33. Advanced Mycology #3
“Shit,” I breathed. “Ciarán, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Ergoth grabbed me by my hair from behind, and I yelped as he threw me to the ground. He glared down at me, still wearing Ciarán’s visage. Fungus knit his abdomen back together with sticky strands.
“You would steal our food and cut our roots, but do we not all have to eat?” Ergoth said. “Do you blame Ergoth for doing what we must to survive?”
“I blame Ergoth for trying to eat my friend!” I leapt to my feet, loosing a punch swathed in blue fire as I did.
Ergoth grabbed my fist before I could make contact with his face. “We do not leave our strath. We do not seek out Magicians. We only devour those who come to Ergoth. Does this make us worth burning?”
“Yes!” I swung with my free arm and its serrated blades, cutting Ergoth clean through this time. He collapsed to the loam, and I stepped over his twitching parts to reach the real Ciarán again.
The cut in his abdomen was the deepest, but every bit of exposed skin had been eaten by roots to some extent. I hesitated, unsure of where to start, or if I even had time to heal him. His chest heaved with labored breaths, and sweat slicked his mottled skin.
“Ergoth was keeping him alive.” A new visage stepped out of the gloom. Ergoth had stolen my face again, along with the blue hair of my Nightmare form. “It is too late. The only way to save his life is to re-assimilate him.”
“He’d rather die.” I pressed my palms against his open wound.
Ciarán cried out against my touch, arching his back and recoiling away, but I let magick heat my palms and flow from me to him. I used our tether to feel out his injuries, and I could feel my magick stitching them back together, pulling at my own organs and tissue as it did.
And then I sent fire through his veins.
He screamed in pain, but the ridges under his skin receded, and the bits of mycelium still hanging from him shriveled and fell off.
Ergoth screamed in pain too, their voice echoing through the graveyard from every direction.
I hadn’t realized more apparitions had surrounded us, but now that I looked more closely, I recognized Ciarán’s parents again, joined by a nightmarish version of his cousin Daithi.
Massive sea stars crept through the curtains of roots, as did other beasts and creatures.
Orla, Galahad, Tiernan, and Ferrin all creeped closer, each one misshapen. My high school physics teacher stood with them, along with a clawed version of my father.
There were dozens, maybe hundreds of them lurking in the mist and mycelium, each one drawing closer.
“You will assimilate by the time the night is over,” Ergoth said, speaking still from the apparition of my Nightmare. “You and the boy both, and you will feed us for centuries.”
“You can’t have him!” I stood over Ciarán. “I won’t let you!”
“The ego of a Magician,” Ergoth sneered. “Ergoth does not require your permission.”
New hands grabbed me from behind and pulled me into a headlock that rendered my arm blades useless.
“We can be together here.” Ergoth was back in a new version of Ciarán, hissing in my ear with fetid breath. “Outside the strath, we must be separate from each other, but here, we can live for years. Together.”
Roots snaked off him to wrap around my arms and worm under the hems of my clothes.
“You won’t touch him!”
“You cannot stop us. We will take who and what we deem fit. We will assimilate. We will devour. You are helpless to resist. So why fight? We have devoured so many Magicians. We will devour so many more. You are not special.”
“I said NO!” The ground shook, and bits of fungus rained from above. Fissures cracked the soft earth, releasing sulfurous fumes that overtook the smell of decay. “I don’t care what Magicians you’ve had wander into your strath. None have been as strong as me!”
“But that’s not true.” My blue-hair apparition pointed to the skeletal figure in the web of mycelium overhead. “You are strong, but you are not as strong as Ergoth’s father. Though with your addition, maybe the father can finally rest?”
I stared up at the skeleton man for too long, and Ergoth-Ciarán shoved me forward so that I toppled on top of the real Ciarán’s body. For a moment, I thought he’d let me go, and I grabbed at Ciarán, planning on heaving him over my shoulder and running him out of the strath myself if I had to.
But the roots that had spread from Ergoth to wrap around my arms tightened, lifting me into the air, away from Ciarán.
