The Wyrms of &alon

Interlude 3.30 - Der Abschied


EUe didn't say much during the short flight back to the Capital. He and Vyx discussed some of the logistical details surrounding the generation ship idea—food, air, living space, and what they meant—but, halfway through the trip, the Gatherer found it was just becoming too difficult to keep up the conversation, and he stopped talking altogether.

And what could he have said? His world was coming apart at the seams; not even biology was being spared. As horrifying as they'd been, the glimpses of the destruction he'd gotten from the Philharmonium footage paled in comparison to witnessing it with his own two eyes.

Dawn and dusk were EUe's favorite times of day. They'd been eUna's favorites, too. In their liminal space, the world's beauties had their crescendo. In the pre-morning light, the coastlands around the Capital should have been aglow with phosphorescent lichen trees: hwO-ke-hE. The spear-like organisms grew in the hinterlands, away from the thick forests, towering at nearly seven times a twEfE's height. eUna had come from a family of hwO farmers; her parents and their ancestors harvested the low-maintenance organisms' flesh and prepared it to be processed into cheap, tasty protein supplements as well as dozens of medically important compounds. Symbiotic algae lived within them, glowing blue at night, while the hwO-ke-hE whispered to each other in sheets of not-light, chronicling the Earth God's dreams. From the distance, it made the hinterlands look like a mirror of the big cities. The patterns of the hwOs' communions were simply magical in their endless fascination.

EUe even remembered reading a paper about how their not-light webs could solve the Traveling Salesman problem.

But now…

EUe fell silent the instant he got his first glimpse of the hinterlands. He could have called them hideous and unholy, but the words wouldn't have done it justice. The hwOs were crowned in glowing fungal growths, often bearing small spouts spewing green clouds. Much of the flora had pulled themselves out by the roots, which now moved like legs as the mutant hwO-ke-hE prowled across the land.

And that was just one loss.

The once-beautiful tEkwE-bugs had been corrupted into monstrosities. Their grand, iridescent, conical shells sat empty on the plains, rotting in the plague's grasp. The fungus had made gardens out of their meat. The rivers and seas had been similarly violated, filled with nameless things whose thick, seaweed nets writhed in the dying currents, gathering the bodies bobbing in the water.

It hurt EUe to see his world like this. It wasn't just frightening, it was cruel. He wondered if what the Ecumene had done to their world had caused the other Colors to feel a similar pain, before the end finally came.

Maybe lU-twO had been onto something when he'd called the plague their revenge. Was what the fungus was doing to the Rubies really that much worse than what his ancestors had done to the other Colors, even before the Culling? Ecumene twisted the Emeralds' bodies, warping them into brutish forms, dull and unthinking, perfect for labor.

It was just one of the many useful unintended consequences of the Ecumene's experiments.

As a child, EUe had asked one of his teachers why the Ecumene had allowed such awful things to happen. He would never forget her response: That's why the double dozen were so important, EUe. They saved the other Colors. They don't need to fear our hateful, barbaric instincts anymore. They're safe. We saved them.

Even then, it had bothered him. But now? It made him sick to his stomach.

After a while, the silence proved to be too much for Vyx to bear. The alien asked EUe if he was okay, and EUe answered in full, and together, they mourned the beauty that had been lost.

The outskirts of the Capital came into view not long after that.

EUe stuck his wings out in shock. His tail feathers felt stiff and wooden.

"It just keeps getting worse and worse…" he muttered.

The fungus was crawling across the earth, remaking the landscape as it went. Flat stretches of turf had given way to otherworldly groves. In some places, they stuck up like thickets of fingers, while in others, they formed massive, lonely trees whose blunt, branching crowns pumped more and more of that green dust into the atmosphere. The sheer quantities were unfathomable!

"This isn't a plague," EUe said. "It's an invasion." Fungal horrors trekked through the morphing landscape, claiming territory for an insidious, unseen master.

EUe squeaked in heartbreak when saw the skyholders. It was like a dark god had reached into his deepest terrors and made them real. His dreams had been plagued by nightmares of loss and ruin ever since he'd become a Gatherer. In one recurring dream, he'd step out of the Door and find himself in a decayed, fog-drowned world, the lone living twEfE standing among a sea of perfect statues, with nothing to look forward to but be reaped by the harriers lurking in the mist, forever out of sight.

