33. Advanced Mycology #2
“Your friend? He…” Ergoth paused, and her eyes grew wide over her smile, “…feeds us. He was powerful. The powerful Magicians never fight long.”
“You’re lying.” I tightened my grip on my flail. “I still feel him. He’s alive.”
But I didn’t like how distant his mind felt from mine, like I was reaching for him through a fog.
“Do not worry. He assimilates with Ergoth,” Ergoth crooned. “Ergoth will keep him alive for many years, so we may feed on his nightmares. And then he will die and feed us one last time. As will you.”
She let go of the rotsbane’s noose, and it charged.
The rotsbane might have looked real, but when I flung my flail at its face, it reared backwards instead of absorbing the magick like a true rotsbane would have.
And then I ran.
The sponge-like dirt made it difficult, but the rotsbane must’ve been struggling too, because while I braced for its claws digging into my back, they never came.
“Ciarán!” I screamed at the spores. I needed to find him. I needed to get us out.
A body slammed into mine, and we fell in a tangled mess. I landed on bottom and ogled up at Orla. She stared back through cracked goggles. Barnacles clung to her face, and the arm of a sea star peeked from beneath the collar of her tunic.
“We always win. Ergoth always feeds.” Seawater spilled from Orla’s mouth when she opened it to speak in that same oily voice as the apparition.
She was another nightmarish construct. I released a burst of blue flames, but they wicked off Orla’s armor and skin. She was made of my magick, I realized, so my magick wouldn’t affect her. I had no way to fight back.
“You will assimilate with Ergoth. You are powerful. We will feed on your nightmares for years to come.” It was Ergoth’s voice again, but it came from behind Orla.
Galahad stepped into view. His tanned skin stretched tight over the contours of his skull, and his eyes, once silver and bright, now rolled back in their sockets.
His neatly braided beard ran with dried blood, and the front of his tunic showed off the ghastly hole in his chest where Ferrin had run him through.
He took me by my ankles as Orla slipped off my chest to hold me under my arms. They lifted me from the ground, and I screamed and twisted in their grips, but they were unnaturally strong.
“Let go!” Blue fire swathed my arms and legs, but neither construct seemed to notice.
Panic and magick swelled, and I screamed in rage and fear, releasing more blue fire that dissipated into nothing.
“Do not worry, Magician.” More water spilled from Orla’s mouth as she spoke. “You will be with your friend. You may rot together.”
My magick surged, and while the nightmares remained unbothered by its flames, a quiet groaning filled the oppressive quiet of the forest.
It grew into a rumble, then a roar, and the earth jolted to the side. Galahad and Orla collapsed, and I managed to rip myself free of their grips as the earth continued to shake.
I pulled Ciarán’s scythe, the corporeal one he’d made into metal the morning before, from my belt and tried not to look as I sliced Orla from her shoulder to her opposite hip.
She was easier to slice through than I imagined a real human would be, and her flesh was more like that of a mushroom’s insides than a person’s. Tendrils of white mycelium broke through the dirt to wrap her remains in roots.
“You can resist,” Galahad growled in Ergoth’s voice, “but you will assimilate.”
He lunged at me, but a dark figure darted from the shadows to cut him down with a two-handed scythe that glowed orange against the blue of the spores.
Galahad’s remains joined Orla’s in the dirt, and the roots twisted around him as well.
Ciarán spun to face me, relief breaking across his face.
“Wren!” His arms wrapped around me as his weapon dissipated. It was selfish, but I allowed myself a moment pressed against his chest, holding him tight.
“You’re okay. I thought—I thought—you were screaming and—” My voice quaked with relief and panic alike.
“I’m fine. You know I’m strong, Blue.” His casual ego, even if it was only a front, quelled my fear just a little bit, and I felt my heartbeat calm against his chest.
“Strong isn’t necessarily good. You said it yourself. The stronger we are, the stronger the nightmares are. That’s why no one ever leaves the strath.”
He wrested himself out of my grip to take me by the shoulders. “Then tonight we become the first. You were the first Magician to open the Rift. You can do this too.”
I took his hand in mine, and we raced towards what was hopefully the exit. I glared into the mist as we ran. It was only a matter of time before the next hallucination appeared. “What happened to Una?”
“Not sure,” Ciarán admitted. “Hopefully she got out. She’s not a Magician, so she can’t make nightmares and will be safer the farther she is from us.”
The fungal towers thinned, turning sparse and spindly, and for a brief moment, I thought we’d done it. We’d made it through. We’d leave Ergoth behind, and find our friends, and save Gams and both of the worlds with her.
