33. Advanced Mycology
The hallucinations were real, as were the holes the arrows left in my leg and chest after they dissipated into orange steam.
Ciarán left me in the dirt and screamed in fury as he charged at the apparitions of his parents. His orange scythes met their weapons, and the air turned electric with the hum of magick.
I gasped against the pain, and Skal-laden spores filled my lungs. I jammed my hand against the bleeding gash in my chest. I could fix it. I had fixed worse.
Heat welled in my hand and the pain in my shoulder amplified. Magick burned as muscle and sinew knit back together at my bidding. Nerves tingled along my shoulder and down my arm.
Una snarled and lunged to join the fight between Ciarán and his parents, but the Ferrin apparition morphed into a beast with a size and claws to match Una’s. Ferrin’s head sat between those of Ciarán’s parents on his monstrous shoulders, and he tackled Una around the middle.
Ciarán’s mother fired another arrow my way when she saw me watching, and I paused in my healing to form a blue shield.
“Get out of here, Wren!” Ciarán bellowed back at me, then took his father’s bo staff to the gut. He doubled over and grunted with the force of the blow.
“Ciarán!” I screamed, but when I tried to stagger to my feet and run to him, the hole in my leg screamed back in protest.
I fell back to the ground as Ciarán’s mother looped the orange string of her longbow around Ciarán’s neck. His fingers scrabbled at the ligature, and his eyes locked with mine as his mother dragged him into the shadows of the fungi where Una and Ferrin’s apparition had already disappeared.
“Let him go!” I finally managed to climb to my feet, and a fresh arrow zipped from the shadows to catch me in the stomach and embed in my spine.
I keeled backwards, and towers of fungus swam overhead through a spore-laden haze. My leg didn’t hurt anymore because I couldn’t feel anything lower than where the arrow had struck me.
The arrow dissolved like the others had, but when I tried to roll onto my stomach, only my shoulders and arms obeyed. I dug my hands into the loam of the earth, bracing against the agony that umbrellaed through my chest.
“Ciarán—” The silence of the forest stifled my broken gasp.
“Run, Wren! We can’t beat them!” His voice, broken and desperate, in my head was a small mercy. He wasn’t dead. Not yet.
“I can’t.” I held my hand over the wound and heat swelled in my palm as I pulled on more healing magick. “I’m coming after you. I—”
I broke off as my spinal cord rewired itself at my magick’s bidding, and electricity coursed through my legs. Pain erupted in my shin, but I focused on the hole in my stomach before I allowed myself to sit and tend to anything else.
I grit my teeth against the burning of healing magick in my stomach. Pressure nudged at me along that invisible tether between me and the earth.
This level of healing was too much for the volcanoes, and the land rattled ominously in my head, but I couldn’t stop. Not when Ciarán needed me.
“Anything the spores make us hallucinate, our magick makes real!” Ciarán’s telepathic warning sounded too loud in the silence of the forest. “We’re fighting our own nightmares, Wren! You need to get out!”
“Keep fighting.” I grunted and forced myself to stand. I would heal my leg as I ran. There wasn’t time otherwise. “I’m coming!”
“We can’t win, Wren! No one can! The stronger we are, the stronger they are too!”
“They haven’t killed you yet!” I took the first running step in the direction Ciarán’s headless parents had dragged him. Magick screamed in my leg, but the pain only spurred me forward. “I’m coming! Ciarán, I’m—”
Fresh panic reverberated along our tether, and my heart constricted in my throat.
“No, no, no!” Ciarán begged. “Stop! Wren, run! Get out! You won’t—”
Ciarán’s voice cut off in panicked howls that ricocheted through my mind, filled my skull, and turned my freshly healed stomach to lead.
“Ciarán!” I screamed, trying to cut through the noise that crescendoed in my head. “Ciarán, hold on!”
My own panic swirled against his, and his screams of terror turned my mind to slush. I wasn’t sure I was even sprinting in the right direction anymore. All I knew was I needed to go faster. I needed to reach him. I needed to save him.
More horrible than Ciarán’s screams was when they cut, replaced by sudden and sharp silence.
I staggered to a halt, and fear wrapped my chest in an iron fist. The ember of his presence flickered at the back of my head, muted and distant, but there.
“Just hold on. I’m almost there.” But that was a lie, and as I scanned the surrounding forest, I was met with rough bark and distant canopies of leafy trees. Real, proper trees, just like the ones back home.
Had I really made it through Mycastrath? I should’ve been relieved. Instead, my throat seized.
Not only had I somehow gone too far, but I was alone in the woods.
