Spores
A shockingly loud bang erupted as the bloated corpse popped, like an overinflated bladder. Purple dust filled the air in an enormous cloud.
He was poisoned. That much, at least, was real.
Confirmation came a split second later, when the world began to shift and deform, separate and recombine. Melting glass seen through a kaleidoscope prism.
“Back away—” Captain Danvi tried to cry out. “Don’t breathe—” She verged on collapsing, not because she was falling unconscious but because her sense of balance had been obliterated. The world was thus about to slap her in the face.
Math heard laughing. Or was he the one laughing?
Or … was that screaming?
He felt good.
His whole body tingled pleasantly. He had to fight the urge to sit down, or maybe lie down, and just enjoy himself.
It seemed better to be closer to the ground.
Less likely to trip or fall. It would be easy to do that—fall—because the world was shifting, rocking from side to side like an unsteady boat on tumultuous seas.
Stuff was happening around him. He wasn’t sure what, but it was loud stuff, making lots of noise. Sometimes that noise was music and sometimes it was screams and sometimes it was apples.
Across from him, Captain Danvi kneeled, one forearm on the damp, bloody ground. A knight managed to stand, before tripping off out of Math’s line of sight. Captain Rabu stared up at the sky, screaming that his hands were on fire, which they most certainly were not.
Captain Danvi tried to right herself. She must’ve jostled something, though, because without warning, her skin melted from her face in a slow slide, revealing a radiant, prismatic skull beneath. The eyes, still wet and human, rolled in confusion.
Math was probably supposed to be scared. Maybe normally he would’ve been, but right now everything …
Well. Nothing was real, was it?
Captain Yihura held a cloth over her face as she rushed in to pull Captain Danvi to safety.
Past Yihura, Captain Rabu stood, the screams having switched to growls. The Captain of Swords manifested his weapon. His eyes were wild, his face twisted in fury. He looked like a grimmock.
Math laughed at the idea. There wasn’t much difference between an out-of-control Idallik Knight and a grimmock, really.
Maybe no difference at all, except the knights looked human while they lost control and slaughtered everyone around them.
Just like Rabu was losing control.
Math had always thought it ironic. The Captain of Swords did not himself use a sword. Rabu’s resonance was Land, and in a fitting detail, he manifested a giant war hammer. Then Rabu spotted one of the other knights, shouted, and charged.
“Captain, no!” The hammer caught him in the shield, splintering it, and drove through, tossing the knight into the air and sending him sailing a good ten feet away, although he turned into a crow before landing, and flew away.
So he was probably fine.
Captain Rabu kept attacking, this time bringing down his hammer on the bloated dead body—which puffed out yet more purple spores. The sound the hammer made when it hit the body was the stuff of nightmares. Math had crawled too far away to breathe any in this time, but he was …
What was he doing?
Math spotted Alik Nuhzar, who’d manifested his ice halberd. He was freezing and then shattering trees. As if a tree had ever hurt him.
Except, no. Those trees were trying to hurt him, weren’t they? At least Nuhzar had been too far away to breathe in the spores.
Captain Yihura was a giant flower pile, which was pretty, but Math didn’t think she should stay so close to the rampaging bear with the giant hammer swinging at everything. Math asked the vines to bring her closer, which they did, because plants were good like that.
Math himself tripped over something, although he caught himself before the stumble became a fall. He looked down to see a pile of leaves, strangely wet and making the oddest sounds when he nudged it with his foot.
A small voice whispered: Don’t be a fool. You know those aren’t leaves.
Math could only hope that was an old body part, and not a new one. Not one of the knights.
That was possible, given the strength of Captain Rabu’s swings. He’d wipe out his own people long before the trees got to them.
The trees. They were forgetting about the trees.
Math searched the area as best he could through the floating, colored fogs and the strange shapes and the dripping lines.
Not everything was distorted. The trees were normal, except for the part where they moved.
He blinked as a vine rose from the ground near a knight. Several vines. They acted in concert, working together to grab the knight’s arms and legs in a moment of distraction. As soon as she was immobilized, still another vine shoved itself through the gaps in the knight’s helmet, flowing down …
Some instinct told Math the vines were using every opening, every orifice. The green plants flowed and rushed and grew like an inescapable tide, a drowning, lethal flash flood of foliage.
It happened so quickly. By the time Math understood what he was seeing, it was too late.
The vines had finished their journey. They exited again, erupting from arms, legs, torso, tearing her entire body apart.
Only the straps and fastenings of the knight’s armor kept the pieces from flying off, as they had with earlier victims.