“No!” I grabbed at him, wrapping an arm around his torso to try to hold him close, but new roots had sprung from the ground and wormed their way beneath his skin. Mycelium pulled me up while it tied him down. “Ciarán! Please!”
Roots snaked beneath my clothing, wrapping around my limbs, stinging where it touched my sin, lifting me higher, and higher until Ciarán was far beneath me and the skeletal man was at eye level.
His skin stretched over his skull, and ridges of fungus decorated his arms. His tunic had worn away into ratty threads, but there was only fungus underneath, clinging to bone-thin remains. A single blood-shot eye opened.
“Eth…” he rattled, “…thel…”
I froze in my struggle against Ergoth’s roots.
“‘Ethel?’” I repeated. “Did you just say ‘Ethel?’”
The rotting Magician had said my grandmother’s name.
But then the sting of the mycelium against my skin turned into sharp, burning pain, and I cried out as it needled into my flesh along my arms, legs, chest, neck, everywhere.
The roots twisted beneath skin, worming into muscle, around bone, into blood vessels…
I felt every movement of Ergoth’s mycelium burrowing through my viscera, and I screamed in protest. Sweat pooled and dripped down my face as I tried to generate enough heat to burn the roots weaving through my flesh, but there was too much.
Ergoth’s roots kept coming, until they were climbing my spinal cord, up my brainstem, and then—
My limbs went limp and heat fled as an entity larger than myself clicked into place. Ergoth’s expanse opened in my head. I was in every stalk of fungus, every spore, every rotting Magician trapped in this graveyard.
And they were all in me.
And we were all Ergoth.
I felt every bird, every beetle, the beating of Una’s talons as she raced for the edge of the strath, the reservoir of purified Skal that lay beneath the forest…
All while Ergoth’s roots continued to eat their way into my body.
The skeletal man gave a final, rasping gargle, and his single eye rolled back in his rotted head.
Silence fell over the strath. Ciarán lay far below, but the orange glow of his eyes percolated through the curtains of mycelium that separated us.
“Welcome to Ergoth. The Ergoth Father has fed us for centuries, but no Magician has been strong enough to replace him. Now he may rest, and Ergoth may feed.” Ergoth spoke directly into my head, buzzing through the roots that now tangled through my system.
“Er…goth…” I gasped, no longer sure of where I ended and Ergoth began.
“The man you fought so hard to save, you will spend the next centuries watching his skin stretch and bloat, and his eyeballs fester as we take what is ours.”
Ciarán stared up at me through half-closed lids, and his lips parted, but he was unable to speak.
I’d brought him in here.
A spark flickered inside my chest, somewhere still untouched by Ergoth’s roots.
“You will…” I whispered, “not…touch him.”
The spark caught, swirling and growing, even as I remained immobile in my web of mycelium. The ground below quaked and split, releasing streams of super-heated air into the graveyard, and my magick swelled until I was screaming and unable to hold it in any longer.
It burst forth, snapping my bones as it released. Spouts of lava broke through the crust of the earth. Fungus shriveled in the heat released from the earth, and the falling of monstrous fungi roared like thunder. Ergoth screamed in my mind, and I screamed with them.
Everything was heat and noise and the breaking of my bones, but I’d been breathing Skal all night, and I would use it to turn the earth inside out if that was what it took to escape.
My magick made this land.
Now it would destroy it.
And if it destroyed us, too, so be it.
Mycelium snapped, and the earth rushed upwards. I landed in the loam next to Ciarán, surrounded by molten rock and steam. Blue spores still hung on the air, but the landscape was stained in fiery reds and oranges as earth churned.
Ergoth’s screams subsided to a faint whistle, and then faded on the wind as fungi continued to collapse in the distance.
“Ciarán?” I reached for his face as dark fog at the corners of my vision impeded the light of the lava. The mycelium that had bound him had receded, but he lay immobile, and my head was silent, devoid of the buzzing of his thoughts. “Did we…did we make it?”
The darkness won. I slipped into unconsciousness.