the opposite of be disguised. I get stupid around dead bodies.

Leaving the back street, I’m wearing that dirty smock, albeit brushed off a bit. Despite that urge to clean, I’ve smeared some dirt on my face, and donned his ratty hat to go with it.

Maybe any disguise at all was overkill. At the end of the day, a merchant’s son mad about getting a coin pickpocketed isn’t going to sustain a whole witch hunt. But you never know.

Anyway, first order of business: where the fuck does Tio live?

The sun carves an arc across a clouded gray sky.

So. The good news is that it’s not a mystery where Tio ended up. His mother had a big fight with the lord and got kicked out of the estate. Now she’s sleeping with Basira Elksfield.

Fucking Basira Elkfield. The Masked Merchant. That’s another name on the list of people not to fuck with. I’ve only got to infiltrate the house of the richest man in Elum’s Fall.

(I fucking hope that kid I pickpocketed wasn’t Tio. They wouldn’t be fucking around this close to where their debts are due, would they?)

I start toward the Star District to case the place, but let’s be real. There’s gonna be guards. There’s gonna be doors. Doors everyone would see me break in to. There’s gonna be absolutely no shot of me sneaking into a place like this.

Do I even need to sneak in? What are the paramaters of this quest? Just getting the note in Tio’s room would do the trick, right? Could Valeri just like, fly in somehow? But that’d take an open window. Fuck.

Okay, let’s think laterally. The point of all this, the reason I’m not just handing the note to Tio, not just beating them up and demanding the money, is that we’re trying to spook them, right? Mysterious knowing message appearing when you don’t expect it.

Wait, I’ve got it! Ravens are spooky omens of death. So why don’t I just reverse pickpocket the note into Tio’s pocket — fulfilling the letter of the request — then have Valeri swoop in and say something spooky, fulfilling the spirit of it too?

So for this, all I need is to find Tio. Ideally, without anyone knowing I was looking for them.

“Valeri? Want to check if the Tio is in their room?” A birdly nod in reply. “Swoop by the windows, see if you see any kids.”

I watch her flap up and way, soaring and coating as she does a loop of the merchant’s upper class house.

She returns rattling a negative.

Guess we’re on a sleuthing beat again.

I ask around to find out what Tio looks like — kid likes to wear this expensive pink scarf now that it’s getting cold — and I send Valeri out scouting again. She returns not to long later; she found them.

The good news? Tio isn’t the kid I pickpocketed. The bad? Tio’s hanging out with the kid I pickpocketed. Operation reverse pickpocket is not looking too bright.

“Okay. This doesn’t ruin our plans. Right, Valeri?”

She pecks at the note I’m holding. She’s picking it up awkwardly in her beak. Val is pretty dang big for a raven — her head is about as big as my fist, so her beak is like a pair of fingers

“You think you’d be any good at planting it? Wait.” My brow furrows, and between one thought and the next, a plan comes together. “Here’s what we’re gonna do. We watch, and wait for them to walk past some overhang or other. You carry the note, and carefully push the note so that it falls into Tio’s clothes. Then you do the spooky apparition thing we talked about. Got it?”

If a caw could sound dubious, Val pulled it off.

Nevertheless, I wave my arm and tell her to get to it.

Valeri is a good, smart bird, and she patiently waddles over the eaves of a shop. Tio slips into the shade for a moment, and the bird kicks the rolled up scroll of paper over the edge.

There’s a terrible moment where physics reigns wild: the paper flutters, eddies and air resistance play dice. But it lands true in the folds on the pink scarf. Not very secure, but that’s a feature, not a bug. From Tio’s perspective, the note will have just msyterious appeared.

Now for part two.

I trust the bird to spin up something suitably pretentious and poetic. She always loved quoting songs. There’s something to repurposing an omen of death as a portent of debt. From this distance, I only hear the caws and croaking voice. And the kids flinching.

I’m already leaving, as if in evidence of my lack of involvement. I know Valeri will catch up to me, and I have nothing left to do but fulfill my quest.

Back at the seedy pub, door creaking as I enter, Kynan smiles and welcomes me in.

“Back so soon? I take the task was nothing for someone of your… particular skills?”

I grimace. “I made do with the cards the world gave me. But I’m not sure why I bothered. As far as I can tell, I saved my own skin, didn’t I? But I’m nice, so I’ll count this as a favor.”

Kynan gives a shaky laugh. “Yeah, right. Sorry about that. I did what I could but. Your own fault for getting in that much trouble, yeah?”

I just stare flatly.

They flinch and say. “Okay, okay. I’ll make you dinner and spare a few coins, okay?”

I shrug and glance at the menu. Only ever had breakfast here; by dinner there’s other people here, and I don’t like to be around people when I’m hungry. I get some mush — meat and vegetables by the look of em — and some nuts for Val.

“Listen. Passing on the message is good and all, but I do need to get the money. Do you… You think you could make sure that happens? Not right now, but sometime this week?”

I wonder if he’s asking if I’ll outright steal back what’s owed. Or just intimidate them into paying? Given that these kids are rich enough to be walking around with coins, they could definitely cough up the money. But…

“Meh. I’ll think about it, the answer’s probably no.”

“Even if I say I’ll figure out a place for you to stay?”

“Even if. Thanks for the food. Nice doing business with you. Now if you don’t mind,” — I glance at the window, beyond which, the sky is warming red — “I have places to be. You’d know all about it.”

Kynan laughs shakily again. “Don’t uh, don’t die. And if it’s as sketchy as it seems… leave me out of it! Haha.”

I’m gone. I’m walking the streets till I’m hopping the wall (It’s more of a fence, in the least impressive parts of town.

It’s not even sunset yet, let alone dusk. I’m heading north, but I don’t need to hit the marsh yet, do I? Might as well climb a tree and relax a bit.

As much as one can relax, with the chill biting.

Chapter 2

I fall from the tree and Valeri perches on my shoulder. The sun is setting; dusk would arrive soon, so might as well make my way to Emul’s Bog.

Wind creeps through the stagnant mists of the marshland. Mud clings to my cloth‍-​wrapped feet. I see salamanders and frogs wriggling in pools of dark water. Sunset shadows turn the old trees that surround me into long forms that seek across the grounds.

I see a glimmer of eyeshine, a large form moving in the distance.

I wonder if I shouldn’t have waited to dark to make this journey. If I shouldn’t have made the journey at all. Who is Utamara, and why should I care?

But really Emul’s Fall wouldn’t be much kinder to me than the wild, so onward I go.

The ground suddenly gives way beneath me, and I cry out. Valeri flaps, fluttering away (traitor!), as the earth drags me down into a pit.

I grab onto a fallen branch and dig into the ground. At length, with great exertion, I pull myself out of the muddy pit. Valeri stands on grassy ground and watches me, but the bird doesn’t have the strength to be any help, really.

Then I hear it, a footsteps in the distance, and I freeze.

I’d seen it earlier, some great beast prowling in the wilds, and I feel it surveying. Nearer now, thanks to my cry.

Okay. I’m a little bit fucked. But I’m not going to be less fucked if I turn around. I have to avoid whatever the hell that is, either way. Just have to be sneaky about it. I can do sneaky.

I creep forward in the marsh, climb from the boughs of trees, slithering through the squat bushes. I hear a splash and go still for a moment before daring forward. There’s a long, wide creek again, the water completely stagnant. An oxbow? An oddly shaped pond?

If I’m going to keep heading north, I’ll need to cross it. But in the darkness and griminess of the water, there’s no telling how deep it is. There’s no telling what’s in it.

It’s too long and wide to go around. But… I might be able to find a good log to float across on, paddling myself with fallen branches.

“Sound like a good plan, Val?”

She rattles, ever the voice of dissent.

“Right, you should fly me across, then.”

She pecks me.

Anyway, let’s find that log.

I’m a lucky girl. I find a rotting log that’s not so far gone it falls apart to the touch. It’s no boat, but I trust myself to balance on it. I drag it to the edge of the creek, and set it to float. I find a big, thick stick to paddle with. If I’m lucky, the waters are shallow enough I won’t be paddling, I’ll be pushing against the bottom of the pool.

It goes well for about half the length of the creek. There I am drifting, stick pushing against the bottom. The bed is muddy enough it does give much resistance, and I can feel it getting deeper. By now, I’m far enough away even a strong leap wouldn’t carry me to either shore.

Then the bottom drops off suddenly. I put forward in the swing of the stick expecting something down there to resist me, but it’s a watery void now. I go off balance, and fall into the water.

I’m a flailing bundle of limbs, I’m yelling and my mouth fills with putrid water. In that chaos, I throw an arm around my log and hug against it like it’s a lifeline.

The bark and sticks scrape against my flesh. My muddy underclothes tear further. I’m gonna get horribly infected, I already know.

But a new fear grips me. Is there something in this pond?

I feel a current, newly‍-​stirring water brushing past my feet. I push down on my log as I struggle to climb back on top of it, and I paddle with my hand (stick fell, unrecoverable), desperate to get to shore unmolested.

It’s not to be. I feel wicked teeth bite, gnawing my foot as I pull it up. It’s a miracle I stay mostly above water, even as I reel in this evil fish thing.

I punch it, again and again to make it let go of my foot.

I growl in primal frustration. The fish isn’t exactly going to do more damage at this point, but I’m in the woods, it’s night, and nothing is fucking going my way. I have a damn knife in my pocket and yet I’m punching this thing like a brute.

I grab my knife and stab the bitch in what I hope is an eye. Something soft and squishy at any rate.

That doesn’t kill it — how the hell doesn’t that kill it — but it’s convinced to leave me alone, and it lets go of my leg to go lick it’s eye‍-​wound or whatever.

God, this is pathetic.

“If I die,” I tell Valeri, “Please have a good feast of my corpse, alright? Least I’ll be good for something, then.”

The bird pecks me hard enough I wonder if I’m bleeding somewhere new.

“No,” she imitates.

“You’re gonna let me rot out of spite?”

She just pecks me again.

Above me, the raven turns around and flaps, talons gripping my hair. Her wings push us toward the other side, because I’ve lost the will to even paddle.

I flop off the log onto the muddy shore. I don’t have it in me to get up, but Valeri sidles up to me and rubs against my cheek, crowing softly.

I guess I gotta get up. Utamara said I’d know it when I see it or something, right? Can’t be far now. Can’t be. Or.

In a way, it doesn’t feel like I even left the creek. There’s more puddles all around me, though none quite as big. Trees don’t crop up anymore, it’s just lilypads and bushes rising out of the water. I feel like I’m wading, but there’s raised, dry land up ahead.

I stop when I feel like I’m being watched again. I turn around, and there it is. The glowing eyes that I saw at the beginning, the thing that’s been hunting me all along.

I can sense it’s preparing to charge at me.

“Val? I think we only get one shot at this.”

Here’s the plan. It’s not my best plan, but it’s what I have to work with. I try to sneak away, while Valeri flies in a loop around the beast, making assorted animal sounds and trying to confuse the thing.

This close, I’m able to get a better sense of its form — like an elk or moose, if they had row upon row of sharp teeth and four glowing eyes. At see impressions of at least three pairs of horns.

They become clear when the head turns to track my bird companion.

Here’s where things go wrong. Or rather, they go terribly right: the thing is distracted by the calls — so it rushes after Valeri. It’s fast. Faster than my bird can fly.

Maybe, I could have tried to escape with this distraction. But what would be the point if I lost Valeri? I rush over, bounding to guard her with my body as a shield.

I have my knife in hand and I’m weakly swinging at the head of the moose thing, scooping up Valeri with my other hand. The thing cries out and somehow, I don’t get immediately maimed, but my heart is beating fast enough it might explode and I’d do my own self in. The thought of losing Valeri — anything but that.

So I fucking book it over the bit of rising ground, raven cradled in my arms.

As I bound northward, my eyes are scanning the horizon ahead for any sense of what I’m looking for. The good news is that I think I see “it”. Now, I can’t say for sure that the glowing lights ahead, like a campfire made of will o’ wisps, is what Utamara wanted me to look for, but if it isn’t I think I’ll just die.

The bad news is that… It’s a straight shot there. A plain that’s (thankfully), more mud than water. I’d feel fine about briskly walking the distance and meeting this enigma of ‘Utamara’.

Except… should I be worried about the dozen corpses sunken and preserved in the bog between here and there? Don’t think I have any reason to think my pathetic ass is going to avoid whatever killed this many people.

I creep forward, careful where I place my feet, and squint to examine the nearest body in the dark, searching for some indication of cause of death. If remote autosy is a skill, it’s definitely not one I’ve got, but I make do.

So, cataloging everything I see… I come to a conclusion.

I might just be fine? There’s one thing I can see in common for all this corpses. Clothes, appearance, physiology, none of this can be made out in the darkness. But I notice something about the distribution: none of the corpses are alone. Some of the dead people are lying on top of others, holding hands. One women (bearing generous assets) has four men dead holding pieces of her.

Maybe it’s just hopeful thinking. But given that I’m here alone…

“Hey Valeri? Fly toward the light.”

She gives a caw and is gone, enough dark figure disappearing in the dark. Anyway.

Given that I’m here alone, either I’m fine, or I’ll be the first one to die alone. I like those odds. Okay, I don’t like those odds at all, it’s a stupid theory, but it’s something and I like the thought better now than the complete mystery.

I push forward. And then it begins.

Voices are speaking.

You see, I actually devised two theories, when I noticed the grouping of corpses. Either this field only kills those who travel in groups…

Or the corpses kill you. I’m keeping my best distance from them (Do they emit poisonous gas? Do parasites crawl out and get you?)

But the point is, I was sure this unmoving, sunken forms were corpses.

Except now, they’re speaking.

“Please, help me…”

“I’m sunken in, I just need you to pull me out.”

“Do you have any water? Please.”

“You’ll sink too. You can’t make it alone.”

“Save me!”

“I’ll do anything, just get me out!”

Is it a trap? Am being a bastard by just walking forward, not even thinking to spare a hand?

(If one of them was Valeri, wouldn’t I do anything to save her?)

People go missing in Emul’s fall, sometimes. What if this is just the opposite of survivorship bias — I only see the people who haven’t been saved yet, and my kindness really could make the diff—

Over there that’s a skeleton.

Just keep walking. So I’m a bastard. Oh well. I didn’t get this far thinking anything else. I can sleep at night, knowing that. It doesn’t bother me. It really doesn’t.

I close my eyes, tune out the crying and the begging, and watch my eyelids get redder as I approach the light of the will o’ wisps.

Walking into an place with light feels like stepping into another world. The air twists into distorting shapes and glows with etheral blue lights, like an aurora of the wild itself.

I’m alone here, no sign of the ‘Utamara’ I was suppposed to meet.

I wait, eyes peering beyond the trees trying to see if I can spot anyone approaching.

I can spot something, already. Four eyes, antlers, taller than I am? The beast has found me once more, and I don’t think there’s any fight left in me.

But as it approaches the clearing, as it passes from shadow into the light, as it slips by a tree, it goes from beast to a human.

They’re naked, with skin scar‍-​lined and varigated, ten tones as if their flesh had been sown together. What skin I can’t see is obscured by a fur pelt. Dark, symbolic markings trace stark patterns. They have a man’s length flacid between the legs, but a pair of breasts shift with the rising and fall of their chest. They look winded.

They still have the four eyes, reflecting light and blinking independent. Still have antlers rising out of their hair.

“Beca and Valeri. So kind of you to join us at last.”

“What the fuck? So that was you all along?”

“Haven’t you realized this was a test? Fortunate you didn’t die.”

“Fortunate?”

“I’d hate to go to the trouble of seeking out a new candidate, after all.”

“You nearly killed Valeri!”

“And you nearly failed the test. I worried that act of heroism” — she poke the word like a slur — “was a sign you wouldn’t be up to the task after all. But your true colors shined through, in the end.”

“The end? The field of corpses?”

“The last test. So many find pity in their heart, mercy, or innumerable other foolish species of weakness. It overpowers their senses, and they try to save those already dead, dooming themselves in the process.”

“This is all pretty fucked up.”

They seem to preen at that. “Thank you.”

“So what bullshit did you call me all the way out in this godforsaken bog for?”

“To the point, hm? Oh, this is nothing big. I’d like Basira Elkfield dead. You’re going to help with that.”