The city was now a graveyard, cracked and crushed by the fungus' growths. The plague grew out from skyholder after skyholder, like elU sprouts pushing up through skulls. Bodies littered the streets, alongside the wrecked airships, crashed along the promenades. EUe saw the GTS' roof poking up into the sky among the overrun buildings at the city's heart, seemingly undamaged.

It was a lonely detail, but it gave him hope.

"There, Vyx," he said. Rising to his feet, he pointed at the structure. "Do you see that building?"

"What is a building?"

"The tall thing." To illustrate, EUe knelt down to the ground and said "short" and then said "tall" as he raised his arms and wings as high as they could go and stood on tip-toe, his talons scraping Vyx's silver floor.

"I understand," the alien replied.

The vessel adjusted course, heading straight for the Great Temple Skyholder. EUe felt only the slightest tug from the movement.

The city grounds quickly came into view.

From a distance, EUe saw swarms of figures meandering through the air. At first, he'd thought they were flying abominations like the ones he'd fought back at the camp—and some of them were. But, as they neared the GTS and more and more of the city core came into view, with a gasp, he realized that they were twEfE.

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He flared his wings out in shock.

They were zombies. The plague had ravaged their bodies, stripping them of nearly all their feathers. Beaks stuck out like bones from their grotesque, shriveled heads, their eyes wriggling with ecstatic fungal life. They buzzed around like flies, moving erratically. Amalgam-abominations flew alongside them, absorbing any undead twEfE they touched.

Then, somewhere among the ruined skyholders and the rising green clouds, there was a sound like thunder. EUe lowered his second eyelids and spotted shining tunnels of pure not-light. Gouts of fire and lightning streamed through the clouds a moment later, igniting the zombie twEfE, who shrieked, flailing their failing wings as the swarm broke apart and its victims fell away. Dozens of infected twEfE crashed into Vyx's exterior while the ship plowed through. They splattered like paint.

EUe looked away, but it wasn't enough. He could still hear the faint thumps and splats of bodies slamming against Vyx's hull.

"C'mon, Vyx! Shake them off!"

"What?"

EUe hopped up and down. "Go up! Go! Up!"

The impacts quickened as Vyx rose, when a sudden thump overhead made EUe flinch.

He yelled.

A burning, winged abomination with mouths of broken rib cages tumbled down off the front of Vyx's hull, right as Vyx broke through the swarm.

EUe's eyes went wide.

Three Gatherers were chasing after the swarm. They were pelting its monsters with all sorts of communions, doing their best to drive them back.

Otherworldly bellows chorused through the thickening dawn. EUe turned toward the sound.

Silver-eyed serpents slithered through the air.

Through one of his second eyelids, EUe could see trails of not-light. They spiraled off the creatures' bodies like comets' tails.

Some of the Gatherers attacked the serpents. They chucked giant fireballs and distilled acids from the air. Bombs of gravitic lighting detonated across the cityscape, collapsing buildings as they sucked in everything nearby. Airborne fungal monsters caught fire, shrieking, thrashing, flailing, falling. Patches of space quivered, inverting the creatures' bodies, raining their insides onto the parkways below.

A half-twEfE half-serpent creature dodged a blistering energy ray with a flick of its tail. It swam upward, darting around a collapsing nest-tower, its snout pointing toward the sky.

The Gatherers were winning, for now. The creatures were scattering, even though waves of more zombies and worse were already spilling out of other skyholders and heading toward the GTS.

They were gathering into an army.

And near the GTS…

"Gods… no…" EUe muttered.

Vyx was close enough to the Great Temple Skyholder for EUe to see the ring of carbonized corpses encrusting the ground around it. twEfE bones stuck up throughout the mounds. There had to be tens of thousands of bodies, if not more.

He couldn't begin to imagine what had happened, other than a sinking feeling that Gatherers had been involved.

And then, in the middle of the chaos, almost directly in front of Vyx, a familiar face zoomed by, a firebolt charging in her hand.

hUen-dE.

That caught EUe totally off guard. He had literally never been happier to see her.

"Vyx, I need a way to talk to them!"

The Gatherers must have noticed Vyx flying through the city, because one of them was rushing toward Vyx with fistfuls of lightning crackling in their hands.

EUe ran his fingers through his head feathers. "No no no!" he screamed. "Vyx, they're going to blast us!"

In his panic, an idea hit him.

Vyx could make voices inside his body. Could the machine do the same on the outside?

EUe pointed at the Gatherers. "Can you make them hear my voice, outside?" Every one of his words was a race against time.