However, as the stalks of fungus thinned, the curtains of white mycelium grew thicker, hanging from fungal ridges and peeking up out of the loam. It glistened in the blue glow of the spores like dew-heavy spiderwebs, and we had to duck around several messy tangles to avoid getting caught in it.
We skirted around a stack of fungus that twisted and towered like a coral formation, and I stifled a gasp as I nearly walked face-first into a rotting carcass.
The man was held up like a puppet by cords of mycelium, caught in a web of thin, white roots. Mushrooms grew over his wrinkled skin. Folds of fungus pushed out from beneath his rotted clothing. Capped stalks grew from his eye sockets.
I thought he must be dead, but then a rattling breath grated at the back of his throat. I staggered backwards into Ciarán, who steadied me by my shoulders.
“Is he a hallucination?” I hissed.
“I don’t think so,” Ciarán said solemnly. “Look.”
I twisted to look through the glowing smog. More human figures appeared in the haze, each of them strung up by mycelium threads and all in varying states of rot. Many were dead, held together by white mycelium and stretching sinew, but others heaved with gasping breaths.
One hung higher than the rest, reduced to near skeletal remains suspended in the center of a mycelium web. Twenty feet beneath it, on the loamy ground, a body stirred, stronger than the others but still too weak to break free, like a fly freshly caught in a spider’s trap.
Its eyes fluttered open and glowed orange through the mess of mycelium.
Ciarán.
My breath caught as the Ciarán behind me tightened his grip on my shoulders. I craned my head back to look at him, and his open grin split unnaturally wide to reveal the mushroom gills that lined his mouth and the back of his throat.
“Your Ciarán has assimilated. Ergoth already feeds on his mind and his body. You will join him.” His voice morphed as he spoke, slipping from Ciarán’s tenor and into Ergoth’s oily lilt.
I ripped myself from his grip, stumbling into a web of mycelium. The roots quivered and stung where they touched me. When I tried to pull away, the mycelium stretched with me, worming and tightening across the surface of my skin.
I grabbed at them and pulled, but new threads grew from the existing mycelium to attach to my hand. The more I struggled, the more the mycelium grew and the more tangled I became. I clawed at my skin, trying to stop the roots spreading through my body.
“That,” Ergoth-Ciarán purred and took my chin in his hand, “tastes divine, Little Saergrim.”
Panic ebbed to make room for anger, and I remembered that Ergoth’s roots weren’t the only thing flooding my system.
I breathed deep, letting the Skal from the spores fuel me as much as they fueled my hallucinations-made-flesh.
Bone blades forced their way through my forearms, slicing through skin and mycelium alike.
“How’s this taste?” I snarled, and sank my blades of bone into Ergoth’s abdomen.
He split to reveal mushroom flesh where there should have been viscera, and he hissed in anger and pain. I broke free from the last strands of mycelium tangled around me to sprint for Ciarán where he hung suspended in his own web.
I wielded the bone blades ahead of me, cutting through curtains of white.
More decaying Magicians who’d been foolhardy enough to enter the strath stood between me and Ciarán, their swollen bodies split by fungus and rot.
Rattling lungs echoed in my wake as I cut past, but I only had eyes for my Grimguard.
He was on his knees, held upright by mycelium with his arms spread out to the sides.
The burns and gashes that painted his bare chest looked purple in the blue light of the sports.
The torn remnants of his tunic and armor lay nearby, stained by his blood.
His eyelids fluttered as his lips formed my name, but his head lolled, and his loose hair fell forward to occlude his face.
“Ciarán!”
His eyes were closed again when I reached him. I hovered my hands over his pale face. Mycelium wove into the skin of his cheeks, his neck, his chest…
“Are you real?” I held my bladed arm aloft. “Ciarán, say something that tells me you’re real!”
“Ergoth…” he groaned, eyelids fluttering again.
“I know,” I begged. “Just tell me something that proves you’re real. Something I don’t know. Something my brain wouldn’t make up!”
“…feeds.”
“What?” I hesitated.
“Ergoth feeds…on the Grimguard boy.”
“Come on, Ciarán!” I screamed at him. “Fight it and tell me something that proves you’re you!”
“Ahltira,” he gasped. “Wren…”
“Ahltira? I don’t know what that means!”
“My name…”
I sliced through the mycelium.
Ciarán collapsed forward, and I caught him to lay him back in the dirt.
Mycelium still hung from him, and ridges along his neck and cheeks betrayed the path they’d woven just beneath his skin.
Blood seeped out from a sticky wound cutting deep into his abdomen.
White roots dipped in and out between the layers of flesh.