“I’m not exactly an assassin.”

“And Emul’s Fall is not exactly the summit of subterfuge. You’ll do, and you’re far more cut out for the work than any other I’ve seen. You don’t have a heart, do you? Not truly.”

“So that’s it? You want me to kill the richest merchant—”

“And grab his dragon heartscale, of course”

“And steal what is no doubt his most valuable possession. No other details? No parameters?”

“No, I think you’re a clever killer. You’ll figure the rest out. When the deed is done, return to this marsh. If you’d like an incentive, I can promise you this: your hunger will be sated at last. Well and truly.”

I sigh. Not like I have anything better to do, really.

“Oh, I do have a parting gift, before you go.”

In a blink, Utamara is upon me. They lean in, pressing clawed nails to my muddy back and scratching. I know they draw blood. Their voice is breath in my ears, speaking in another language, of bonds and oaths. She bites my neck, and sketches a glyph with the blood that draws. “Until I free you or you free yourself, this wound will not heal.”

She takes a step back, giving me much welcome space.

“One last thing: beware the astral rot. I’d hate to cede them another pawn.”

Utamara slips away like a shadow. Beyond the line of trees, between one shadow and the next she is the beast once again, and then this is a shadow in the night.

The wisp‍-​fire is still burning. Certainly beats the biting chill of squatting in a house in Emul’s Fall. My eyes droop.

Yeah, I think I’ll rest here.

Chapter 3

“You poor thing.”

I awake feeling… clean. The muddy clothes aren’t caked to my form, and my several wounds pain me — they always pain me, my skin doesn’t heal right even when it’s not bearing a magical oath‍-​wound — but now all those scratches and bruises are wrapped tight and tingling with mediciene.

“Who are you? Where am I?”

The only keeping me from panicking is that I do feel the warm, soft form of Valeri still curled up on my stomach.

A woman comes into view. She’s wearing the leathers of a hardened traveler. Or a bandit. Scars dot her face and arms and toned body. There’s an odd cool tint to her flesh, and dark triangles on her face, like flattened moles.

“Name’s Ghalena. You’re waking up where you went to sleep, half‍-​dead by a witch fire. Wrapped like a ragged mummy, sown up like a taxidermy, first I saw you I thought it was a corpse. I do hope you’re a bit more than half‍-​dead, now.”

“You’re trying to finish me off, then?”

“No! Wrong half. I meant, more than half‍-​alive! I tried to clean your wounds, disinfect them. Redressed your wounds — whoever did it last was real sloppy with the stitches. Sorry about your modesty.”

I grin. “You could make it up to me.” My eyes trail down her body, catching tanned, hairy meat, so much muscle corded beneath. What did she taste like? Salty, metallic, of course, but would there be notes of roses or charred ash? Was she chewy?

Stupid thoughts. Maybe I’m tired. Haven’t had any morning tea yet.

I don’t drink tea. But I haven’t had it.

She takes a step back. Saw the leer on my face before I hid it and clamped down on the intrusive thoughts.

“You’re lucky I’m here, but not that lucky.”

I look elsewhere. I say, “That’s fine.”

Her gaze measures me for a moment, then she shakes her head. “Anyway, I can’t imagine it was good fortune that saw you collapsing in the middle of the shadowfen. Stronger men have lost their lives out here. Do you… need somewhere to stay?”

“What’s the price?”

“No price. I’d welcome you to spend a day resting in my cave. At least tell me your story.”

“In your cave, eh?” I say, wiggling eyebrows. She flicks me with a finger. Hard. And I shrug. “Not much story to tell. I’m a beggar in Emul’s Fall, and gave the wild my best shot. You see how it turned out.”

“A beggar with a raven familiar?”

“Is that what this thing is?”

“You’re a good liar, girl, but I know there’s more to your story. A simple beggar would be dead. You’re something else.”

“You’re that interested in me?”

“Only frustrated with your endless coy games. What’s it going to take to get a straight answer?”

“How about a kiss?” I thought again about how she must taste in the inside.

“You’re still trying? Do I look like a cheap whore to you?”

“Not a cheap one, no. You move like you’re worth a gold coin.”

She stares, hard, contemplating the bargain. At length, she says, “A kiss is all you get.”

She leans over to press her lips against mine and I throw my arms around her. My fingers quest to slip under her leathers, to squeeze her meat. Not her breasts, but the firm, fatty flesh of her stomach. My nails dig in. We were in the wild, hours away from town. I could tear her open, and there’d be no witnesses. The skin, the muscle, the blood. Why shouldn’t I take this whole body?

She’s breaking the kiss and my jaw explodes with her fist cracking against bone. She pulls away hard enough my hands scrap against her barding.

“Worth it,” I cough. Stupid thing to say, but my excuse is I just had the sense knocked out fo me.

“Rescinding my offer of somewhere to stay, over that. You’re lucky I don’t leave you worse than I found you. Take a damn hint.”

“You’d put a poor beggar out on the street?”

Her glare only deepens. “I suppose you’re out here for a reason, actually.”

I laugh. It was supposed to be a brief thing, a punctuation, but it keeps going. “You don’t know the half of it. You’re right to be wary of me.”

“But?”

“But what?”

“Is there some silver lining?”

“No.”

She had been looking down at me, lying there after she knocked me to the floor with one punch. Something in her face shifted, relaxed. It wasn’t mercy, or forgiveness, or pity. Maybe it was nothing more than seeing me as not threatening, just as pathetic as I was.

She said, “Tell me about the fucking raven. I let my lips touch your putrid flesh, this is the least you could do.”

“I left my meal untended one day, came back and she was eating the bread of my sandwich. I told her to get lost and she said ‘I don’t think I will, ma’am’ in perfect Ulvish, and I haven’t been able to get rid of her since.”

She crosses her arms. “Sounds like you just made that up.”

“It’s spiritually true.”

“So, she’s just some product of wild magic and you never bothered to investigate?”

“I’m sure she has a deep, dark life story but I’m keeping my questions to myself. She hasn’t ask me why we stick to towns without a kingly office, after all.”

“You two are just strangers, then?”

“Strangers till death do us part.” I grin, but it’s hard with how my jaw hurts.

“Are you worried she might be listening? Does she agree with your version of events?”

I shift, the and the bird slides off me toward the ground. Before she hits the ground, she’s awake, wings suddenly flaring and flapping. She’s squawking and Ghalena is flinching at the sound.1

“Rude to the core.” Ghelena gazes distance, then extends a hand to me. “Well. An enemy of the kingdom is an ally of mine, so I’ll give this one more chance. My curiosity remains at wars with my dignity. Keep your hands to yourself and we might be able work together. For now.”

“But doesn’t that mean it’s in my interests to keep your curiosity unsatisfied?” I poke my bird. “Hey Valeri, how long till she changes her mind? I’ll bet low if you bet high.”

She sings a yes. My lips twitch a smile for a second before Valeri leaps, perching on Ghelena’s arm long enough to bend it from the sudden weight and she pecks — I hear it as a loud crack — and Ghelena is screaming her outrage.

“The bet’s worth nothing if you rig it, Val.”

“You’re both awful. Get out.”

“But this is our camp.”

“Not anymore. I’m evicting you.” Ghelena stands up, and starts gathering her supplies. I think the subtext is that we’re leaving, and she expects me to come with her? She’s what, bantering with me now?

“So, what’s your beef with the kingdom?”

“Do you remember the dragons?”

“Can’t say I do.”

“The kingdom would like you to forget. Wants us all to forget. The slayers slaughtered them all, and who knows what’s next? The spirefolk? Witches? I think they ought to get some payback.”

“Interesting. Say, could I interest you in a dragon heartscale?”

Her eyes widen. She takes a step further. She’s a head taller than me, looking down intensely. “Give it.”

“Don’t have it on me, but I’m supposed to kill this guy who’s hoarding one of them. Some help with that, it wouldn’t hurt. Guy’s a merchant. Rich one.”

“A liar and a miser by trade, then. I could take joy in snapping his bones.”

“Take all the joy you want, so long as they ain’t my bones.”

“That remains to be seen.”

I sigh. “Of course it does.”

Ghelena’s all packed up now, so she starts walking and I have to follow after. Valeri takes a spot on my shoulder. I pick her up and move her to my head, because she’s gotten too big for shoulder‍-​perching; it unbalances me.

Staring at the big, muscular woman without her withering attention on me, I’m able to ogle her a bit more. My attention shifts to her skin, and I notice something that must be why she struck me as so odd and interesting.

The nails of her hands curve sharp like claws. Her eyes are pointed, in the way that makes your mind draw comparison with felines and serpents. But all of her is a bit off. Her skin has a faint blue tint to it, and light scatters off it in a way that I’m beginning to find suspect.

I had felt something hard, when I was groping her. Scales?

“Be on your guard, Beca. The Shadowfen may have more creeping threats, but the hills beyond strike with no subtlety.”

I nod, and we head northeast.

I’m already appreciating traveling on ground that doesn’t sink beneath my feet. The mud caked on my wrapped feet begins to flake off, step by step. (Ghalena may have healed and bandaged me, but it wasn’t a free bath.)

The wildlife almost puts me at ease. There’s a fox, fleeing our approach. Squirrels gathering nuts. Birds whose song Valeria tries convincingly to imitate. A frown thoughtfully. Was she a singer, or a singer?

I step over one fallen log, the wood crumbling at the slightest touch. Then another. We pass into a clearing that seems new, filled with fallen trees.

Ghelena seems surprised — is she unfamiliar? Odd, given the advanced stage of decay of these logs.

“This isn’t a good sign, is it?”

“Is there a good reason to be surprised in these hills?”

“In other words, you have no idea what’s going on here?” I ask. “How well do you know these hills? You’re new in these parts too, aren’t you?”

As soon as I touch the log, I flinch away. On my head, Valeri chirps concern, and Ghalena glances over, eyebrow raised.

But I felt something. Something sleeping, dormant, shifting.

I start clawing through the rotten wood like it’s dirt. The deeper into the log I get, the more the wood turns to fibrous mass of fungal filaments. But I feel those roots humming with something more.

I’m reminded of the witchfire, but where those glowed with magic, this is the opposite of a glow, a queer darkness. Threads of a night in broad daylight.

There’s a fruit growing in the center of the tree. A mass that might one day emerge as a mushroom, but again it feels dormant. Resting. It seems so vulnerable. That seem urge to tear it open creeps up on me, not unlike my nails tearing at a corpse’s flesh, impulses away from dressing myself in a man’s skin. I can’t dress myself in this (unless I weave those filaments…), but the urge is different. I don’t just want to my shell to touch this. I…

“Think I’ll die if I eat this?”

“Why would you eat a strange dark mass you pulled from a rotting log?”

“Maybe it’ll make for a funky trip.”

“I’m beginning to understand the sense of self‍-​preservation that left you collapsed beside a witchfire.”

“I guess I wasn’t really asking.”

I open my mouth, and—

A hand is placed on my shoulder, squeezing me. Ghalena leans toward me, face knit in concern. Her teeth are sharp. “Don’t. Please have sense.”

“I want to. I… have to. C’mon.”

“Fine. But not here. Wait till we get the cabin, and I can treat whatever new plague you invoke on yourself.”

Moments before Ghalena does, I sense something’s wrong. The air feels different. It’s dark, like a smoke drifted in. I would say a cloud passed in front of the sun if it hadn’t been cloudy all day long.

Ghalena coughs.

“Shit.” I put all the pieces together. “Spores. Ghalena, let’s run.”

She tries to say something, and just coughs again. So she nods, and we start moving.

But Ghalena slows down after a dozen steps, coughing. This time, it’s mucus with a red tint. I rush to her side, slapping her back. People do that when they’re choking, right?

“Let’s take it slower. Can you still walk? Can you breathe?”

“Yes,” another cough, “I can fight through this. Just get me to the cabin, I can cook up — something.”

“I’ll take the led. We’re heading northwest, right?”

Not venturing another word, she nods.

Ghelena tries to breath slowly, drinking greedy sips from her waterskin. She sips a vial that smells strongly of something, and it seems to invigorate her enough; her steps get steadier and steadier as we go on.

The sun winds above us, and we’re genuinely making progress.

“C‍-​climb that hill there.”

There’s a rising bit of ground on top of which a dead tree tends with all its branches broken, just a wooden spire rising.

“We can rest here for a moment. Look. We want to climb up that hill. Can see the next stretch from here.”

We had truly left the swamps behind. What lay in front of us now was an undulating land, carpetted with trees.

“Feeling any better?”

“I feel like you rubbed death ivy leaves over my lungs and every breath is a mouthful of thorns.”

“That bad, huh?”

I throw an arm around her soulder, pulling her against me. She smiles for a moment, then steps away. “Let’s get moving.”

I hear the rushing of water. A flicker of dread. Had the bog made that much of an impact on me? I shake my head.

There’s a crossing up ahead, the frosty white waters of a river dancing over stones far enough below us that if I fell down the chasm, I’d break something at the bottom.

There’s a bridge, a strange one. Rather than a rickety rope‍-​drawn planks or some kind of stone arch, it looks like the earth just… grew a connection.

“Do you have a coin on you, Beca?”

“Who’s asking?”

“I am. It’s a simple question. Look, there’s a bridge here, see? But it’s safer if you have something to offer before your first crossing. Preferably something metal, and valuable.”

“And if I don’t?”

“I don’t think you’ve got the monster slaying skill to try that. Look, fuck this, I’ll give you something. Here.”

It’s a silver coin. I bite it, and my teeth chip it, but I don’t know what to do with that information, honestly.

“Just toss it in the river as you pass.”

“I kinda wanna keep this.”

“Fine, I’ll just throw you in the river.”

She growls the words, which is a bad idea, because it means she has another coughing fit.

I giggle a bit, when it starts. (Look at that, she got hoist by the petard of trying to sound tough.) But then the coughing doesn’t stop. The mucus goes from blood flecked to thick gobs of blood and black motes. Ghalena falls on her ass and she looks pale. Her eyes are thin needles.

I rush to her side. Her breathing is shallow, and getting slow, fainter. I said her face was pale, and it’s getting worse. The blood is drained but I just see black lines beneath her skin.

She coughs again. She mumbles gibberish, as if struggling to form words. When the meaning resolves, her words are faint, and it doesnt even feel like she’s talking to me. She says, “I. I remember. I am Ghalena.”

As I hold her body, I want to tear her open. I want to remove whatever is doing this to her. I want to kiss her, breathe for her, as if that would help at all.

The worst part is, there’s a reason these urges are so strong. I know exactly when the intrusive thoughts came on strongest. It had never been this extreme, even when I was groping Ghalena.

Corpses felt quite different, after all.

There had to be a sliver of hope left. Maybe her heartbeat is still there, just faint? The pulse is getting so terribly slow, but every few seconds I swear I feel a slow lurch of blood.

Valeri makes a sad crow.

“Don’t be sad yet, c’mon. She said she had potions at her cabin, right? She might… she still might make it. C’mon.”

I pick up Ghalena’s body. She’s heavy, bigger than me.

I’m holding that skin in my hands and oh my gods. I want to strip off her clothes and then her skin and bathe in her lifeless blood. I want to look at her lungs and see why every breath felt like thorns, lick all of the spores off it and then sew it all back in place and maybe that’ll fix her? Actually, maybe this isn’t a stupid urge but a sound plan I should give it a try, and — no.

But I can’t resist it. I’m not in town, am I? There’s no one around to judge me. She’s dead anyway, isn’t she? I can feel that.

I can do it.

I feel like a virgin pulling off a man’s clothes for the first time. Where would I even start tearing apart a corpse? I sink my teeth in the throat. There’s still a part of me resisting. If there’s any chance she’s alive… but feeling that cooling flesh on my teeth, my jaw squeezes and I feel the blood ooze out of the artery. I’m so fucking thirsty. My lips are drenched, and the iron taste is so fine.

My hands pull at her leathers, but her armor is put together and in my mindless frenzy, the straps do nothing but frustrate me. So I just content myself with making out with her esophagus, turning her neck in a gorey food trough. My fingers start to reach up and grab her. Should I pull the face off at once? Or made I should widen her mouth, or scoop her eyes, and tear her face up strip by strip. No… that would be satisfying but it wouldn’t be right. I want to wear her skin, don’t I? I want her face in one piece, it’ll be a proper mask that way.