"Yes!" Vyx said.

"When I say begin, start making my words outside. Stop when I say unbegin."

The enemy Gatherer stopped, hovering in place. Light true and not bloomed around him in a fractal halo as he pulled back his arms.

EUe was resting all of his hopes on hUen-dE's bad personality. It was their only chance.

"Begin," he said.

Then he screamed his lungs out.

"Don't shoot! I'm a kwekek! hUen-dE! hUen-dE!!"

Suddenly, a firebolt zipped out from the corner of the viewscreen. The unexpected friendly fire instantly grabbed the haloed Gatherer's attention, who, turning to respond, dashed it to motes with a swipe of a communion-wrapped hand.

"Are you trying to kill me?" he yelled.

Then hUen-dE hovered into view. There was a look of genuine shock on her face. She stared at Vyx, completely ignoring the other Gatherer.

"EUe?" she asked.

EUe pumped an arm in glee. "Guilty as charged!"

Understanding widened the male Gatherer's eyes. "What in the world is this thing?"

hUen-dE crossed her arms over her armored chest as she hovered in place. "You've put on some weight."

EUe rolled his eyes. "I'm inside the big silver thing!" Then, turning away from the viewscreen to face the wall, he said, "Unbegin," and Vyx ended the broadcast.

"Go down, close to the ground," EUe said, pointing at the GTS, "but don't land."

"Yes. Why?"

"Do you see the holes down there?" EUe asked.

"Yes!"

"Go there! Go through one of the holes!"

A tiny spurt of lightheadedness breezed through EUe's skull as Vyx plummeted toward the ground. The world rushed toward him at what seemed like a thousand miles an hour before suddenly coming to a stop when Vyx plowed through the entry arches on the GTSs' ground level, cracking the stone and making EUe wince.

Vyx had obliterated at least two entire arch columns.

Thankfully, there were a lot more to spare.

"Begin," EUe said. "hUen-dE, we'll need to…" but his voice trailed off as he turned to look at the Great Temple—that skyholder within a skyholder. "Unbegin. You don't need to send this message, Vyx."

He'd been about to ask hUen-dE and the others to make a barrier to keep the monsters at bay, but now that he could see the situation for himself, he realized it wasn't necessary.

To EUe's disbelief, with the sole exception of the two columns Vyx had wrecked, the GTS was pristine, as was every single thing inside it.

Fresh flowers and fruit hung from the branches of the ea trees in the Skyholder's orderly parks. The ea would be ripe soon, reading for picking. The grass was neat and trimmed. Bonsai elU—only a little taller than the average twEfE—sat peacefully in their pots, oblivious to the world's end.

Even the shrubberies were perfect.

And there wasn't a monster in sight.

It was uncanny, almost eerie.

The government buildings clustered around the Temple were also perfectly preserved.

The fucking lights were still on! People stood on the catwalks around the Nectar-King's Palace and the various ministries, watching in disbelief. And every last one of them was perfectly healthy—physically, anyhow.

As EUe panned over the scene, he let out a broken squawk when his eyes arrived at the shops on the ground floor.

The zUzU Fresh was still there. The lights were on inside, and there was a longer than usual line.

EUe hopped in pure joy. "Look, Vyx! I was right! I was right!! The dreamshards and the Door kept the fungus away!" He pointed at the smoothie shop. "The zUzU Fresh is still there! The zUzU!"

EUe cackled. Song and storm flooded him in a fervid duet. He wanted to shoot up into the sky in triumph and croon in grief at the same time.

Bizarrely, though they had no trouble entering through the ground arches, all of the fungus' monstrosities—the zombies, the serpents, everything—flatly refused to take even one step past the fringes of the uncorrupted gardens. It was like an invisible wall was holding them back.

EUe laughed and cried at the same time.

"What's wrong?" Vyx asked.

EUe wiped his eyes with a flick of his second eyelids. "It's ironic, that's all."

"What is ironic?"

"It's… complicated," EUe said. "Alright." He cleared his throat. "Land here." He pointed.

There was a gentle tremor as the Impactor settled onto the ground.

EUe didn't dare slide his second eyelids into place. Even from within the Temple's fortified walls, the brightness of the Blade's not-light was almost too much to bear.

"EUe, what is that?" Vyx asked, in wonder.

"What is what?"

"The big not-light."

So, EUe told him.

Vyx's response made EUe's blood run cold.

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