Page 160 of Keldori By Daybreak

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.”