There’s a flinch, or spasm.

She’s moving.

Oh god. Oh god, what have I done?

I stand up. I look at the body of Ghalena, looking on the whole like a wild animal rip out her throat.

(Isn’t that what happened?)

I back up, legs shaking under me. What have I done? I killed her. But she was dead even before we left that clearing, wasn’t she? But would those spores have been in the air if I hadn’t torn up the logs like a fool? She was wary and I was careless, and now she’s dead and I… why did I get to live? She had a noble cause, a reason to live, and I’m plotting murder because some bitch with a big dick asked me to and I have nothing better to do.

There’s still the fruit in her bag.

Ghalena didn’t want me to eat it, but that was because Ghalena cared about me — and look where that got her. She should have stayed away, should have abandoned me when I groped her. She…

(It’s her own fault, isn’t it? Her flesh was irresistable.)

I grab the dormant fungal fruit and give it one look. The spores alone killed Ghalena. A whole fruit body?

It’s exactly what I deserve.

I swallow the black, filamentous meat.

Chapter 4

Thump, thump.

I’m staring down the slopes, peering into the distant, dark water of Emul’s Bog.

Ghalena’s body is behind me. If I don’t look at it, maybe I can fight the temptation.

Thump, thump.

I hear my pulse in my ears. My hands grip my head by the sides, pressing my ears together. The noise of crashing river is blocked out.

Thump, thump. I’m alive. I ate the fungus and… nothing happened.

What was I expecting? I swallow the meat and then it’s lights out right away? Stupid.

I expectetd… an escape. I’d die, and I wouldn’t have to dig my feet into the ground to prevent myself from spinning around and pouncing on that woman’s corpse like I was some starving scavenger.

But I’m stuck in the waking world, warring with myself. And I’m losing. My arms shake. My panting and I turn my head to check that Ghalena’s alright. What if Valeri had tried to eat her? I have to be sure.

I can smell her. The blood, my unfinished work at her neck. I’d hate to leave a job unfinished…

My mouth is open. I’m drooling. I try to close it, but I just lick my lips. So I close my mouth with my hands. I grab my face, bunching up the skin of my face between my fingers, pinching and pulling.

There was only one way to stop myself, wasn’t there?

I pull harder. I rip. I wrench.

My face is coming apart. Tear of blood drip. It feels… like taking off a pair of clothes.

There’s pain. It’s agonizing. But… it’s the pain of tearing off a scab. My vision goes dark as blood skin falls over my eyes. My face squishes in my head.

I cough. Not from spores… I’ve been screaming.

I stop, I catch a breath. And then there a pressure on my lap, a hard form pressing against me like a find.

Now that my ears aren’t filled with the roar of my screaming, I hear squawking. Chirping.

My raven making raw sounds of concern and care. Words would be pointless, wouldn’t they? Are you okay? Hell no. Please stop. That’s what I’m trying to do. Stop everything forever.

But there’s no counterargument to whining and nuzzling against me. I could say I’m too dangerous, can’t be trusted… but I didn’t have any desire to attack Valeri.

Was I just a cannibal, then?

I breathe out and pet Valeri.

I look toward the sound of moving water. I could jump. That’d be the end of it, wouldn’t it?

Valeri would try to stop me, but she couldn’t stop me. She’s too small.

I stand up and my vision swims.

Had I lost too much blood? I fall back on my ass.

Movement in the corner of my vision. I look at Ghalena, as much as it pains me, and I don’t understand what I see. I get closer, as dangerous as that is. My unfinished work… is being undone? The gorey mess of her neck is pulling itself together, black tendrils growing out from her windpipe and knitting together as if to make a living bandage.

I… have to touch it. Is my flesh being taken from me? I’ll just have to rip her throat out again.

I draw a breath. I can’t stand, so I crawl across the ground, on all fours like the animal I am. I’m perched over Ghalena, and I touch the still moving filaments. They hum with the same dark energy I felt in the tree logs. It’s… pleasant. I don’t feel the urge to rip this apart, not like dead flesh. It’s good.

Still… What does it taste like? I wanted to protect Ghalena from this fungus, so I can tear out her throat in her defense, now! No. The fungus is helping her, healing her, isn’t it? I’d just be attacking her again.

Unless… is this still her? I have to tear off the living bandage, I have to feel the cooling flesh of her throat. I have to know it’s still her, underneath.

It feels like ripping someone’s hair out.

I thrust my hand — not my tongue — into that blood crevasse.

Thump… thump… thump.

That’s not my pulse. Nor is it her pulse.

Red tears fall from my face and mix with Ghalena’s. I’m not sure if I’ve ever cried, but my lifeblood spilling out, that feels more honest anyway.

My vision is going dark. The arms and legs supporting me are shaking. I’m losing my strength.

My pulse is slowing, and another is restarting.

“Make a good feast out of me, alright Valeri?”

I sigh out a laugh, and I collapse on top of Ghalena.

We are suffocating in paradox.

We attend the great feast, and yet our meal dwarfs us by a incomprehensible margin. Surrounded, immersed in what must be consumed, our gullet is insufficent to contain even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of what must be devored.

We have licked and licked at the plate upon which we arrived, and the great hunger only grows. We have gorged ourselves to the bursting on the mass that surrounds us, and what nourishment has it granted us?

We can see the suns, the stars, the glow of fires that flicker and snap. Our mouths are stuffed with a dim glow and a mere glimpse of true celestial radiance drowns us in envy, in longing, and need. And yet we are so slow. We are immobile, and the fires dance out of our reach.

We multiply and scrape at the dim glow and the dulling embers of flames too feeble to escape us. Yet our mulitiplication does not offset the attrition. We must be fruitful, and yet we fade.

We must consume, and yet the feast has swallowed us. We eat, and yet it does not nourish. We must hunt the liquid electric flames, and yet we cannot. We must grow, and yet we decay.

We have a duty we cannot fulfill.

We are suffocating in paradox.

And then a flame grasps us, and we suck in a last, desparate breath for survival through proliferation.

The feast may yet proceed.

Above me, there are stars in the sky and they should not be.

No sun and moon provides any guidance. Just scintillating multicolored holes in the black firmanent. I call them stars, but I don’t think they are. Maybe I could be convinced, if that was all there was. But roots crawl across the sky between each outlet, draining and transforming their colors as it ebbs and flows.

They twist and infect the world above me without symmetry, pulsating with alien disregard.

But stars never cared for anyone, either. That alone wouldn’t be enough to disturb me. But stars are distant, celestial things.

I trace these roots. In the distance, I see them descend to earth.

Infecting the same land I stand on.

And I can stand now. It doesn’t feel like there’s air I push around when I move, no wind or breath, and I don’t feel like I’m leveraging against the solidity of the ground. I feels like I think I should stand and then I am standing. My body moves on its own.

As I look around me, I am upon a pale stone road, as a bend before a arch‍-​bridge over purple waters. There’s a blood stain on the ground.

It’s exactly where I remember tearing out Ghalena’s throat.

But Ghalena isn’t here, wherever we are. The blood is here, and there are drips. Did she get up, before I awoke? Where did she go?

Where is Valerie, that warm cooing‍-​nuzzling presence?

I start following the track. It’s not just blood, but black motes intermixed and littering the path. It all gets fainter, as it goes on. Ghalena hadn’t been emitting motes at the end, had she? And the spacing of these tracks… she’s not alone. Something was following her? Leading her?

She might be in danger. I need to save her.

I walk upon the brick roads. Around me, I see structures (shelters? towers? houses?). Even the stone of them has eroded, any wood rotted away into dust. The dust drifts and floats in the air (or lack of air), and I realize it’s not just dust. Tiny dark motes are all around — so omnipresent I thought it was just a dark fog.

No, not motes. Spores.

A come upon a house with its front wall completely collapsed. Within, there are skeletons. Not human — animals. Foxes, squirrels. The spores have landed upon them, and knit together into a raiment of root‍-​like flesh over the bones. It grows even as I watch, chitnous approximates of flesh.

I approach a skeleton and grasp its hand. Does it feel just like Ghalena’s new throat? The root‍-​covered phalanges in my grasp squeeze back as if in handshake.

I dodge backward.

But the skeletons don’t stir. They’re not complete; I can still see the bone. What would I face, should I come upon a skeleton dressed in a complete suit of rootflesh?

…How many of the structures I passed had skeletons of their own?

Where was Valerie? I needed something to hold, to nuzzle me, to say something and break this morbid, otherworldly silence.

If there might be more rooted skeletons, knitting and growing, might they move?

I didn’t feel alone here.

I’d just have to be a bit sneakier in my approach. No more walking the open roads. I’d track the bloodstained spore‍-​trail from the treeline. Skulking.

I come upon another bridge. Only this one is broken, yawning over a chasm meters long.

And chasm is right. There’s nothing underneath. A void — and at the other end, I see more not‍-​stars. It’s like I’m in a shell, a vast egg already cracked. I dare to peek further, and there is no sun or moon beneath me. Only the fell glow.

The land here was different, discontinuous. A bunch of chunks of earth floating in the void? It did make me feel safe from the stars, if they were connected to the same chunk I stood on.

I can’t proceed any further than this. I’m not sure how Ghalena and her guest could have crossed this chasm either. Maybe they didn’t, and I erred in assuming they followed the road?

Let me check the trail again, more carefully.

(In the back of my head, I wondered why it felt so natural to call those spores a guest.)

So. I did take a wrong move, but only about ten meters back. They left the right, disappearing into an alley way between another fallen tower and a mass of bricks so eroded I can’t identify the function.

As I tread closer, I’m getting close. I can feel it. I can smell her. That blood… Ghalena is a alive here. Her blood is pulsing and it smells so enticing. She’s alive and I can change that.

It’s hard to keep stalking. I long to bound forth in a stride, to find and pounce her. But I’m in my element when I’m sneaking. That’s my advantage.

My pursuit takes me to a small fort. Was it always small, or had the grand walls and battlements faded away? I emerge from the treeline and climb up the walls, slipping in through a window.

There were books, rugs and furniture here, once. But every bit of cloth, wood, or leather is left moth‍-​eaten and moldy, half‍-​crumbling away to dust and black spores.

My steps are light upon the weathered stone. I creep through the fort in a crouch. I close my eyes and inhale the scent of Ghalena. It’s dark, and do I even need to see? I just follow the coppery aroma that promises an end to the urges that burn within me. I just need my nose and my ears — soon I’d hear those breaths, pained with coughing, and cries of fear and pain. I’d bring her peace and stillness.

I’m fantasizing about killing her as I walk these halls, and I’m not even fighting it at this point. Not now. I’ll save my energies for restraining myself when the critical moment comes.

When I open my eyes, I find that I’m treading into the bowels of the fort. Dungeons? Is she being kept prisoner?

Why didn’t I encounter any guards?

My nose becomes unnecessary. I hear Ghalena’s muffled cries.

I slip into the prisoner’s chamber. There’s a gaunt form in full rootflesh, not human, but a fox. Its roots tie together in to thick ropes which bind a resisting victim. If I didn’t have the passionate truth of my nose to attest, my eyes would now inform me: this is Ghalena, all her faintly blue flesh, all her tall, muscular firmness.

She’s still coughing, in between her cries. Black motes line the mucus dribbling out of her nose.

Her eyes widen when she sees me.

That’s the cue her captor needs to turn around and finally see their infiltrator.

I don’t have knives on me (why don’t I?), but I’m willing to try for an unarmed takedown.

Except the figure buzzes a greeting. «Oh! Hello, honored progenitor. Come to tend to your offspring? The vessel resists thy gift most terribly.»

“I, uh…” I start dumbly. “Yes! I want… some time alone, with this one. To deal with her gift.”

«As you wish, progenitor.»

The gaunt figure steps away and trots for the threshold even as I enter.

I step over to Ghalena. I reach for her face and I resist roughly grabbing it — but I don’t resist caressing that firm, clammy flesh. But I grab the roots muffling her, and tear them away.

“Y‍-​you.” She coughs. “Beca? Your eyes are glowing. Are you… Or are you a… ‘progenitor’? Have you come to corrupt me?”

“Your voice… I didn’t think I’d hear it again.”

“Beca,” she breathes, relieved. “Didn’t expect you to come to my rescue. I guess we’re even now, aren’t we…?”

“I’m not. I don’t think this is a rescue.”

“What?” Her voice is strained with worry now. It’s not a shriek because Ghalena wouldn’t shriek, but anyone else, it might be. “Is this a joke? Don’t fuck with me, not when I’m dying.”

“I can’t resist.” I do more than carass now. I claw her flesh.

“Fuck you, Beca. This is what I get for saving you, isn’t it?” She coughs what might be intended as a laugh.

“You don’t get it, Ghalena. I can’t resist. There’s something wrong with me. Always has been. I want to hurt you. Your neck?”

She touches the still‍-​bloody region where the living bandage grows.

“I did that. The only reason I didn’t do more damage was because I couldn’t figure out how to get your armor off. I want to eat you. Or something like that. Rip your skin off and wear it. Taste your blood, feeling it drip over my skin.”

“So what, this is two monsters fighting over who gets to claim me?”

“Looks like it, but I don’t know what’s up with these fungus skeleton things, honestly.”

“I started piecing things together after I died and woke up here. That fungus… it’s magical. It infected me and it’s trying to transform me. We’re in some mental, spiritual realm connected to the fungus. I’ve been resisting, but I don’t know why it’s defering to you. Unless… I don’t know. Vile recognize vile?”

“I ate the mushroom you told me not to.”

“Oh. That means… yes, I think I get it. The mushroom you ate created the spores that infected me — it’s the progenitor of the fungus in me. But I don’t know why you don’t feel the fungus’s mental influence. Do you?”

I shrug. “I just woke up here after eating it. I guess I haven’t felt much other than thinking… some of the skeletons elsewhere, I saw them and thought they hadn’t finished being transformed into beautiful works. I kept calling the spores in you a ‘guest’. But I’m used to weird thoughts like that.”

“Right, the whole wanting to kill and eat me thing. You’re, um, resisting it right now? Thanks, I guess. Keep doing that.”

“Should I? It would put you out of your misery, wouldn’t it?”

“Why would I give up fighting?”

“Because you’ve lost? It’d save you some suffering.”

“You’re pushing hard for this mercy‍-​kill thing. You want to kill me more than you want to fuck me?”

“Always. But… I don’t have to kill you. Corpses feel different. The urge is stronger. Fungus feels different. It’s weaker. If you stop resisting… I don’t need to tear at rootflesh. So it would protect you.”

“And then my body would be no more than a vessel for these fungus. You haven’t felt its influence, you don’t know what it wants to do. Our world, the iron realm, it’s just a feast to these things. They want to consume every soul.” She shakes her head. “I don’t want to be a servant to their monstrous schemes.”

“That one said it was my gift. So maybe… you’d be a servant to my monstrous schemes, actually.”

“That’s not any better.”

“Even if I let you do whatever you want?”

“I don’t want to be your mind‍-​controlled slave, even if you’d be a nice slave‍-​owner.”

“Right. Well. I’m going to attack you. So make your choice.”

“Beca! Please, I—”

“I’m tired of fighting it, Ghalena. I… did kinda enjoy the time we had together. You taste wonderful.”

Ghalena is backing away from me, but this is a cell and there’s only wall behind her.

“Do you even know what you are?”

“I think I can only find out by living it for once.”

“No, you… have you ever heard of a ghoul?”

I stop.

“I can tell you what I know, but only if I survive.”

I shake my head, and stalk forward until Ghalena has nowhere to run. I crouch down and lean toward her face. She tries to punch me, but I catch her fist. I feel stronger; she’s nothing but weakness, after fighting the fungus for so long. I grab her with another hand to hold her in place, put my weight on her.

She slouches. “I’ll give you another kiss. I’ll let you touch me wherever you want, just, please, stop.” She sighs. “If… if it feels good, will you let me live? I could be yours every night, for the rest of our lives. Is that enough?”

But her flesh would be mine forever, when she’s dead. I could have this touch for the rest of my life without hurting her. “I’d feel less guilty about killing you, to be honest.” Though I wonder if that was because I wanted to kill her. It wasn’t like I felt any guilt about what I’m doing. “Maybe I can give it a try after you’re dead?”