Oh. So that’s how those lumberjacks died.
Some instinct he couldn’t name alerted him. His hand snatched the vine sneaking up on him.
“Stop that,” Math snarled, tearing the vine in two. The thing jerked back, as if it was a scolded dog, and then retreated underground again.
He spotted another vine, about to attack another knight. Unacceptable. He demanded it return to its mother soil.
It did.
He stepped on something that looked like, but was almost certainly not, a set of stairs. Math spotted Huraiik.
He was dead, too, one open eye recognizable from a face otherwise torn to pieces.
Rough hands grabbed him by the shoulders. He blinked as Alik Nuhzar’s face lurched into view—too close, wild-eyed and spitting. “Fucking grim, Kaven! Get ahold of yourself. I know you’re a damn third circle in Wood. Fix yourself! Purge the poison!”
Math blinked.
Fix himself. Right. Wood, third circle. He knew the spell. Knew the sigils. His hands remembered even if his head didn’t.
Lieutenant Nuhzar didn’t wait for an answer; he had trees to chop down. He ran away, leaving cold frost wafting behind him in the air. He cast spells as he went, magics to turn the trees brittle and frozen.
Nuhzar’s resonance was Sea, particularly glaciers, ice.
What was Math doing again? Oh, right. He was watching the trees.
The trees.
They weren’t … they weren’t trees, were they? They looked like trees, if trees could move in the way trees never did.
Almost never did.
Math had, in fact, seen trees move like this once before.
The attacking creatures were trees, an enormous collection of oak, ash, and thorn with some rowan and pine sprinkled in. But underneath the bark …
Somehow, they were the lumberjacks.
Math didn’t know how this had been done, why these men had been turned into these monsters while the ones in the camp had been torn to pieces. Were these men still alive? Were they aware and capable of agency? He didn’t think so. Whatever had happened to them was as good as death.
In the far back, though … past the vines and the walking trees, there was something else. Someone else.
Three trees less like trees than all the others.
These beings were aware, awake, intelligent.
He felt them like a light shining into his eyes, searing and red even with his eyes closed.
They each resembled a tree, yet were as unlike actual trees as a painting of a fire was unlike the real thing.
They weren’t attacking or making any movement toward the camp at all.
He felt them watching, knew from the roots of his hair to the tips of his toes that each one was a ruler, a matriarch.
A queen, one might say.
One of the Queens was injured, the bright white slash of a wound where someone had taken an axe or saw to her side. He had the hysterical thought that if only he’d kept a first-circle Wood spell ready, he might’ve fixed it.
The new trees—the ones made from the lumberjacks—weren’t alive in the same way. He could control the newborns. Maybe not all of them, but enough to set them to attacking their siblings instead of Idallik Knights. He forced them to do that in a moment of lucidity. Or what felt like lucidity.
Some things were so clear. So beautifully, crystal clear.
Everything else was mud.
And then something brushed his mind.
Not a voice. Not a thought. A presence.
You’re unexpected.
Whatever had just spoken to him hadn’t used words or language. Ideas, emotions, had appeared in his mind, tangled with his thoughts.
“The Queen,” Math murmured to himself. Someone had said that recently, right? He didn’t remember who.
Her touch felt familiar.
He remembered …
Math swallowed down bile and memories of running, tears streaming tracks down a face still throbbing from his father’s backhand. Memories of screaming and pain. The knowledge that he was broken, that his mother demanded that he be fixed …
Branches moving over his head like a hand brushing a child’s hair …
No.
Math opened his eyes, not realizing he’d closed them in the first place. He cast an ugly gaze at the attacking forces trying to hurt his people, his knights.
“Go home,” Math screamed. “Go away!”
Some did. Not all. The trees rallied, but there had been a decided pause. The knights had taken advantage. They pressed forward, attacking with blade or fire or, in the case of Captain Yihura, carving away wood with her bare hands.
Math hefted his axe to help when a wave of exhaustion overtook him, forced him to his knees. He didn’t think he’d been doing anything that would tire him out. Had he?
He mumbled something, twitched his fingers, felt a wave of energy spread up from his feet, push at the fuzziness and the dripping wet glass of his perception.
Math stared across the battlefield. The trees were close to being felled, the tree men laid to a more final death than their first.
They’d won. The Idallik Knights had won.
But he didn’t see the Three Queens. No sign of them at all. It was as though they’d never existed.
He felt the air shift—just enough to turn. Then something slammed into his back, and everything turned black.