All the raw meat I'd gotten from eating Heggy's brother ended up driving my body's biggest changes to date. Even now, waves of transformation rippled through me every couple of minutes, like a muscle spasm that wouldn't quite go away.

I'd put on a few pounds, to say the least. Below the waist, I was a serpent. Before, I might have passed for an especially long-bellied lizard, but no more. The recent changes were mostly growth. It had been like I was stretching out my legs—well… my spine-threaded, sinuous tail—only the muscles and tendons never reached their limit; they kept going and going.

As for the rest of me, I'd grown somewhat broader, my chest and shoulders having telescoped out a bit to either side. Though at a distance, it would have looked like I still had a human torso, a closer inspection would have revealed that my chest had a cylindrical curve to it, as if it was just another segment of my tubular body—which, I suppose, was what it was ultimately going to be become. My hands and the upper parts of my forearms had also grown. If I put my wrist up against my ear, I could curl my claw-tipped fingers all the way around to the other side of my head.

Fortunately, there was at least one upside to all these changes: with more transformation came more control. My tail's awkward half-responsive movements were now a thing of the past. Before, my tail had been a mere appendage, like a giant toe, its presence receding into the background the moment I stopped thinking about it. However, the remaining patches of numbness covering the lower half of my changed body had evaporated over the past few hours, and now, it was hard to think of the tail half of my body as anything other than one big leg.

Every inch of it was like a knee.

I lay on the floor, rising on my tail like you would a pillow, panting out spores in pale green plumes. Perhaps it was just because the changes still hadn't stopped, but I was having a hard time keeping my tail still. The thing twitched and curled like legs or feet would as you laid down after a long day's work. As strange as it was to feel my chest and arms pressing down on my back—the dorsal side of my tail was part of my now incredibly long back, after all—it was even stranger to feel my tail shift about beneath me, and me against it.

In other news, some of my hair was starting to fall out, though mostly on the back and the sides.

Pushing myself away from the door, I flopped off my tail and sprawled across the floor, supporting myself with my claws. Doing this knocked my tail into the hospital bed the nurses had wheeled me in on. Thing's wheels creaked as it rolled away, pushed by the sweep of my tail. My green hazmat suit was on the floor, halfway between the window and the low-lying table in front of the lounge's main sofa. Looking at it, I couldn't help but feel like a snake that had just shed its skin.

At the moment, I was only wearing my glasses and the tattered remains of my white doctor's coat. The coat had rips on the side, and many of the buttons had simply popped off, but it was mine, and I wasn't planning on getting rid of it anytime soon. For one thing, it had my hand chip soldered to the cufflink on the right sleeve. For another, just because I'd pretty much mostly accepted my transformation, by no means did that mean I was going to abandon my personal attachments, be they music, my clothes, or collectible editions of my favorite manga.

Spread out as I was, with all of my body on display, Andalon took excited advantage to gander at my newfound wyrmliness. I envied her childlike simplicity. For someone like that, even the deepest miseries could pass away like a storm cloud before a sunny day. Honestly, as frustrating as her immaturity could be, I'd grown fond of it. The sunshine she injected into my life was certainly better than the alternative.

"You're so much bigger now, Mr. Genneth!" she said. "And you're just gonna get biggerer and bigger!"

The little blue spirit girl floated beside me—the Angel-fragment, with eyes as blue as the sea and hair as blue as the sky—her gray nightgown undulating in the air.

If I had to take a guess, right now, I was probably around twelve feet long, if not longer, lying on the floor in the shape of a horseshoe.

Then, there were the scales. By surface area alone, I was more scales than skin, with nearly all of my tail-part being covered in minute, dark purple scales. There were strips of still-human skin here and there, mostly near where my crotch would have been had I still had it. The skin came in varying levels of quality. Some of it looked almost healthy. Other parts were black, rotting, and horrid. As for the scales on my human-y bits, going by what I could feel, from above the waist, I must have looked like I was wearing some strange-looking swimsuit. A roughly arrowhead-shaped region of frighteningly pale human flesh spanned the space from the base of my ribs down to my waist, though the scales rose up from my waist far enough to cover the navel I no longer had.

Going by what I saw of my face in the lounge's bathroom mirror, my face looked almost normal. Tensing my muscles, I was pretty sure I felt some lumps on my back, by which I mean both the back of my human torso, and a good deal of the dorsal side of my tail-body. Wanting to investigate—and ignoring Andalon's ogling—I flexed the muscles of what felt like an abdomen several abdomens beneath my abdomen to curl my torso over myself, until I could rest against my body's midpoint by propping my elbows against my spine with my elbows.