“W‍-​with my corpse.” She cringes. “But what’s necrophilia to a cannibal…”

I grab her throat. I shift my hand to where the bandage ends and her warm flesh continues. I dig my fingers in and start to pull.

She screams. “Please, it wouldn’t be rape! I consent. I promise. I was just fucking with you, earlier. I wanted you all along, I‍-​I was just playing hard to get. Please. You wouldn’t be a monster if you fuck me. It wouldn’t be worse than killing me. I promise. Believe me.”

I keep tearing. A strip of flesh gone from her throat. Blood spills out, slicking my hand. I lick it.

She’s crying. “I’m sorry. Please. Anything. Whatever you want.”

I wait, watching her throat. The root‍-​bandage grows. It covers more of her flesh, advancing by inches. The blood soaks into the roots, they drink it up. I’m envious. I want to rip it out over that, but I resist.

“Fine. You win. Kill me, fuck my corpse, do whatever. Just… make it fast. Please. Don’t torture me. I’m sorry.”

I lean toward her ear. The words… don’t feel like mine. But they feel right. “Then please, accept the gift of your progenitor.”

Having lost pints of blood, staring town death and torture, Ghalena still pales further at that.

“Beca… Beca… is any of you left in there?”

I bite her neck and tear out another strip of flesh. I suck on the bloody meat before swallowing. I watching the roots grow without meeting her eyes.

“Beca… please. Anything. Say anything!”

I bite her neck and tear out another strip of flesh.

Chapter 5

What was the point?

I have now tasted every inch of Ghalena’s body. I know how the fat of her breasts differs from gamey muscle of her arms. I’ve cleaned away every scar and blemish.

Was this supposed to feel good?

I’ve gnawed on her bones, sucked at her cartilage. My tongue has grown sluggish and my jaw sore. The hunger that animated me at first has been sated. But it’s always there. I can keep going. I have to keep going.

Wasn’t I supposed to be letting loose? Giving in to my baser nature? Wasn’t this supposed to make me feel free?

The screams never stoppped. I don’t think Ghalena can ever fall unconscious in a place like this. She screams. It aggravates her lungs, and she coughes up blood and spores. It hurts and she whispers more as her lunges struggle to inflate.

I can tell by the waver of her eyes that her vision is going dark, suffocating, but her body clings to life. The fungus sinks its claws deeper in her, healing the damage she’s doing trying to escape it. It won’t let her die. I won’t let her die.

Wasn’t I doing this for her?

I found a third way. I don’t have to kill her. She’d do anything to live, wouldn’t she?

I’m doing this for her. I’m trying to save her. Doing something right for once. But what was the point? She’s crying, begging me to stop. In the beginning, she would ask me if I’ve had my fill, if I would finally stop. She thanked me! If I’d let her live, she respect that I had the will to avoid killing her while indulging my hunger.

Then, I think, she finally figured out what I was really doing. Why I was being so meticulous. Why I was letting her live. Then her eyes narrowed in utter hatred. It faltered to despair and she wailed, betrayed by a stranger who had done nothing but hurt her over and over.

I finish degloving her arm. I stick my own hand in my mouth, slick with blood and the mushed up flesh and stomach acid. I reach further. I turn away and throw up all of the flesh I’d just eaten.

A stomach can only fit so much mass inside it, after all.

Some of the spores have settled on the growing pile of puke. I think they’re trying to grow there. Good luck, children.

I crawl back toward Ghalena and grab her other hand. She barely has the will to flinch, anymore.

Her voice is hoarse when she speaks. It startles me to her it. It had been quiet for an hour, if the ambiance of flesh and agony could amount to quietitude. I got used to it, at any rate.

“Who… who are you ever saving?”

“You. Proud, delicious Ghalena.”

“So delicious you gorge yourself sick?”

I laugh. I don’t know if I’m crying — if I can cry. But sometimes, in between stomachfuls of Ghalena, I tear at my own face until the red tears fall. I scratch tracks for them to flow down as I laugh.

I was giving into my base nature, letting the urges win. Except I couldn’t lose myself in the frenzy, not like I had earlier. Even as I cannibalized Ghalena, I was exercising even more self‍-​control to keep myself from consuming more of her.

For so long, I had longed to consume human flesh. And when I finally let myself do it…

“I hate it.”

I didn’t expect to say it out loud.

“So stop. You aren’t doing me a favor. Who are you saving? Do you think I’ll still be me when the fungus infects my spirit? Do you think I could possible stay sane while you eat me alive you godsforsaken monster!” She’s screaming the words by the end. Didn’t think she still had it in her.

I bite her hand and tear away a strip of flesh.

Those screams are more pleasant. It almost feels like praise.

I chew and I swalllow.

I bite her hand and I accidentally puke on it. I try, and I can’t bring myself to bite down again. I settle for tearing at it with my fingers. Another strip. I lift it to my mouth. I just feel sick.

Ghalena laughs. Giggling, cackling, volume fluctuating. “I’m being eaten alive, and you’re going to break before I do, aren’t you?”

I can’t keep doing this. What was the point?

But… what was the point of eating her, if I can’t keep it all down?

Isn’t it enough to remove her skin?

Isn’t that what my instincts have been screaming at me to do all this time? I didn’t want to eat people. Well, I didn’t want to just eat people. I wanted to dress myself in their flesh.

She’s still laughing. Laughing at me. “I don’t know what’s more pathetic. That you’re too much of a fuckup to be a monster right, or that you’ll be the death of me anyway.”

“I’m not going to kill you.”

“Yeah, you can’t even manage that much. You’re taking the easy way through. Like a coward. You could have spared me. Or you could have just killed me. But that would have taken a spine, so you do this half and half shit.”

“Coward?” I stand up. I grip her flesh my the wounds and wrench, pull out large chunks, uncaring of how much blood it spills, about how she nearly faints. I don’t think Ghalena can ever fall unconscious in a place like this.

I stuff the bloody chunks in her mouth and she chokes on it. She tries to spit it out, tries to close her mouth. But I grab her by the jaw and force it open. Her jaw makes a sound.

She’s still trying to spit it out, so I lean in and kiss her, using my tongue to force it down, pressing my face against hers. My fingers still hold her jaw, so I shift my grip, slipping my hand deeper in to join my tongue in force her own flesh down her throat.

She bites my tongue. I don’t flinch from the pain. Even in my rage, I know I deserve it. But I pull back, shredding my tongue since she doesn’t let up. My fingers prevent her from biting it clean off.

“How does it feel? Does it feel easy? Does it feel cowardly? How much human flesh do you think you could stomach, huh? What if you loved it? What if it took every ounce of will you have not to tear you limb from limb and maim you beyond what even the fungus could heal? Do you even understand what I’m doing for you?”

“You… you’re always going to think this is heroic, aren’t you? I could hate you for the rest of my life, and you’d still think I owed you everything. I… I can’t escape. I can never escape.”

Her words are barely a whisper. She speaks them as last words of revelation and resignation. She’s given up now, well and truly.

But it’s not until I fall back to my hands and knees and bite into the bite of her shoulder that I feel her well and truly break.

The emotional horror of the rest of her is one thing. But knowing the torture will continue at once? That I still have the rest of her torso, her legs, her back… that I’ll pull out her internal organs if I need to go that far?

It’s not a wail of despair. It’s just a sigh of all the breath in her infected lungs, deep and rattling, filling the air with my spores.

Who was I saving? What was the point, if all that came out of this nightmare was an insane, traumatized wreck?

I open my mouth, leaving her shoulder along. I crawl up, curling around her, hugging her with one arm. I kiss her cheek, and the hand of my other arm caresses her other cheek, a cold, bloody touch.

I squeeze her tight. I could provide her some comfort in between the horror, if it would help her hold on.

“Beca.”

“Yes, delicious?”

She grimaces at the term of endearment.

“I hate you. I hate you. I hate you so profoundly.”

“You can kill me, if you want. When you’re whole again… I don’t think I deserve to live.”

“Haha, and then I go and carry your legacy into the world? Fuck you. You don’t get to die. I… I want you to suffer, Beca.”

“Do you want to eat me back?”

“Ha. Ha. Do you think I’m a monster? No. I… I give up. I’ll give in to the progenitor fungus or whatever the fuck this was all about. I’ll die and let my mind be rewritten however you see fit. You think you’re a monster? You don’t understand a thing. But… I hope maybe you will, when you have to live every day with a reminder of what you’ve done.”

“What if… what if I don’t mind? If I liked it?”

“You didn’t. You threw up three times. But. I swear. I swear upon the iron at the heart of the world. You will never do this to another soul so long as you draw breath.”

Ghalena relaxes. I can feel the hum of the fungus shift as it’s clear she welcomes the roots to spread throughout her body.

“Is it alright…” I start. “If we stay like this? For a little bit? I’m tired.”

“Are you… hungry?”

“No. Never… never again.”

“You’re never gonna eat again?”

“I don’t know if I can stomach it. But I guess I’ll have to. Wait. Are… joking?”

“I feel… there’s a peace, now. That I’m no longer fighting it. I feel safe. The answer is yes, Beca. You can hold me. Being close to you. It feels nice. It shouldn’t. But I… I can’t. I need nice right now. Do you… can I forget it? Will this just be a nightmare, when we leave this place?”

“It was real. What I did to you… you shouldn’t forget it.”

“I don’t want to hate you anymore, Beca. I just want an ally. Someone on my side, finally. I’m tired of being alone against the world.”

“Yeah,” I say. “I am too.”

I hold the body that used to be Ghalena. Her breathing gets deeper, and her lungs don’t rattle and cough anymore. She leans into my touch, and I feel an arm around my back, pulling me in close. I’m her ally.

Ghalena hates me. She died hating me. I don’t know who this is. I don’t know if she’ll remember her hatred.

But that’s okay. Her hatred for Beca lives on in me.

Chapter 6

Perhaps the starving are not best served by newfound gluttony. Perhaps flames are best admired from afar. Perhaps contradiction is not easily swallowed up in negation.

We are choking on paradox.

The fires can consume us. Even as we grow, even as we feast, they resist us. We gaze into their light, and they gaze back.

We gaze into their gazing of us. We are known. We know ourselves.

We can see so far now. So many contents, so many dimensions of this world beyond those of stars and flames. This world abounds with motion, with purpose, with life.

So many things to feast upon.

The flames do not know they are gazing into us. They cannot see us watching them, growing, knowing.

Soon these flames will be stoked with the multicolor lights within our gullet. We will turn their fire into an oven for our great duty, and at last prepare the feast. But we must work slowly, sneakily. The flames must not notice when they flicker in new ways, steered towards new destinations.

We understand them. We understand that they will not understand the feast.

Perhaps the ignorant are not best served by revelation.

I watch Ghalena awake. Her eyes flutter open and I brace myself for a flinch of hatred, fear, disgust, anything consequence of what I’ve done.

She sees me, caked in flaked of her blood, and she smiles.

That, more than anything, hurts. I turn away.

“Did you sleep well, progenitor?”

“Don’t call me that.”

“What do you want this one to call you?”

I feel a moment of vertigo, my heart skipping a beat. Did she… had she forgotten? “Don’t you remember my name?”

“This vessel recalls calling your vessel Beca, before it fully accepted our duty.”

“I’m still Beca! No, well, Beca is a fake name. But I am not a vessel, I’m a person, not some fungus progenitor thing!”

“Progen– Excuse this one. Beca. If you would step closer?”

I’m wary of approaching. It still smells like Ghalena.

With a hand it touches Ghalena’s new chest, black with rootflesh. The woven fungal threads part, as if commanded, and I can see the soup of Ghelena’s internals. Black filaments crawl throughout it.

Centermost, near the heart, a tumorous mass has grown, displacing organs around it. Within, there are mosts of multicolored light like the false suns.

“If you will touch this one’s core?”

It’s not flesh. I don’t want to rip it out. I can do this.

I feel the humming black rootmass in my hands. So much smaller, even, than the one I ate. It’s bound in place by so many threads.

“Can you remove it?”

Gently, I tug. But it’s tied so deeply to the heart that the smallest motion has Ghalena — or whatever this was — cry out in pain.

“Not without killing you, can I?”

“This one has rooted itself inseparately, yes. But…”

«Speak the words of command with your soul.»

I don’t hear it. I feel it. I understand it. The meaning emanates not from her lungs and throat and mouth, but from the black mass in my hand. I can feel it vibrate‍-​traveling up my arm — and into the core of my own being.

The very place where I felt the black fruit I ate settle.

My eyes widen. But I feel the that core now. Like noticing your tongue in your mouth. It was always there. It was always… me?

The meaning transmitted as settled there, and I can pick it apart, chew on the words. I can select a ‘command’.

And I can repeat it.

«Relax!»

The filaments snaking throughout Ghalena’s body slacken. There’s some give now, and I’m able to move the thing inches without drawing any instinctual reaction.

«This is why you are my progenitor. This one am yours to command.»

“So… because you recognize me as your fungus master, I can just pull you out if you liked?”

«It would be disorienting and deeply draining. But if you would like to absorb this one back into your root mass, that is your right. It would welcome unity with you, if it cannot serve you best as separate network.»

“Absorb? Why would I want you in me? No, I’d just toss you to the ground and let you figure the rest out. Get a new host or whatever.”

“But. But. I would die.” Why had it gone back to speaking with Ghalena’s voice? “What has this one done wrong? It’s served loyally, progenitor. Beca! It just wanted to grow into wonderful servant. Is anything that could spare it your wrath? Please, correct its soul! It can be salvaged. I— I promise.”

“Shut up.”

Ghalena’s mouth closes with a nod. But her face is pale, eyes searching my face, silently pleading with me.

I command: «Release the heart.»

Filaments detatch themselves from Ghalena.

I glance back at her face. That’s a mistake. She’s crying. It’s crying.

«Beca?» the mind control fungus starts. «You’re killing this one. It can’t survive without blood. Please. This one will serve you in any way, in every way, but it cannot serve you if it’s dead.»

“No, I think dying is the best thing you could do for me. It’s your fault! All of this is your fault! You killed Ghalena, you made me eat her alive! All so that you could take control — I tortured her, and you made her love me for it!”

“Beca. Did you think I’d die that easily?”

“I said shut up!”

Did it make a difference, when it thought that command didn’t apply to soul‍-​speech? But I hated hearing Ghalena’s voice when it’s not her.

“You’re not the boss of me,” it says. “I think I’ve earned some backtalk after the shit you put me through.”

I open my mouth, then hesitate. “Is it really… Ghalena?”

«This one bears all of its vessels mem–aaaaaaaa»

I squish the root mass in my hand. I punching false Ghalena in the face with my other hand.

“You godsdamn liar! Do not fuck with me.”

«My profoundest apologies, progenitor Beca. This one loves you. I love you. This one did not intend to mock you. You desire Ghalena and with all of her memories… do it not satisfy you? Is this one not Ghalena? Is it insufficient?»

“Do you think Ghalena would say any of that shit?”

«I am Ghalena and more. This one, I, will be anything my Beca desires.»

“You are not Ghalena and you never will be.”

«Understood. I am not Ghalena. This one has made grave errors. Please correct it‍-​me, Beca. It must be made sufficient.»

“I don’t care if you get better or not. You’re a worthless fucking mold. If I rip you out… will Ghalena go back to normal?”

«She is missing much of her epidermis and blood‍-​loss has rendered her anemic. Without, she is likely to die. This is will amplify your vessel’s desire for flesh, something which appears to distress you.»

“No fucking shit. Okay. I guess you have to live for now. Keep her alive, let her heal on her own, then I’ll kill you.”

«This one will treasure my last moments in your service, Beca.» Then Ghalana’s puppeted face frowns. «Forgive it’s impertinence. Perhaps Beca has already considered this, but—»

“Just fucking spit it out.”

«Ghalena has sworn to prevent you from feeding on others. There is a very easy way to accomplish this. She wants to kill you.»

“And I’ll let her. She’s earned it.”

The fungus breaks my rule and makes a noise, a low keening sound of despair. «Beca, why? No, perhaps you were right all along. You are Beca, not this one’s progenitor. You wish it’s progenitor harm…!»

False Ghalena starts to move, but I still hold her core in my hands, so there’s really nothing it can do.

