32. Intro to Mycology #3
“They’re actually sea stars, not starfish,” I mumbled, still scanning the fungus. “Where?”
“What do you mean where? They’re all over!”
I twisted around to frown at him, but he was beaming at the surrounding fungi. I looked again, but there were still no sea stars.
“Ciarán—”
“Look! Did you see how many legs that one had?” His smile slipped from his face. “You don’t think the strath floods with sea water do you? Maybe it’s connected to the ocean somehow.”
“I’m pretty sure fungus and salt water don’t do well together.” I squinted at the passing messes of folds and delicate gills, still not seeing Ciarán’s sea stars.
A pale face with her mouth drawn open in a silent scream stared back from the bright shadows, there and gone again in a blur of fungal growth.
I startled sideways, and Ciarán lunged to try to grab me, but we both fell from Una’s back. The soft ground cushioned our landing, but we hit in a mess of limb and cloak. I scrambled to break free of Ciarán and run back over the loam to where I’d seen the face.
My heart hammered in my throat, threatening to choke me.
It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be.
“Wren!” Ciarán yelled after me, but I called out for someone else.
“Linsey!” I scanned the formations, trying to bat the spore-heavy haze out of the air ahead of me. “Linsey, where are you?”
Ciarán grabbed my hand and yanked me back to him. “What are you yelling about?”
I pushed away, pointing into the gloom. “I saw her! Linsey! She’s not a rotsbane. She’s here, in the strath. We just passed her!”
Ciarán held me back with an arm across my chest as he peered into the haze. Una cut into the pressing silence, whining softly behind us.
“Do you still not see the starfish?” Ciarán whispered. “They’re everywhere, Wren.”
He held out a hand and let a spore land on his palm.
“It was Linsey. I know it was.” A cold realization washed over me. “What if that’s the secret of the strath? The souls of the Nightmares who turn into rotsbane are trapped here somehow.”
I shrunk against Ciarán, preparing to see the haunted faces of other lost Nightmares lurking in the dark.
“That’s not it.” Ciarán dropped his spore. “Keep steady, Wren.”
“What—” My stomach lurched, and my vision shifted. I was staring at the same fungal forest, but from behind Ciarán’s long nose.
And the strath was covered in sea stars of all colors. Orange, purple, reds, some with five arms, others fanning out like sunflowers, all stuck to the fungi from their bases and up into the gilled canopy.
My vision shifted again, and I was back behind my own eyes and in my own head. The sea stars were gone, and my chest heaved as I tried to make sense of it.
“Did you see them?” Ciarán hissed.
“I did.” The pieces locked into place, and the way Ciarán squeezed my hand, I knew he’d beat me there. “Linsey isn’t here. Neither are the sea stars. The spores—they’re not poisonous. They’re hallucinogenic.”
“Back to Una. Now.”
We spun back towards Una, then stumbled to an immediate stop.
Ferrin stood between us and the onchú, his body malformed and bursting from his leather in a mash of man and monster. His goggles made him look like a misshapen insect, but his grin showed off canines worthy of a wolf.
He raised his hands ahead of him, and bile rose in my throat.
He held a decapitated head by a fistful of hair in each hand, one man and one woman, both with jaws slack and eyes rolled back.
Even in the gloom of the spores and in the state she was in, Ciarán really did look so much like his mother.
“It’s not real,” I said automatically, but my voice shook. It can’t have been my hallucination. I hadn’t known what Ciarán’s parents looked like, but our minds were tethered, and now his nightmares were bleeding into mine. “Ciarán, it’s the spores.”
“I know.” He said through a wavering rasp of pain and disbelief. “I know, Wren.”
His shaking hand found mine, and we took a careful, shuffling step forward together.
It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t real.
Two figures stepped out of the gloom beyond Una to stalk forward and join Ferrin.
Their dark armor and cloaks resembled Ciarán’s, but their cowls hung loose at their necks as they had no heads to wear them on.
An orange bo staff lit in the hands of the man, while the woman’s body armed itself with a humming longbow of orange, an arrow already nocked.
“No!” Orange scythes ignited in Ciarán’s fists, and he launched towards the hallucinations with a howl.
“Ciarán! Stop!” I grabbed him by his collar and pulled him back before he attacked Una by mistake.
He staggered backwards and fell on his backside in the loam. Tears streaked down his cheeks, but he let his scythes dissipate.
“I’m sorry,” he croaked. “I know, I know. It’s not real, but—”
The dull thunk of the arrow burying itself in my back cut him off. I lurched with the hit and looked down at the orange arrowhead protruding beneath my collarbone.
“Oh.” The taste of blood washed over my tongue, and I staggered back around to face the grisly apparitions of Ferrin and Ciarán’s parents. For a hallucination, the hole in my chest felt hellishly real. “Ciarán—”
I fell backwards into his arms just a second arrow split through my shin.