My breathing turned shallow, and I pivoted, unsure of which direction I’d come here from, unsure of where to go next.
“Wren, help!” Hauntingly familiar and horribly impossible, the voice was too feminine to be Ciarán’s.
“Linsey?” I stammered.
“Help me!” she screamed again.
“You’re not real!” I yelled back and pressed my hands over my ears when the underbrush rustled in response.
It was just the woods. I’d faced so much worse since graduation night. Monsters, Magicians, the potential end of the world…
Linsey’s ear-splitting wail turned my insides cold, and then it cut in a strangled cry.
I knew what was hanging above me before I looked, but I forced my eyes upwards anyways.
The limp figure of a human swaying from the branches stole my breath away.
“It’s not real,” I repeated under my breath, but my palms turned sweaty and my knees went weak. “None of this is real.”
It hadn’t been real the first time, either, when Linsey had strung up a mannequin in a tree as revenge for her college expulsion.
The horror of it had been real enough, of course. There had been a moment when the shape in the tree had been my friend, and she was there because of what I’d done.
Her limp body twisted on its rope to face me. Linsey, blank faced and unblinking, stared into the trees with her head at an impossible angle. The joints in her neck cracked as her head straightened. Her unseeing eyes fluttered closed, then reopened to reveal pinpricks of light in deepset sockets.
Linsey’s jaw unhinged, and she screamed the horrible wail of a rotsbane, high-pitched and ear-splitting.
Bones splintered, and the branch she hung from snapped. The transformation into a four-armed mass of shadow and claws was complete by the time she hit the forest floor. Linsey was gone, replaced by a monstrous rotsbane with pinprick eyes that glowed the same blue as my magick.
She lunged, and her four claws reached out for me, but my legs felt like awkward stilts as I fumbled away.
She would’ve torn me to shreds had the noose around her neck not tightened at the last moment, jerking her backwards. She whimpered at the figure that stepped out from behind her, holding the end of the noose like a leash.
Wild blue hair fell in thick tresses, and blue irises glowed against dark sclera. I had never gotten a good look at my own Nightmare before, and I wondered if there was any way I looked even half as beautiful as the version standing before me now.
“It’s always a Magician who thinks they will be the one who finally survives Ergoth’s strath.” Despite having stolen my face, her voice was ethereal and oily. Something about it made the shaved hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. “But none of them ever survive. None of them ever will.”
“Who is Ergoth?” I demanded. She couldn’t be me, despite the fact she wore my face.
She held out a hand to catch a bright spore on her fingertip and blinked her luminescent eyes at it.
“We are Ergoth.” She gestured at the trees.
Bark and leaves rippled, revealing towering stalks of fungus again.
I hadn’t made it out of the strath at all.
The spores had only made me believe I had.
“Ergoth lives in the strath, and Ergoth is the strath. We sense you are a powerful Magician, so by the end of tonight, you will be Ergoth too.”
“Over my dead body.” Magick buzzed in my hands as a flail took shape.
“That is the idea, yes. Ergoth makes the spores. You breathe them in. You create wonderful nightmares for Ergoth to inhabit.” She held her hands out as if to show herself off. “And then, Ergoth can hunt.”
Ciarán had been correct. Hallucinogenic spores laden with Skal so that anything our brains dreamed up was made real, which the forest then adopted into its hive mind, probably through those same damn spores. But if the hive mind, Ergoth, had a consciousness, maybe they could be reasoned with.
“But why?” I demanded. “We’re trying to save Skalterra. Let us pass through—”
“Magician politics do not concern us,” Ergoth replied. “We only want to feed. We like dead things. You will stay in our strath until you are also a dead thing, and we will feed on you.”
“I’m just one dead thing.” I stuck my arms out, the same way she had, showing off the meager amount of potential dead thing my body offered. “I can’t feed a strath.”
“No, but this will be a dead thing soon.” She put a hand on her chest, and then on the rotsbane’s back.
“And this. And the other constructs you create. And the more you breathe our spores, the more constructs there will be. The longer you survive, the more we get to eat. The more powerful you are, the longer you survive. But you will die. You are curious. I can feel it. Would you like to know how?”
“You’d really tell me how you plan to kill me?” I scoffed.
“Strong Magicians are strong because they are stubborn. Stubborn Magicians stay alive longer out of spite. But they always end up rotting.” Ergoth’s stolen face split into a too-wide grin. “The rotting tastes the best.”
“I’m not about to be killed by a talking mushroom.” My flail crackled as I wielded it ahead of me. “Neither is my friend. Let us through, or—”