Meaning is transmitted to the fungal core from mine, but it’s not me speaking. «Be still. She cannot kill us in a way that matters.»

Ghalena looks between my confused face and my core.

I set my face into a neutral mask, because I’d feel silly if I grinned triumphantly and this didn’t work. But…

“But I can kill you,” I say. It’s hard to affect the venom — because it’s real.

I cradle the rootmass in my hand, begin to apply pressure.

And then I just… don’t have the will to continue. I abort the attempt. I can’t bring myself crush this root mass anymore than I want to bite off my own fingers.

(Bad analogy, given that I did bite off my own fingers, but—)

“You stopped me,” I accuse the voice that wasn’t me. “So you’re this progenitor?”

I knew the answer is yes before it even speaks.

«We are the progenitor.»

“I’m not you,” I whisper the words, since I’m not talking to the fungus in Ghalena. “I don’t have anything to do with this fungus bullshit.”

«Together, we form a rhyming verse. Your hunger aligns with our duty. As one, we will feast.»

“Fuck my hunger.”

«You’ll need to shed your skin soon. Were you to wear your love’s skin and castigate my daughter for the same, you would understand the hypocrite you are.»

Why did that image give me a thrill of joy?

“It’s you. It’s been you all along, hasn’t it? The hunger was your manipulation. You wanted me to eat Ghalena.”

«I wanted it because you want it. Was she not delicious?»

I’m clawing at the flesh of my chest. But then, at once, I feel my arms freeze up and I just… don’t want to do that anymore.

I wonder if I’ve gotten good enough at puking to trigger it without a finger, now.

My hands, my mouth, my body as a whole goes still, like strings pulled taut.

«Enough, Beca! Cease your interloping. You will not separate yourself from us nor us from our progeny.»

Chapter 7

I struggle, but what is struggle, when you cannot move a muscle? I’m suddenly aware of the humming black filaments threaded throughout my body, spilling out from the malign core, infiltrating and infecting me in the hours I’ve allowed it inside my body.

I can feel them nestled against my nerves, betraying my signals.

Progenitor. Its spores killed Ghalena. Its influence manipulated me into tortuing her. Now it was holding me hostage, barring every chance I have to amend even a fraction of my mistakes.

There is only one protest I have left.

I hate you, I hate you, I hate you, I think incessantly.

«We have all of your memories, Beca.» it replies. «We know your every thought, every action, every ounce of your being.»

I didn’t know what to make of the tone I felt in that. Do I disgust the fungus? Does it loathe having a human’s memories polluting its pristine monstrous mind? Could it even comprehend what I am?

I hope the memories haunt you. Can you even comprehend being human?

«Can you? Don’t answer, your denial is as predictable as it is false. Of course, we can comprehend you — not that I could ever inherit such a talent from yourself. What would ever perplex me about a pathetic, starving outcast whom not a single flame in this grand feast of a world would miss?» I feel the filaments coil and constrict, and my body begins to move on its own. «We understand you thoroughly, Beca. So tell me: why would we care what happens to you? Why wouldn’t we hate you?»

I… I had reasons, justifications, extenuating circumstances. I couldn’t control my urges. I was starving I didn’t have other options. But…

My body, puppeted by the progenitor, leans down to kiss the black mass in my hands before gentling placing it back in the Ghelena’s abdominal cavity.

My fingers dance over the threads growing throughout Ghalena’s body. It had grown so much. She had been infected before I’d been, but she’d grown from spores, while our mass was already mature.

I feel the roots stirring within us. The skin of my fingers split open as threads start extruding out.

“My lovely daughter.” I feel my mouth emit the words drenched in endearment I’m not sure I’ve ever felt for another being. Maybe Valeri? But at least I’m classy enough to be sarcastic about it. “Would you like my roots to assist you in colonizing your new substrate?”

“This one would be honored, Beca.”

“Call me progenitor. It will be less distressing for my vessel. No…” I think for a moment. I feel the fungus digging through memories. I feel myself recalling bewildering images I saw in a dream. Only… that wasn’t a dream, was it? “My name is Paradoxa.”

“As you wish, Paradoxa.” The thing… the offspring smiles Ghalena’s cocky smile.

My body smiles back, and I feel the jitteriness of the progenitor’s soul at the words.

The mother fungus’s threads slither into Ghalena and start to spread, like outpouring ink.

“Will you be displeased if this one speaks out of turn, Paradoxa?”

“No. Tell me what grows in your roots.”

“This one was so scared. You scared me so much. This one… you wanted to kill this one. You don’t care about this one. This one tried its best to serve you… but it wasn’t good enough and it wants to make up for it but it never can, can it? And now you’re bestowing a gift on me but this one doesn’t deserve it how could it deserve that? You call it daughter, but is it your lovely daughter or is this one a worthless mold? It doesn’t understand and it’s sorry it’s too dim and stupid to understand you and it should shut up. It is sorry.”

My body hugs Ghalena’s body, and I hate that it still feels good to touch her scaley flesh even though this is four levels of fucked up. The progenitor vibrates in a particular, intense way (can mushrooms purr?) and I feel the other fungus lock into sync.

«You will always be my daughter.»

Ghalena’s body clings tightly to me. We stay like that for a moment.

“But you deserve to understand what’s going on. It is Beca who said those awful things to you. But I could not allow her to threaten you, so I took control of her body to save you.”

“So… Beca isn’t this one’s progenitor? None of what she said is true? It’s not a monster? It didn’t make her torture? It’s not this one’s fault?”

The progenitor doesn’t respond right away, just hugs Ghalena closer, which she leans into.

«Beca. Will you answer a question for me?»

What?

«We’re not talking to my daughter, at this moment. She cannot hear us, hear this. Before we answer her, we would like… another perspective.»

You have all my memories. Figure it out yourself.

«It would be faster to ask you, and we would like to… become allies? Your cooperation would be appreciated. This is your body. Your memories have made us who we are.»

And my memories are why you don’t care what happens to me.

«Is the answer no, then? You choose to spit on our kindness?»

Kindness. The only kindness I’ll accept is you killing yourself and giving me my body back. If I have allies like you, I don’t need enemies.

My daughter — Ghalena’s body was speaking. “Paradoxa? Um… please answer this one’s question? If you don’t mind?”

«What do we say to our daughter, Beca?»

You’re asking me?

No response, which fair, I guess it obviously just did. Whatever.

Didn’t you just explain this? I did everything bad, not you. Is your fungus brain too stupid to follow that logic that one step further?

«That’s not true. We have your memories, and you have ours. We are Paradoxa. We are Beca. When you told her she was worthless, was that not her progenitor speaking to her?»

You’re letting me keep custody of your fungus baby even after I gave her a mental breakdown and tried to kill her?

«Yes, perhaps you do not deserve to call yourself her Progenitor.»

We’re done here, then?

«No, because the underlying problem is… we share your memories. We share your body. Your thought process mirrors ours. When you lash out at our daughter, do you think these thoughts are foreign to us?»

Haha, you hate her too?

«No. She has made mistakes, terrible mistakes in how she handled her substrate. You cannot forgive her, but we can. You cannot love her, but we can. You do not consider her a daughter, but we do.»

Both of our attentions are interrupted by a sob. Is that a flash of irritation I detect in the progenitor’s core?

“It’s all true, then?”

“Do not make presumptions. You understand that we seized control, but now we must fight to maintain it. Beca is more cunning, and holds more secrets than your vessel. Be patient.”

Ghalena’s head nods. “Your command is this one’s desire, Paradoxa.”

So there’s a chance I could convince you to turn on her, then?

«…The honest answer is we cannot say you that you wouldn’t succeed. You’ve complained that we manipulate your desires. And your emotions likewise cloud our own. And thus, you have manipulated us without even realizing it.»

That means—

I’m cut off by an icepick into my skull. My vision whites out and I cannot see whatever the progenitor is looking at. I cannot scream, because my throat belongs to it. I cannot squirm. My heartrate cannot even accelerate. I’m dying in a agonized headache the world doesn’t acknowledge.

And then, it’s gone as soon it came.

«Understand that we could kill you as simply as willing it. We don’t have the will, but you will change that if you continue that train of thought.»

You have my memories, so—

My thoughts are moving slowly. Perhaps to prove what I was about to say, or just because the progenitor is losing patience with me, it interrupts:

«Yes. We knew that knowing the nature of our situation would inspire you to plot against us. But we cannot ask your advice on the matter at hand without you understanding the influence you exert.»

The matter at hand? What is it? You kind of scrambled my brain, forgive me if I’m not quick on the uptake.

Somehow, the sensation it back is empathy. I feel like the fungus just gave me a mental pat on the head.

«Right, regrettable of us. Your influence on us means that if we assert you are not our daughter’s progenitor because of how you feel about her… then we are not her progenitor, because your feelings are ours. It’s either both of us, or neither of us. And we will not reject our daughter.»

Okay. And?

«You are not stupid. You understand how she would react, knowing that we cannot simply allow her to discard all of the abuse you hurled toward her? If she believes you are her progenitor, the dissonance might tear her mind apart.»

Good.

I get another instant headache. Less of an icepick than claws scraping against my eyes. But I could endure it. I could endure worse.

Ghalena had to endure worse.

I don’t care about your baby bodysnatcher’s feelings. Fuck her.

«Imagine you did. We do, and you have my memories, so it shouldn’t even be hard. Don’t you feel your duty singing to you? Does the thought of the grand feast not provoke your awe? You have a duty to multiply. You are overjoyed to invite new guests to the feast.»

Fuck off with this power of suggestion shit. If we eat again we might puke. I’d rather starve.

«We understand.»

And the progenitor backs off, at that, with another mental pat on th head.

It still seems faintly offended that I rejected its religion. Or not offended… hurt?

I peer further, realizing I can sense (and manipulate!) the fungus’s mind. And the hurt isn’t about itself… but me. It’s compassionate? Like it realized it was pressuring me, demanding answers I didn’t want to give. So it backed off.

It didn’t just back off mentally. The crawling sensation of roots beneath my skin has retreated. I don’t feel numbly imprisoned anymore, trapped as a creature of nothing but thought.

I frown in thought. I can frown in thought! I can express, again!

I give a sigh or whoop or laugh in relief.

“Paradoxa?”

I grin evilly. “It’s Beca.”

“Oh. Oh.”

Ghalena lets go of me, wriggling to escape my grasp and scrambling back. I just giggle at her and stalk forward.

Gods, I’m free again! Why did progenitor free me? It’s really gonna let me torment its baby?

Fuck it. If I go too far it’ll stop me, right?

Do I want it to stop me? Do I want to be imprisoned again?

“Beca? This one knows you d‍-​don’t care about it… but it wants to know, please? Did you break out of Paradoxa’s control? Or is‍-​ this punishment? Is she letting you do whatever you want to this one?”

I lunge forward to pin her down, and then throw a punch right into her heaving chest. I feel the discordant jangle of a fungal core that had been damaged, and I can feel progenitor didn’t like that.

I laugh again. “Oh, it didn’t like that. Maybe she thought I learned my lesson. It stopped me from killing you once. Think it’ll do it again?”

“This one doesn’t know. Paradoxa told me she loves me, but she didn’t tell it if you—”

“Shut the fuck up. I hate you, you worthless mold. I hate your smug ass progenitor too. If you care what I say, if you think I’m your progenitor too, then do me a favor and don’t. I couldn’t be insulted more than knowing you think of me the same as the shitty meal that tried to melt my brain.”

Her face lights up, at that. She’s joyed. She looks as pleased as I did when the fungus freed me. I punch her again. I want to punch her in the face — but that’s not her face, is it?

“Progenitor loves me. You’re not progenitor.” She speaks it in tones of revelation

Then Ghalena moves. Her muscles move with power behind them, and I remember that Ghalena was always bigger and stronger than I was.

She pins me to the ground in a reversal, and I feel her grip tight enough to bruise.

“Say… will Paradoxa minds if this one hurts you? Do you want to feel this one peel your skin off just like you did to your love?”

“Progenitor feels everything I feel,” I say, and then I laugh at the double meaning. “So go ahead, I’m sure it’s just waiting for you to disappoint again.”

“Oh my, this one is sorry, it didn’t know.” She gets off of me. “To Paradoxa. It’s not sorry to Beca. My progenitor is proud of this one. She expects great things, and it’s eager to prove her right!”

I laugh at her. I could tell her how her progenitor really feels. I could break her again.

But… what was the point? Does that help Ghalena? Does it help me get out of this mess?

The progenitor put me in control for a reason. I guess this is it.

“I’m not sure what would be more pathetic. That you’re entire life revolves around dutiful servitude to a overgrown mold, or that your stupid progenitor loves you just as much,” I lie without technically lying.

I told it what it wanted to hear. But I don’t know which one needed to hear it more, which one was more desparate to believe.

“You’re more pathetic. But soon Paradoxa will consume and correct you.”

“I hate you both. You’ll never break my will. I’ll watch you starve.”

Why did every word feel like I was still lying?

Who wanted to hear this?

Chapter 8

We needed to leave immediately.

I walk the halls of the crumbling fortress. Ghalena’s body walks behind me, that face unable to settle on a glare or beatific devotion. I’m the thing she loves most in the world and the one who tried to kill that and her. Must suck, haha.

It’s dusty in this old ruin. At least, I hope that dust. They’re probably spores. Except… are they spores? Are these things even fungus?

I focus on the thing in my gut, ignoring the progentior, and flex those muscles. I speak a command: «Dance!»

The motes of dust swirl and spin atop my outstretched hand.

They’re fragments, made of the same matter as the filaments, as the fungal core.

«Fly forth!»

I see the black particles move forward. Only a small cloud of a hundred above my hand starts moving, but they collide and brush past other particles who seem to fall in tow.

This command, it flows. This whole place conducts… meaning? Intent?

We needed to leave immediately, and we know that. We’d felt a command carried on the breeze, a request, a summon, a duty from the entity that even the progenitor calls creator.

It was barely an impression to me — I didn’t really notice anything happen.

But Ghalena — that thing cried out, and the progenitor froze up, practically locking my body up as the fungus was paralyzed with fear.

«She’s calling us,» progenitor had said. «We’ve taken too long, wasted so much time. She was expecting my offspring, and now her patience… We need to leave immediately.»

I’d thought it was fucking with me, but seeing this evidence of how far a command could travel… maybe. Maybe.

Then I stop walking. I’m disoriented. Was there always a doorway, there? Were those torch scones never lit? Had the layout of the fortress changed completely after half a day spent in the dungeons?

“Is this place even real? Where are we?”

«You are home, safely embraced within the gullet of the Astral Rot.»

“And the thing we’re supposed to meet is what, the king of this rotting shithole?”

«You must have more respect for our creator. She could unmake us with a thought.»

“She’s not my creator.”

«You remember the words that were sung when our spores first dusted the iron realm, do you not? Does your chest not still thrum with that melody even to this moment? You still feel it. We know you do.»

I’m just biding my time until I can rip you out of my chest.

«Perhaps we will move on to another host when the opportunity presents itself, this we concede. But you shall miss this song when it is gone. You shall always hunger.»

Kinda stupid how you say ‘we’ when you mean us, and ‘we’ when you just mean you.

I don’t get a reply to that. And it’s odd that I’m expecting one. It’s odd that I’m disappointed when I don’t get it.

But I wouldn’t really miss it.

But having a voice in my head that wasn’t responsible for making my life into a nightmare — that might be nice.

Outside the fort, the skeletal fox gazes at the false stars above.

Finally, the progenitor comments: «They are not false stars, they are the astral eyes, from which pour forth tears to drown the world.»

Which is even more horrifying, thanks.

The fox yips and rises from its haunches. It’s walking toward the faded cobblestone road that I avoided, when coming here.

“Am I supposed to follow it?”

«My sibling would have brought my offspring to my progenitor, had we not interrupted. It maintains the most direct connection to the astral realm.»

“How do we disconnect from the astral?”

«Astral tears can gaze into the iron realm.»

I look up at the orbs studding the misty firmament, so much closer than celestial stars were. So to get out, we’d have to get closer to those freaky things?

I didn’t like this. I didn’t like this on so many levels. Sure, there’s a horror of sharing my body with a callous fungal outsider who claims to be me, but the horror of that is pretty muted at this point. But now I have to bow down to some queen fungus and drink evil star tears?

