8. Vireth #4
Then comes the scent—rot. But it isn’t my rot. It isn’t the comforting fragrance of damp earth and the soft, mineral aroma of mushrooms or even the sour punch of mold. It is the smell of rotting bodies and the peculiar pungent things that only grow on human and fae flesh, and it is wrong.
Again, I try to move, but my limbs are so heavy and sluggish that it’s almost like I’m sinking into something soft and yielding beneath me. The ground—gods, is this the ground? Why does it feel like flesh?—gives way under my weight.
I try to call out to Nibblebones, and then to Renard, but nothing happens.
My tongue feels too thick and weighty, slicking the backs of my teeth that have become more numerous and much sharper than I remember.
The unease starts to give way to panic and I hear it then… a whisper curling through the dark.
Vireth. Blight Mother.
My name, spoken in a voice that is not a voice at all. It’s a chorus of them—a thousand mouths whispering in unison. I open my mouth to answer, but a bitter taste coats my tongue and something spills out—black spores, drifting upward like ash.
“No,” I rasp.
The darkness parts, giving way to a soft gray mist and I see them. Roots. Endless roots, twisting and writhing, threading through bones. Through disembodied rib cages. Through the cracked teeth and hollow eye sockets of skulls that turn toward me as one.
This is the deathly chorus that has been calling my name. These dead ones are hungry, and they are waiting for something that feels both incredibly important and terrifyingly inevitable.
Something presses against my brow—a heavy, jagged, and painful thing that I realize belatedly is a twisted crown made from these dead ones’ bones.
I reach up to try and rip it off—no no no, please, I don’t want this—but I feel it sink into my skin, burrowing, taking root beneath my hair, ripping through my scalp.
Pain explodes behind my eyes and I wake with a scream clawing its way up my throat.
The bitterly cold air rushes in, sharp and biting, yanking me from the nightmares that have been getting too terrible and so real, I would swear they weren’t dreams at all. The fire has burned low, little more than embers now, and the clearing lies in uneasy half-light.
My head—gods. It feels like it is splitting apart.
I clutch at it instinctively, fingers tangling in my hair…
and freeze. Something alien, something foreign, meets my fingertips.
Bringing a hand forward into what little light there is, what I find pulls bile up from my gut.
Pale shapes tremble between my fingers—small, rubbery, and soft.
Mushrooms. Growing from me. Not from my powers, but from me.
On me. As if I am rotting from the outside in.
“No,” I whisper again, tears freezing on my cheeks almost as soon as they spill from my eyes.
This is no dream—no vision haunting me when my eyes are closed.
This transformation is real, and my bones ache with the knowledge.
I have spent a lifetime feeling like an outcast, a horror, a weed among the garden of my sisters.
And now my body is changing—proving the worst that everyone has always believed about me.
If I wasn’t a monster before, there is little doubt about it now.
Panic claws up my throat, and I scramble to my feet, boots slipping in the snow-covered ground that has begun to ice over.
I stagger away from my bedroll and run down to the stream.
A soft blanket of snow has covered my field of purple mushrooms but I cannot stop to admire it now.
I run further still, deeper into the bruise-colored shadows of the forest, away from the faint glow of the fire—away from Renard.
I cannot let him see me—not like this. My hands shake as I touch my head again, more carefully this time, and beneath the soft growths of mushrooms and moss, I feel it.
Hard, knobbed, pressing outward. A broken sound escapes me. Monster. Monster. Monster!
“Gods no,” I mewl, covering my screams with dirty hands.
I stumble toward a bend in the nearby stream where water pools against a submerged log, and drop to my knees to stare into the trembling surface. For a moment, the reflection wavers, but then it steadies.
My face stares back at me, pale, strained, eyes wide with sickening terror. And from my head… small, budding nubs of antler break through my scalp as cleanly as new growth through soil. There is no blood, nor bruise, but the skin around them feels raw and tender.
My stomach drops out from under me and I clap a hand over my mouth to keep from screaming. Behind me, faintly, I hear Renard shift near the fire.
I don’t turn. Coward that I am, I cannot.
Instead, I stare at the thing I am becoming and feel, for the first time, something colder than fear take root in my chest. Black tears spill down my cheeks, making the monstrous woman in my reflection look even more frightening.
Something inside me is changing. And I do not know if it will stop.