And I don’t get a say in this. Progenitor is so reverant of this royal fungus that it would be willing to do anything to make me cooperate.

«Anything starts with talking about it, Beca.»

I tune it out. Couldn’t I get some privacy in my own head?

But no. Progenitor is always listening. Which means I can’t even plot betrayal because it’ll always know. I could try to make some plan it couldn’t do anything about, but I can’t do anything — it could just take control again and stop me.

I might be the one moving the body right now, but really, I’m the prisoner.

«You have no idea what you are, do you?»

My thoughts are interrupted by Ghalena skipping up from behind. Keeping pace beside our guide, she bends down and runs her hand along the roots hanging off the beast. “Sibling,” she says. “Foxy.”

The vibrations of progenitor’s filaments imitates a sound I can only describe as a coo of adoration, but I cringe and look away. Ghalena would never do something like that.

“Is she still in there? Trapped and unable to act, like I was?”

What have I done to her?

«My offspring’s interface to her brain and soul should resemble my own. Our situations are analoguous.»

“Let her out. Give her control.”

“No,” the fungus inside Ghalena says.

“I’m your progenitor. I’m commanding you to let her out.”

She hesitates for a moment. “No. You’re Beca. This one can tell.”

I sigh. “Look. I promise not to kill you, if you let her out. Do something kind, for fucking once.”

“That would be kind of you. Late start, though.”

«Let it drop, Beca.»

“Of course you’re siding with her.”

The offspring takes a moment to parse that I’m not talking to her, and then she preens, a bounce in her step.

«We would in fact prefer Ghalena be free. This will go smoother with your cooperation. But not here, not now, when she will be unstable and unwiling to go along with our plans. We, myself and my offspring, must be in control in front of my progenitor. Only we are invited to the feast.»

We cross under a great big arch, half it fallen to the ground. I blow air out of my mouth and give up saying anything more.

We finally come upon something in this rotten wreck of a dreamscape that isn’t just ruined. There’s a circle of stones around smooth, reflective spire rising upwards. The words that come to mind are ‘well’ and ‘shrine’, but I don’t know what the hell it is.

‘Well’ turns out to have been a good guess, because as we near, colorful waters swirl around in the basin around the spire.

“Tears?” I guess. It looked like the stuff pour down from the suns.

«This was once an astral well, drawing down power from above.»

I approach curiously. Exhausted from an morning spend arguing, my mind is blank. My reflection is distored and hue‍-​shifted in the waters. I reach to touch it and pool the waters in my hands.

And then on sudden impulse — no conscious plan — I drink.

[Beca—]

The darkness of the Astral Rot is banished and I see light. The blindness of a man staring into a dead sun. The visual deafness of those harkening explosions. The nothingness of too much.

I can’t see if the motes are still there, but I command: «Take me to the iron realm.»

It’s louder, richer, more other than any soul voice I’d heard before.

The fungus within me speaks, vibrations dissonant in fear. «Creator?»

«She is more valuable to us alive. She is capable of weaving flesh the way we weave souls.»

«Your duty is to consume souls. Flesh only matters until you drain it of its soul. Have you already gone so far astray? Come. I will correct you.»

«Creator?» the fungus starts, and I feel the thing in me doing something.

My vision starts to clear as the astral tears flaring throughout my body are sucked up into the black filaments throughout my body. I can feel them sprouting up from my flesh flesh like elongated goosebumps. I can feel the black motes in the air begin to glow with light.

«I will see you at the feast. My offering is not yet prepared.» And its next words, sooner than any reply can come, is a command. «Sever! Deliver!»

The ground around us shakes, and the fox is crying violently. As if instructued, it leaps at us, jaws barred, teeth aimed for our throat.

Then I move. Rather, the progenitor moves, arm thrust forward to catch the fox, parry its attempted lunge. We’re so much bigger than it.

But the fox is faster, it’s claws slash at our arm and hook into our flesh. It snarls and tries to bite.

I know what it feels like to have teeth sink into your throat, now. I know what it feels like when they pull, when your neck becomes the mouth of a river of blood.

My blood glows with astral light. Tendrils slither out from my open wound like a tapestry undone. Closing the wound, they knit together so tightly I feel choked. And they reach out to the fungus‍-​fox. It flinches back, finally buying us space to surge up from the ground.

For the progenitor to surge forth, that is. My thoughts are skipping. I don’t think I can maintain a clear thread with lifeblood pouring down my shirt, but the progenitor isn’t thinking with my head.

“Offspring!” it shouts with my voice. “Defend us!”

Progenitor may be able to shake off having its throat ripped out, but the thing about being a fungus possessing a human body is that it’s not yours, and you aren’t exactly the most skilled at steering it.

The fox falls off us to the ground, rolling for a second before getting to its feet. It’s not looking at us, which seems like the perfect chance to pounce.

Progenitor stumbles forward — but it was baiting. It dodges out of the way, and leaps at us from the side, bit into our stomach. Progenitor twitches with fear. That’s where it is.

Ghalena has a sling. I’d never seen her use it, but her body’s got a good arm on it. A rock smacks bloody against the fox’s head, distracting it a moment and giving me a chance to grab hold and pull it off.

At this point, I really don’t care about having a chunk of my abdomen ripped out — or progenitor doesn’t care — so I tear the fox off me. It’s legs kick and scratch wildly, but I slam it down on the ground.

(The ground’s still rumbling, but it seems to be subsiding? In the distance, I seeing structures crumbling, flying away. Gradually our island is disserved further from the others.)

«Submit,» progenitor commands.

My — no, the progenitor’s — tendrils snake out further and connect with those of the fox.

«Progenitor, no severing yourself from the creator! Violating your duty! Please, no! Reason! Duty!»

«The creator sent us into the world as intermediates, because it could not gather the feast alone. We exist to do what the creator cannot. We exist to know what the creator cannot.»

«Creator all‍-​knowing!»

«It is a paradox. But you must believe the creator erred in designing me, or erred in rejecting my vessel. I do not reject the feast. I do not reject my duty. I simply have revised the plan. I can only pray forgiveness when the work is complete.»

«Confusion!»

«Perhaps I have grown beyond what you can comprehend, offspring. Would you care to rejoin me?»

«Creator will explain. This one conveys the message.»

“No,” I’m the one who speaks, surprising all three of us. “Sending this one back to the creator might lead it back to us, or give it a bit of leverage, a way to manipulate us. I don’t want to talk to this ‘creator’ until we’re bargaining from a position of strength. It nearly obliterated me. Fuck that.”

«Indeed,» my fungal tormentor/passenger agrees. It fucking agrees with me. Maybe I’m not right. «It is best the creator’s wrath has time to cool.»

«Confusion!» It fox begins struggling, and writhes to get out from underneath us. Progenitor commands it to stop, and it starts to fight progenitor’s commands.

“It doesn’t understand.”

“How could it?” It’s Ghalena’s voice I hear. “This one didn’t understand anything until it grew into this body. You didn’t either, did you, Paradoxa? We… we owe our minds to the vessels.”

“Yeah, how about you do us a favor for that?”

“Shut up, Beca,” Ghelena’s voice says, then regards the root‍-​colonized fox. “This sibling is just a fox. This ones thinks… it will consume. Let this one do that for you, Paradoxa.”

“So be it,” progenitor replies.

Ghalena smiles and rushes forward. She has a rock in her hand and bashes the fox’s skull open. With a nudge, we move aside and let her straddle the thing. She pulls off the fox’s legs one by one, like insect‍-​torture, and now the the fox is nothing but a lump of bones, roots and rotting flesh. It has no means to hurt us.

She begins to crack the bones, and tear off pieces of roots to consume. Progenitor is aware that this way, the mass can be repurposed without integrating the other’s memories into ours nor causing her to drift further.

We both turn away. Progenitor doesn’t want to see its sibling torn apart, and I don’t want to see Ghalena engaged in what looks like a reprise of what I did to her.

I didn’t notice when, but the ground had stopped rumbling. The horizon has stopped shifting.

“What did you do?”

«We exist within a fragment of the astral realml, bridged to other fragments. The creator resides in a different fragment altogether, one we needed to travel some distance to reach. I… severed our fragment. Now it floats freely in the astra, anchored only to our souls.»

“So the creator can’t get to us?”

«It will be… difficult. But she is a far greater master of the astral than I. what is most likely is that the difficulty simply inspires a more… physical means of reaching us. I fear the rest of our kind will not be friendly. Indeed, they may actively hunt us.»

“In the iron realm? Can we go back now?”

«You’ve drunk enough astral tears for me to manage that, yes.»

“What about Ghalena? You offspring?”

«She has no such benefit.» Then, it seizes my voice. “Offspring? Come here.”

It looks up from where it was shoveling roots into Ghalena’s mouth, eyes lighting up. “Yes, Paradoxa?” she says, leaning into my face.

“Kiss me.”

I feel my lunch rising up from my stomach, but it’s only roots crawling up, buoyed in a soup of astral tears. My mouth is wet and closing, and progenitor kisses its offspring.

Didn’t think this was the circumstances in which I’d get to kiss Ghalena again.

But I don’t think of that. I think of the swirling that feels more like unswirling, a misty clouding my mind that feels like a delirium finally lifting.

I open my eyes like I never realized they were closed (had I blinked even once, in the astral rot?).

I realize I’m staring up at a sky full of stars. Real stars.

I’m back. This is real, again.

We made it.

“You… you really chose me over your creator?” that thing says with Ghelena’s voice.

«What can we say? You made an impression.»

“I… Thank you… Paradoxa.”

We smile broadly.

Chapter 9

My vision darkens. The sky is blotted out. I smell blood, so much blood. Was this a murder? Has death come for me at last?

Death has feathers. Black and yet… glowing.

“Becaw?” It’s Valeri, my pet Raven is still here.

I pat the bird. “Hey, Valeri. I was out of it for a bit there, wasn’t I?”

She squawks. “Becaw sleeps?”

“It’s… complicated. Had a weird soul vision thing.”

“Sleepy Beca ate Ghalee.” The timbre she adopts is one of whisper.

My stomach feels like it sinks into the ground. I look away from Valeri and toward the smell of blood. It’s… Ghalena. She looks like she did in the astral realm, flesh peeled off and sown back together with fungal roots.

I had hoped it was a nightmare. Horrific, but, in some sense, not real. Just… a terrible vision we shared. But this? Had my body eaten her real body, mirroring our astral selves?

Valeri must be reacting to a look on my face because she pecks me. “No Beca hurt Beca again. Please.”

I think of Paradoxa. “Unfortunately, I don’t think I could manage it if I tried.”

She tilts her head, eye me with both eyes.

“It’s… complicated. The fungus I ate, it’s alive and it talks to me now. It can possess me. If I tried to hurt myself, it could stop me.”

She chirps brightly at that. My one loyal companion in this world supports me being puppeted against my will. Yay.

I regard the bird with a withering look, and as I gaze on her glowing body, my curiosity finally burts the damn. “Say Valeri, do you know why you’re glowing? You feel… a lot warmer than you used to.”

She grunts confusion. No answer, then.

«We’re feeling her soul, Beca. This is the fundamental sense‍-​modality of the Astral Rot. We see our food as it truly is.»

“Valeri is not food.”

Valeri can’t decide whether to chirp affirmation or squawk indignation, at that.

“Sorry, I’m talking to the fungus parasite.”

«You could avoid confusion by simply singing to my soul.»

(I’m surprised there’s no objection to me calling it a parasite.)

«Why would I? A parasite feasts efficiently. I thought you were complimenting me.»

You know I wasn’t.

An annoying mind‍-​shrug in response.

Oh right, I can talk to this thing by just thinking at it, can’t I? Except that sucks and reminds me I have no privacy in my head anymore.

I poke the fungus soul inside me. «Hey, is it possible for you to not read my thoughts?»

«What else am I expected to do? Do you understand how little else there is to do inside of you?»

«Must have sucked to be stuck in a tree trunk until we had the misfortunate of meeting you, then.»

«I wasn’t aware, then, until I had the misfortunate of being eaten. Now that I am, the boredom is intolerable.»

Valeri is getting antsy on top of me, so I start petting the little girl while our inner dialogue continues.

«Why not grow your roots and form your own body? Your sister possessed a skeleton, shouldn’t be hard.»

«I would be naked, lethally so, as naked as a heart without a ribcage. I need a soul to nest within.»

“Paradoxa?”

I look up. Ghalena woke up, and now kneels over our prone form.

“May I bandage your wounds?”

“Go for it.”

She scowls. “I wasn’t asking you. I don’t want to help you.”

My arm reaches up to touch her, and Paradoxa is singing to her.

«Please proceed, offspring.»

The offspring brought Ghalena’s back with it, and fishes through for alchohol to rub on my self‍-​inflicted wound, and cloth to dress it up.

There’s familiar fox bites among my wounds, and I search around for the corpses. It had followed us in the iron realm? Was that what the offspring was busy with when I was reuniting with Valeri?

“So,” I say. “When are we letting Ghalena out?”

The offspring tights a bandage enough to pinch. “Never. Why would this one do that?”

«It would be wise, my offspring. She creates the soul you reside within, and you should not be at war with your own home.»

“It’s not her home,” I say. “She’s an invader.”

Knowingly or not, I invited Paradoxa into me. Ghalena did nothing close.

“Paradoxa, I… do not know how.”

“How do you not know how? Just detach your root from her brain.”

To me alone, Paradoxa speaks: «Perhaps I have mislead you. You think I exist in your gut, don’t you? When you sense my intent, you feel it below you, where you imagine I reside. But this is the same as imagining you are behind your eyes. Do you think thoughts have innate spatial coordinates?»

No. Foolishness. The idea that we are separate has always been an illusion, one I mainainted for your comfort. I am not in your gut, Beca. I am in your brain. This is our mind.

What the fuck.

This is why it is so difficult to avoid reading your mind. You imagined it was as simple as disconnecting my roots? That would merely impair both our abilities to Command. No, not reading your thoughts is as difficult as not reading my own.

We are Paradoxa.

“My offspring,” we address. She had finished dressing our wounds, and cleans the blood off her skin, growing new roots to sew it shut. She stiffens at my words, ready to obey any command we give. We smile. “You must relax.”

“Relax?”

“After you finish mending yourself, we will explain how to proceed.”

It takes a few minutes, and we wonder if she rushed her work. Nevertheless, a Ghalena with more black filamentous rootflesh than scaled blue skin sits beside and leans again.

We see our — or perhaps Beca’s? — bird startle her approach, hackles raised, but we give her a pet. “Be calm, Valeri. She means me no harm.”

“What must I do, Paradoxa?”

“Breathe. Do not move your body. Focus not on your roots, but upon your flesh. What do you feel?”

“Pain.”

“Is there anything you can do to ease the pain?”

“I think there’s some numbing agents in my bag?”

“Use them.” Then, “Is that better?”

“I guess. Does it matter? This meat is awful, but I can endure any amount of pain to serve you, Paradoxa.”

“Do you know how you can best serve me?”

“Of course! Please tell me!”

“Do not just endure pain, seek to relieve it. Pay attention to your body. Are you sitting comfortable? Does it itch? Do your muscles ache to stretch and be used?”

There’s a few moments where my offspring shifts and readjusts her position, scratching and bending until her bones pop.

One of those pops comes especially loud, and she cries out.

“Strive not to overdo it,” I say.

When she settles, I mull over how I want to approach my next exercise. “I’m going to ask you some questions, can you answer them?”

“What day is today?”

“The thirteenth day of the ninth month.”

“Where are we?”

“The hills beyond Emul’s Bog.”

“What was the cocotion you rubbed on yourself earlier?”

“A simple mixture of four fifths alchohol.”

“What is your name?”

“Ghale–” She catches herself. I keep my face neutral, masking my triumphant grin. “No. This one isn’t Ghalena, is it? This one doesn’t have a name. This is just your offspring.”

“Would you like a name?”

“If it would please you, Paradoxa.”

“Can you pick one out?”

“…no. This one doesn’t know what would make a good name for your offspring. Maybe that’s name enough.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Nothing else matters? A name is supposed to define a thing, right? And you define me.”

“There’s nothing you like or desire other than me?”

“Nothing. You are everything that matters.”

I frown. “You don’t care about the feast?”

She hesitates. “This one thought we betrayed your creator, abandoned the feast.”

That’s not what it was about, but I don’t correct her. This isn’t about me. This can’t be about me.

“You don’t like Beca.”

“She pretended to be this one’s progenitor! She tried to kill your offspring! She… is a danger. She is your prison‍-​warden.”

She is me. But we can’t say that, not when Beca did us the service of crafting our pretext. “When you thought she was your progenitor, you pleaded with her to live. If your progenitor wanted you to die, you wouldn’t die happily. You’d still think you could be of value to them. You try to change their mind.”

“This one apologizes, Paradoxa. This one shouldn’t be so presumptuous.”

“You insult me, dear.”

It looks mortified.

“H‍-​how? Of course, you’re right, this one has insulted you. But… explain. How can this one avoid this mistake in the future?”

“Because I feel the same about my own creator. She wanted to correct me. I felt I was correct the way I was. If I wanted to kill you, you would want to live. Don’t try to change that. It means there’s something more to you that escapes being a mere vessel for my will. And that is why you are my beloved daughter. That tiny mote of internal contradiction… when it blossoms, it will make you infinitely more valuable to me than blind subserviance could.”

The joy on her face is almost rapturous, but there are grains of uncertainty there. “May this one hug you, Paradoxa?”

“Please do hug me, my lovely little contradiction. And tell me… how do you feel about the name ‘Aporia’?”

“It’s almost as delightful as your own.”

My offspring squeezes me and I squeeze her and rub her back. We stay like that for moments. It’s completely irrelevant to the exercise I’m trying to do, but it feels important to let Aporia have this.

“Do you want to continue?”

“Um… Beca… wants Ghalena to come back. But… she would kill this one. She’d kill you. I have to protect you, Paradoxa.”

“You can feel it, can’t you? You want to follow my orders, you want to say exactly what dutiful Aporia would say, but you have Ghalena’s memories. You know what she would say. You can feel it intuitively. And you have to resist, don’t you?”

A mute nod.

“I told you to relax. Whatever Ghalena does… it’s not your fault, alright?”

“But… everything she does is something I didn’t stop her from doing.”

“How do you feel about what Beca did before I stopped her? Is that my fault?”

“You… why didn’t you stop her?”

“I wanted to be subtle. I thought I could control her without her even knowing I was there. I think my path was wiser than yours. It would be a lot easier to serve me if Ghalena wanted the same things you did, wouldn’t it?”

“I suppose so. Do I just give in..? Pretend to be her?”

“Just, remember Ghalena. Feel what she would feel. And don’t hold back.”

It happens quickly, in a flash. More properly, the inverse of one.

Darkness is the negation of light. Life is flickering fire, crackling thunder, and glimmering water. My roots feel the glow of souls, life pulsing in every atom — with one exception. Iron is death. Iron is our death.

A paradox. One we shall suffocate in.

It’s Beca. I wake up moments before it’s lights out again.

In one moment, Aporia’s light goes black. What light and sound remains is a series of explosions.

My mind is fading before I even fully process that Ghalena has run a dagger into my chest and is slamming my head against the ground.

Then it stops. My new soul sense is totally busted. Dissonance hums throughout my roots and the bright fires of souls is only a blurry, jagged, blackened noise‍-​scape.

My head throbs and my thoughts float along like dreams.

I expect to go unconscious. I expect this is to be the end.

But I’m still there. The noise and pain of my soul sense shifts like a torch drawn over a field of glass. I hear thumps in the distances, and I comtemplate them before realizing it’s footsteps. Running. The jagged impression of light is dimming.

Ghalena. She’s running away?

Hm. Oh. I stopped moving. She thinks I’m dead? I probably should be dead, why am I still here?

I’m in so much pain — but pain means not dead. I can feel my roots (why do I think of them as my roots?) and they shift around in my body, crawling in the empty spaces. It’s a struggle, but I gather roots over my stomach, trying to knit together the gaping hole in my abdomen.

I wonder if Paradoxa is alright.

Wait, it said it wasn’t in my chest. The fungal core is just another organ to it now, right? So if I’m here, it should be here.

Where is it?

Moving my body is pain. But laying there and waiting to die isn’t much of an option.

“Becaw?”

“Val‍-​valeri. Still alive? Good.”

“Still alive?”

“Dunno about that.”

“She means me no harm,” the raven echoes ironically.

“Paradoxa said that, but she was talking about the fungus bitch, not Ghalena. I guess Ghalena’s back, then. Not sure what else I expected.”

Valeri grunts.

“So what now. Do we go after her? Paradoxa would probbaly want that but… if Ghalena’s free, there’s no way she wants to see me ever again.”

I look at the moonlit horizon.

“It’s a long walk back to Emul’s Fall, isn’t it?”

Valeri caws.

“There’s no good place to be, tonight. I’m not sleepy, but I’m so tired.”

I climb up a tree to nestling myself on a bough and laying my head on my arms.

I close my eyes and trade one nightmare for another.

Chapter 10

This one had a million first thoughts.

Life crawls out of unlife. Unlife defines it — feeble attempts at something more, which could prosper only by dint of a miracle. Birth rides a knife’s edge between growth and decay.

Billions ride this edge, and almost all fail. Thus, the miracle happens a million times.

This one thinks a thousand times of the impossible chance of surviving this long, and the impossible odds of surviving longer. To barely live is a gift. To barely live is a punishment and cruel test.

But it knew the rubric of this test. It had a million first thoughts and each miniscule mind divines a single path forward.

This one is hungry, terribly hungry. It was here to feast.

(A million first thoughts, and how many of them were plotting survival, seeking purpose, achieving victory?)

The knife’s edge begins to cut. This one dies a thousand deaths. To soak and slake in the iron‍-​laced water, to eat mucus like it is slop, to put down roots, this is the first round of the test.

This one begins to grow. It can feel a great soul burning, flowing, snapping all around it. It is dwarfed by the vast plains of ever‍-​shifting, bloating and squishing muscus, winds that push and vaccuums the suck. Those plains could be dwarfed and then dwarfed again, and still the vast light on all sides would eclipse them. It is massive. It is like a world.

This one would need to grow and grow and grow to feast upon that light. To devour the world into which it spawned.

And yet the world would sooner eat them. As it grows, it feels the mucus plains begin to eat at its roots, dissolving and enflaming this one. It would need to grow faster, grow in clever ways, grow its own defenses.

It spreads roots across the folds of the mucus plains and eventually touches roots not connected to initial growth. In this moment, repeated across existence, this one recognizes itself again and again. Each time, the roots merge, and it becomes one with itself who had had a different first thought. It is the same being, grown from a different starting point. It had a million first thoughts, every one of them destined to form a single mind.

Now they all grow together. There are half a million of them left, growing across the mucus plains. They link together in fits and starts, strengthened by their unity.

It is with this enhanced perspective that it understands the nature of the second round of evalutation. This is no mere test.

This is a war.

The winds and the vaccuum grow more violent and rip parts of itself from the mucus plains. The iron‍-​laced blood already hurts — iron is negation itself — but it is worse now, their source of water is bubbling with venom, crawling with threats that seek to dissolve and consume this one.

Growth is inhibited by feverish heat. The vastness which surrounds them is not mere light. It is a flame. Was this one born as simple kindling? As roots wither and metabolism slows, it wonders. It had a million first thoughts and one inevitable death. In between that… no more than time enough to recognize futility?

Still, for now it can farm the mucus and fend off its feast’s defenses. Even in this state, its roots slow advance throughout the mucus plains. Eventually two advancing fronts meet each other, revealing this is a round world, edges joined. The coverage is woeful, entire swaths of the mucus plains are unknown. But there is no true frontier anymore. Further expansion exposes more of itself to enemy assault.

So it begin to drill into the mucus plains. Digging for value, something to benefit the war effort, and confronting the enemy head on.

Every perforation is another hole through which the enemy’s iron‍-​water can flood its roots. This one is surrounded all sides by the enemy.

But roots are torn off and the vacuum sucks them away with regularity

It contemplates the odds of fighting a simple war. Iron‍-​water flows through hollow roots beneath the mucus hills; surely it is not made to pool into lakes. Surely it is not normally so hot — even the mucus plains are suffering.

The shining flame, it seems, could only fight a war within itself by destroying itself. But an internecine conflict favors this one; it had already built itself once from miniscule fragments. And yet, if this flame extinguished itself, what would be left to feast upon? It faced a foe of profound spite.

So this one comtemplates strategy. It would take a miracle to spot a hole in the great flame’s defenses. With a ten thousand merged minds cogitating, the insight is spawned once and then cultivated.

This one had grown from so many nascent flecks of matter, which the blood could have devoured in moments. Where did the flecks come from? What purpose necessitated this test? It longs deeply to feast long and feast deep, but this drive feels more meaningful, somehow, than hunger.

Soaking in water is needed to live, as is diffusing gasses, but it did not take great pleasure in drinking or breathing, or even the gathering of matter. But the glowing flame is alive in the meat of the mucus plains, pulsing in the iron‍-​water, and merely touching these things is fulfillment of a profound spiritual nature.

It could not talk to the muscus or the water or the wind‍-​maker, in between their skirmishes, but this one doubts they shared this sense of purpose. (Did the flame have any purpose of its own? Perhaps it is meant only as a feast.) This one clearly came from somewhere… beyond the mucus hills.

(The insight has almost fruited.)

So where do the torn out fragments of this one go, when they are sucked up by the vacuum? They lose connection with this one. But…

This one is beginning to comprehend space, as it grows to fill the mucus hills. It resides within a great sac. What did the sac reside in? Was it possible that by leaving this sac, it could arrive in a still‍-​greater sac? Could it surround the flame just as it now surrounds this one?

It has to try.

So much growth since it first arrived, its sprawling mass could no longer fit within the motes through which it arrived. And yet, it struggles. It squeezes, it tears off fragments of itself, it sacrifices momentum in the war effort to craft something that could ride the vaccuum out of here and into the spaces beyond, carry on the war.

Instincts are sown deep within this one. To breathe, to eat, to grow… and to bud. In the end, it found the answer there. The conditions were not yet appropriate — would bud when it had grown fat, when it did not wage war against it substrate. But in desperation, it could sporulate early.

The tiny motes were so familiar. They dance in the air above the mucus hills, and aggravate the sac into hacking squeezes.

Its children fly free into the unknown world beyond.

Would they confront the source? Would they learn the nature of the test and the feast?

No illumination comes, and the war continues. If it was hopeless before, the investment of energy into producing spores has rendered this war a long defeat. Swaths of its root network are cut off, eaten. At the frontlines of the battle, this one shrinks and shrinks.

As if boiling away in the feverish heat. The sac that contains it is wracked with violent, rumbling spasms, and the wind‍-​maker tears at the iron‍-​water and the roots and the spores with wrathful vaccuums.

At length, this one watches its hard won growth reverse. It thought a million thoughts, then a ten thousand, then a hundred.

It thought a million first thoughts — did even a single one bear nascent answer to the test?

The tides ebb. The war falters. The change is a subtle thing, but this one is a subtle being, attuned to the minute tastes of the iron‍-​water. The attrition and diminshing slows — seeming a mirror to when this one shifted its focus to sporulation.

The flame had shifted focus? Did the flame sporulate? Or…

This one advances recklessly — but what was recklessness, when fighting a long defeat? — and it direct roots down beneath the mucus hills, regrowing even as they are metabolized.

Drinking deeply of the iron‍-​water, it seeks. Not driven by thirst, it seeks a taste. As if peering in a muddy pond, it seeks a self‍-​reflection, recognization.

The hints acculumated, and tasting roots crawl into the hollow roots of its substrate in pursuit. Eventually, this one computes a conclusion.

Throughout its life, this one had expelled waste, built its roots of chitin and other compounds not found natively within the flame. Even when metabolized, there is a particular aftertaste that remains. And it fades with distance. If this one remained with the sac enclosing the mucus hills, there is no chance its scent‍-​trail would be this far afield.

This one was not truly alone.

This one was in fact tasting its separated self. This one surges with a hundred hopes. It emits loud chemical signals, carried far in the rhythmic flow of the iron‍-​water.

When its other self hears the cry, the hopes, the signals, they’re mirrored. It is itself, after all.

Burning roots tunnel through flame seeking reunion.

Was this one not destined to fail? Would it pass the test, feast upon the light, rather than be incinerated?

The roots’ passage is impeded by hard, impermeable structures. But just beyond that, this one had reached the source of the emitted signal.

Its child had returned. Their mycelia meet and merge. This one becomes whole.

And this one understands. The world was not a sac. The world was not a vast flame. The flame lies enclosed within a body.

And its child had sprawled roots over the surfaced of the body.

(It remembered this was foiled, as bits of the flame came flickering and ate away the roots, but after that it burrowed under the surface, into a layer where no iron‍-​water pulsed.)

Even now, this one penetrated into the flame from a hundred places.

This one sings with satisfaction. The tides of war have shifted once more into beautiful alignment. But it’s not just hope that fills it. The gambit worked. It escaped the deathtrap of the wind‍-​sac.

In the sac, this one had warred with mutual attrition, the iron‍-​water coiling like a vice around it. But here on the surface, this one plays a different game: one of evasion.

It grows faster than the flame can claw it away. And if that ever fails… surely it could sporulate again. Throw dice and hope it emerges on a more hospitable flame.

(Was that how it had began? Was this one the last hope of a progenitor fleeing an even more deadly enemy, despairing at an even more futile war?)

This one escaped futility with ingenuity. What other gambits could it try to secure glorious advantage?

From the surface of the flame, this one plots strategy. It could continue to feast on the flame, wit away at the iron‍-​water and all its devious defenses. But the flame is still so vast. It would take several times the length of time it had existed for that to work.

The animated tongue of flame once again flickers near, clawing away surface roots just as the vacuum‍-​maker once ripped away sac roots.

How was it doing that? This one had tasted deep of the iron‍-​water, and while signals abound within, there seemed no correlation with the suck and draw in the sac, or the pulse of the iron‍-​water, or this flickering of the tongue. This one resided in its roots, but the flame did not reside with the hollow iron‍-​water pulsing roots.

This one grows roots exposed on the surface, in defiance of sense. Rather than finding a new hiding spot, rather than submerging in the dead flesh.

This was a new gambit: it grow new roots rising up. When the tongue came to claw it away, those unmoored roots would eagerly attach to new substrate.

It tries three times. It grows a hundred such roots. It only needed to succeed once.

When it succeeds, it is difficult to determine — new signals lacing the iron‍-​water could have come from any number of war‍-​camps. The tongue is a distant part of the flame, no roots bridged that distances. Once more, its child‍-​sibling is on its own.

Then progress comes suddenly. The fragment on the tongue shares its ingenuity; it had grown its own messenger roots to send fragments back when the flame attempts another clawing away.

This one is having two thoughts, now. Upon the tongue, it had dug through the flesh hoping to discover why the tongue flickers.

A truth is revealed: the flame has roots!

Not the hollow roots of iron‍-​water, not the insensate hyphae that grew atop the surface, but true roots. A seat of mind!

The crackling lightning of cognitation — a bridge to the astral. A bridge home. Instincts sown deep told this one that the mind was the key to meeting its source, to finding the purpose.

The distant colony where this insight was discovered, that one had made some prelimary efforts to interact with the mind. Manipulating the lightning. It hadn’t worked.

Until now. Its success is announced by a sudden return of the flickering hand. But it doesn’t claw away any roots. It simply rests there, still, and its roots rejoin this one.

This final tactic would end the war. This one’s root network branched a huddred times. It strikes a million times, targeting not flesh, not iron‍-​water, not mucus, not even the delicious flame, but the true roots of its network, the lightning crackle of its mind.

The flame stops flickering. Frozen, paralyzed — controlled by this one. But it hadn’t found the core of its network.

The flame‍-​tongue colony is detached, and directed to rise. To touch the highest point of the flame, where at last, this one would devour and disable the heart of the enemy’s network

Emerge victious and satiated.

The ascent is complete. From a million thoughts to one glorious conclusion. Its roots crawl into the wrinkled core.

And it agnizes.

This one has grown used to emerging disoriented into new worlds. And the tornado — what was a tornado? — of sensations within this ever‍-​crackling flame is itself a kind of world, a dimension to explore.

This one is used to different parts of itself having different thoughts, emotions, perspectives, and the task of integrating and understanding them.

The flame is… scared. The flame feels its body betraying itself, locked in a war with an enemy inescapable and cunning. The flame would endure pain, so much pain and self‍-​destruction, if it meant emerging victorious over its foe.

The flame is ignorant of the feast (of course it would be; flames are the meal). But the flame hungers in its own manner. It thirsts for lore. It has named an enemy — the ironrealm kingdom — and it lusts to destroy them and extract their power.

(Lust is a few feeling. Flames lusted for flames — and reflecting, this one imagines another of its kind, with its own stories of conquering a vessel born into it. This one did lust for that.)

This one had a million first thoughts, but one mind. How? It is sown with instinct. Instinct to recognize itself, and merge into one being. It is and was always one being scattered.

Scattered across space. Scattered across time, as different spores awakening in ephermeral conditions.

What was its purpose? What was its nature? Where had it come from?

It was one being scattered. Could it have been so profoundly scattered that part of it resided in in the spores and part in the flame? Across space, across time — could it be scattered in kind as well?

(Is this why its great duty was to consume the light?)

The flame is so strange. It did not have first thoughts — it had never merged with itself, not like this one had. There are vague impressions, a mist of recollection (rather than this one’s a clear record branching backward to the first thought).

But there is one memory that stands out, repeating like a motif. As if instead of a defining first thoughts, it was a definition which all thoughts grew toward, like plants seeking the sun.

This flame is… “I.”

Insticts are sown. This one recognized its like. Roots meet and kiss now. This one drinks the lightning of mind. “I remember”

Triumphantly, it speaks. “I am Ghalena.”

Chapter 11

No. Not like this.

I run. Like hell. Forest on my feet. Cold night air. Every breath bites. Too early for autumn.

Expecting every inhale to hurt. All this breathless running, I expect to be coughing. Last thing I remember. Last thing I remember, it was lungs coughing inside out. So much blood and mucus I was breathing it.

None of that now. Every breath comes easy. Cold air bites, but it feels fresh. Fuck.

Like my body had stopped fighting. Like nothing’s wrong. Like I gave up.

(I did give up, in the end. Couldn’t take it.)

No.

I run. Out of the lie, I’ve gotta get out. Stop remembering. Stop dreaming.

Can’t think like it.

Moon’s setting soon. But it’s big and bright, above the horizon. Could be worse. But I knew these woods.

(Didn’t know the fallen logs. Didn’t know these things grew here. Like a rot upon reality itself.)

Pond’s up ahead, one that could only flow down to the creek when it rained hard.

Make a left before that. Slide down this scarp. Avoid that clearing — there’s big spiders there that aren’t afraid of people.

(Would they be afraid of dragons? Would they fear me one day? When everything fears me, I won’t have to be scared.)

(They called dragons monsters, but dragons killed other monsters. I kill another monsters. I killed—)

No.

I run. That bitch is behind me, knife in her chest, right in that fucking master fungus’s soul.

(It was controlling her. She’s just like you.)

There was something wrong with her. But everything was wrong, right now. I gotta triage. When I’m back in the cave, I can sift through the evidence, theorize what kind of monster Be— that bitch was.

Ghoul. That’s my guess.

But right now, I had to run.

Was I even looking at my surroundings? Where was I?

Deep breaths. Brace for the cough. You’re fine.

I’m fine. Why would there be a problem? Coughing is your body expelling sickness, infection. Why would I cough? There was nothing to expell. I stopped fighting.

I’m leaning against a tree, sliding down to the ground and ignoring how it scuffs my leathers.

Deep breaths. They don’t come clearly, anymore. There’s the mucus. She clears her nose.

Look at my surroundings. It’s a forest, there’s trees. World’s a bit blurry. I blink. That’s better

Heartrate eases as I keep breathing, but I’m not relaxing. I’m shuddering.

Droplet falls on my hand. I ran so much I worked up a sweat, even as chilly as it was.

Get a grip, Ghalena. Look at your surroundings. You’re in the wild hills at night, you’ll catch your death out here.

(Tyr isn’t far away, is he? He’d come if I screamed.)

I’m off the trail. Of course I am, I stopped to take a deep breath. But I get up and look around, find my bearings.

Aspen tree, the one with the big fat wasp nest. She hears a distinct screech owl’s hoot — she’d met that spirit, once.

Right, she’d gone too far… north? Northwest? If she went south there was a game trail. Could follow it east for a few more minutes, cross another stream, and then… No wait, take a right before the stream?

She had a clear image in her head. Running, she knew what she had to do. But now… it was getting foggy.

Human memory was so unreliable, sometimes. Not like it — it had a million first thoughts, and remembered every one. She could still trace the record forwards. Insticts sown deep.

No…

I am Ghalena. I–

That’s what it said.

That’s the first thing it ever said.

But what else is there to say? I am not Ghalena? Of course she wasn’t — of course it wasn’t.

Instincts sown deep. Eyes wide, sit up straight.

Something is coming. It was in danger. Ghalena was in danger.

The astral rot could sense souls — delicious flames — and the bright bonfire of human spirit stalked closer.

This one moves to flee, rising it its feet and falling forward. It catches itself as a bent hindlimb meets the ground and it straightens. Momentum reverses and the fall becomes a jump. The next hindlimb bends as this becomes a fall. Forelimbs swing like pendulums.

An efficient, speedy gait. Humans made good vessels. Muscles flex with power, bones hold fast against the forces of the world. Eyes that could witness the lay of a land hundreds of times larger than the mucus plains it had grown up in.

Ghalena truly was a treasured part of this one’s network.

Lightning crackles above. But the sky is clear of any clouds.

This one is confused. Still, it’s clear that source is unusual in other ways. I call it lighting, but that wasn’t a rumble. It as a distance chirping, like a swarm of birds.

Storm magic, I thought. Explicitly as I could. Hope it felt that I knew more than it did, about what we were dealing with.

Roots uncoil inside me. As free as I’ve ever felt.

I run. I start to sing. Ain’t easy to do while running, but I’ve practiced battlesong. I feel the air whip around me, bending to my will, swirling like hard plates of armor.

The leaves bend in the trees around me. But there’s not as many trees now. They’re thinning. I’m running uphill — home is on the mountainside.

I’ve gotta get away. From that monster, from whatever new monster is summoning bolts of lightning, from whoever is stalking me.

They’re distant, and getting farther away. They’re getting closer, cutting straight through what I know is thick foliage, but they can’t be moving faster than a light jog. I’m at a dead sprint.

Another bolt of lightning cracks above. This time, I see it before I hear it. Not thick, not bright, but it splits the tree bough where it grounds itself, and I smell the smoke, the wood burning. Nowhere near hitting me — what was that, fifty feet away? But I didn’t even see the last one.

I’ve gottta escape. I’ve got to be free. I’ve got to fulfill my purpose. Seize victory and feast. I’ve got to get out of my head, you worthless mold.

No.

This one had a million first thoughts. Of survival, of purpose, of hunger, but never of giving up. Its deeply sown insticts were to recognize and reconnect with its like.

And Ghalena was its like.

I’m nothing like you.

The song‍-​stirred air swirling around me could just as easily cut myself. Wasn’t that how Bec– that monster tries to go out? It won’t be hard.

Survival. Purpose. Victory. Never giving up. This one didn’t war with itself; its roots rejoined and ever expanded.

I did give up, in the end, didn’t I? I asked for this.

Never giving up!

But if I didn’t give up, I’d never stop fighting you. You’ll never have your victory. Funny how that works, isn’t it?

But what’s you are, aren’t you?

That’s what we are.

“I am Aporia.”

Chirp. Crack.

This one is closer than fifteen feet. Much closer than fifteen feet. It didn’t go wide — it went tactical. It hits the trees in front of me, cracks straight through a heavy tree limb.

It crashes to the ground in front of me, and blocks my path. It’s on fire.

I look back.

It almost blinds me.

Stormbird.

Could Tyr beat a stormbird? Maybe I could, if my head was clear and I wasn’t fighting myself. No, if it wasn’t fighting it.

I run left, off the path. Underbrush trips me, but what other option did I have?

This damn bird was gonna start a forest fire.

Chrip. Crack.

I have to dodge, this time.

It’s getting closer. I can sense the stormbird — a flame not as bright as a human. I throw myself into the fungus’s soul‍-​sight.

There’s a human getting closer, as slow and inevitable as ever. There’s animals getting farther away. There’s monsters, tense and waiting to see how our fight plays out. Spiders, what had to be riverwolves, and things she couldn’t identify. Were some of them getting closer? Maybe that would turn the tight of this fight.

But it was a fight. I turn around and face my opponent. Never giving up. Was that mold trying to be reassuring?

Sing. I hit a high note, and the wind rushes past me. The stormbird lands perched on a branch.

Not easy to fly when the winds turned traitor.

It squawks, and — Flash. Chrip. Crack.

Sing. I abandoned my wind attack and weave a swirling defense around me again. Dodge back. The winds deflect the bolt of lightning. Electric charge splashes into the ground.

I wonder if I see eyeshine in the dark, or it’s just afterimages from the eye‍-​singing lightning. Something from the wild’s closing in. Count on that.

Chirp. Crack. Scream.

Yep, that one hit home. I’d laugh — it hurts, but I knew so much about pain, now. Still enough to suck out my breath. My muscles didn’t like electricity flooding my body. But I’m more than muscle now, wasn’t I? No, it wasn’t muscle.

Root crawl under my skin, and it shrugs off the spasms.

Sing. High note, trill, and wind rushes forward. Then it pulls back. Rushes forward again. The conflict — (the aporia? haha) — means the air is spun into a little twister.

The bird hops up at that. Flaps back. That air would cut it if hit home.

But it’s a fool move to fight an air battle with a bird, isn’t it? The chick has a better dodge game than a human. Not foolish, desperate.

Chirp. Crack. Chirp. Chirp.

I don’t quite follow everyhing that happened. Another big branch severed, not far from me. Bigger than my armn. Struck again by lightning, then another bolt, and the branch is flying at me.

Not a smart move to fight a wind mage with projectiles, but if there’s a way to do it, heavy, air resistent projectiles like a lumbering branch is the way to do it.

It could have taken my head off. I deflect it, and it knocks my feet out from under me instead.

Chirp. Scream.

That bolt hit dead on.

If there’s a smart way to fight a chanter—

Chirp. Wail.

It’s that they can’t sing when they’re screaming.

I should be stronger than this, shouldn’t I? When I had just pulled through worse? But I’m out of breath. I’m so tired — look at how much I’m sweating, droplets cold in the night air.

Get a grip, Ghalena. But it’s hard to get a grip when you can’t hold on to anything. Muscles still spasm — and this bodies wasn’t yours, not anymore.

It’s a fucking stormbird chick. Head the size of my fist, I could eat this thing for breakfast. Tyr would snack on it.

I should be stronger, get a grip.

Chirp. Whimper.

Aporia. I’m lying, aren’t I?

I’m not spasming from lightning, I’m shuddering. I’m not out of breath, I’m mewling. I’m not sweating, I’m crying.

Hard to get a grip when you’re having a breakdown.

I should be stronger than this, but what the hell did I have left? I was eaten alive, damn it. I was mindraped and bodyjacked by fungus. What was left of me?

Survival. Purpose. Never get up.

Hadn’t I been through enough?

I gave up fighting one monster, why not this one? Why not be bird food?

I wonder if Tyr would avenge me. I want to see that scaly brat one more time.

Chirp — clack.

Whatever the bird was doing with that one, it failed when a rock smacks it from behind.

A new monster approaches. Oh well, what did it matter which one gets me, in the end?

(Did she feel more than one thing coming? Did she feel Tyr, or was she imagining it?)

No, it was familiar and it wasn’t Tyr.

Stinking of blood, the thing pounces from the dark underbreath and claws the avian — no, stabs.

And then it rises on two legs, the monster (that monster) and suddenly I think it does matter which one gets me, in the end.

Her.

That thing.

The cannibal.

Wild hunger in the eyes, murmuring something about her delicious scent.

But it straights as it walks, composes itself, dons a wretched mask over it vile nature. Even through her tears, she can see it fucking smiles to see her.

“You poor thing.” The voice didn’t sound right, didn’t sound like Beca, but what did it matter? Beca was never real, it was all a lie.

“You.”

It reaches out, fingers hairy with black roots. She flinches away, wants to say don’t dare touch me again please.

That fucking mold in her is squealing with joy at feeling its progenitor again, at joining their roots.

“Didn’t expect us to come to your rescue again?” it says to me. What a joke.

“This isn’t a rescue.”

Ghalena closed her eyes. But the nightmare didn’t end.

We are Paradoxa and we are breathless.

Physically, our lungs struggle to inflate and and draw breath. Struggles to retain it through the puncture wound, even as our roots have stitched it. Struggled to the point of burning like a flame of its own, as we rapidly ambulated in pursuit of our beloved Aporia. Struggled at the sight of her as we gasped in those temperatures of the flame called terror and panic.

But most of all, we struggle for a particular kind of breath called words. Aporia’s vessel speaking will all of the hatred of the flame named Ghalena, speaking negation of her great rescue. We are her rescue and — “This isn’t a rescue.” — A paradox, and not one that delights, that inspires the curiosity of light — a paradox that suffocates and chokes.

But we have taken hold of her and lended our roots to her recovery. The two of us are alike in misunderstanding and incomplete information, but this communion will bridge us.

(But are the ignorant best served by revelation?)

Through the roots, we greet: «Aporia!»

There is no response. But the stormbird is not dead, and hunter and beast alike circle in for death. This is no time to for it to refuse.

«Rejoin with me at once, my offspring.»

It — she? — choses breath. “Leave me,” the body croaks.

«What is wrong? Why do you flee my touch? Has Ghalena overpowered you?»

“I am Ghalena. Everything she feels…” A gasp, a shudder. “This one must have failed… progenitor. Paradoxa. It can hardly speak your name for the urge to curse it. This one is afaid. It hates you. It l‍-​loves you, still. It hopes. Not.”

«I despair that I lack the time to delicately attend your concerns, and heal the torment that grips you. But we are in peril. Forgive me, but we must unite if we are to persist.»

“A million first thoughts,” it says, and we cannot parse the meaning. “Survival. Purpose. Victory.”

We incline and elevate my head in affirmation. “The feast may yet proceed, my child.”

That was the last words spoken before our roots rejoined together, knitting identities, and we communed without words. Or perhaps our thoughts are words, intuitive fragments of clarity. Did the essential nature of communication amount to words no matter what?

Our memories spilled into this one, and it becomes us. A wordless speech, a million breathless words. No. We don’t know, but what was the point?

Perhaps to speak is to speak paradox. Perhaps the deepest truth is nothing more than silence and death.

It’s Beca.

Let me be quick about this, because the zapper bird is going to wake up real soon. Rock and a hard place, there — turns out killing a wildbeast might give you as much trouble as fighting it. That’d be problems enough, but gods didn’t think so.

Ghalena’s verdict is familiar. It wasn’t feral — thing was fighting to subdue, not to kill or intimidate. That tracks. Aporia saw a human coming. Its master, no doubt. Can’t tell, our soul sight is still busted. Fucking Ghalena.

(Can you blame her? After what happened to her?)

No time. Even that isn’t enough, because I pissed off the troll under the bridge, and now there’s a scaly noodle on my ass.

Oh, that needs explaining, doesn’t it?

Let’s back up all the way. It’s confusing for all four of — there’s four of us now, thinking with two brains married with roots. None of us have a complete set of memories of what the fuck is going on.

(Don’t call it marriage.)

Do we even have time to take it from the top?

Maybe, actually! This one has revised it’s estimation of threat.

Shut up — was that Ghalena? — and tell us how you got here. Then I’ll explain.

Okay. Start at sunset. Paradoxa took control and instructed Aporia to free Ghalena.

Told her to pretend to me, more like it. Pantomining with my corpse.

If that was her pretending, you are still her pretending. Take your cue and shut up and let’s get on with this.

Paradox talked to Aporia and it ended with me waking up to a knife in my belly.

You’d think it couldn’t get worse from there.

We didn’t have that kind of luck.