Angel, this felt weird. Imagine yourself resting with your elbows on your belly, but with your belly flush against your back, like it was a mattress; that should give you the right idea. A couple pats and rubs of my palm against my spine revealed that, yes, there were bumps beneath my skin and scales.

Reaching back, I also felt similar protuberances on my neck and the back of my head.

Did that mean I'd be growing some kind of spines? Or horns?

Only time would tell.

"Watcha gonna do now, Mr. Genneth?" Andalon asked.

"I don't know," I said.

There was a pause.

Suddenly, I had an idea. I tried to snap my fingers, forgetting for a moment that that wasn't really possible with those claws of mine.

Kléothag wasn't the only divine being I knew who had talked about running.

"Andalon, you said you had to run from the Scary-Shinies and other bad guys, right?" I asked, referring to the strange, featureless silver vehicles we'd seen scattered around the Lantor Incursion.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

The jury was still out on what those things actually were, but my current hunch was that they were part of a faction in the War in Paradise that stood against &alon, and which may have even allied with the fungus in pursuit of power—but that wasn't why I'd brought it up.

"Yeah," she said, nodding.

"Also, you said that you wanted us—me and the other wyrms—to run away with you to get away from the darkness, remember?"

She nodded again. "Yeah, yeah."

"What did you mean by that?" I asked. "How did you run away? And how would we have run away? What did you have in mind?"

She stared into the distance. "I… uh…"

For a brief moment, her eyes glowed, and then she spoke up in a quiet voice. "So many stars…"

"What?"

"I… Am-per-sandalon travels with the stars. But… not with them with them. No, we go in the place that moves. You can see stars, though; it's like lookin' through a windylow."

"The place that moves?"

Whatever could she have meant by that?

But she just shrugged.

"Is it something we can use?" I asked. "Me? Other wyrms? Ordinary people?"

"Yeah!" She smiled. "Everybody can come!"

I dared to let myself have a shred of hope.

"How do we use it? How do we get to the place that moves?"

"It has to come here, first," Andalon said. "But Amplersandalon is coming. Once we're here, then we can go."

"How long?" I asked. "How long until she's here?"

Andalon curled her finger beneath her chin. "Uh… how long is long?"

"How many days?" I asked.

"Soon…?" she said, with an intonation that did not inspire confidence.

I grunted. "Gah!" I started raking my fingers through my hair before I remembered I had claws. Then, seeing Andalon staring at me with deep concern, I clenched my fists and sighed.

"I'm sorry, it's just… it's very frustrating." I looked her in the eyes. "I get why, when we first met, you told me that the best way to stop the fungus was to run away." I smiled weakly, trying my best not to cry. "I'd be happy to run away with you Andalon, but I just don't know how."

"Though, from now on, I think I'll be doing more slithering than running."

She smiled a little, and that made me happy. It was a small happiness, but it was precious all the same.

I closed my eyes for a moment. "Just… promise me you'll tell me as soon as you remember more," I said.

She nodded. "I promise."

Good. That was all the more reason for me to hurry up and finish my changes. With my family almost certainly dead, I had every reason to consume biomass and advance my transformation. With each new bout of change, Andalon grew more and more in touch with her greater self—the mysterious &alon—regaining powers and memories.

"Mr. Genneth," she asked, "how can we run if you stay here?"

"Well, there's no point in running if I can't move," I said.

I sighed, producing spores.

I needed to learn how to move.

Waddling with my leg-stubs didn't work very well. The best that could do was give me something to push off of. I didn't even need them to sit up anymore; my tail body was muscular enough to support my torso when needed.

"I guess I have to learn how to slither now," I muttered.

The process was time consuming and embarrassing, but, luckily, Rayph had gone through his "snakes are the most awesome thing ever" phase two years ago, so, even without my wyrmly memory, my mind was filled with useless trivia about everyone's favorite limbless squamate. (Dad Knowledge 101, am I right?)

Snakes had two principal forms of locomotion; three if you included desert snakes; four if you included the handful of species of tree-dwelling snakes that had evolved the ability to leap or glide. In order of decreasing frequency of use, these forms of movement were rectilinear motion, serpentine motion, sidewinding, and gliding. For me, gliding was right out, at least for the time being—though it was definitely on the back-burner. Sidewinding involved tightly coiling the body into an S-shape, and using the S's edges to push off of low-friction surfaces like sand. Rectilinear motion, on the other hand, was when snakes used their belly scales to push forward along the ground. Using it required the snake's body to be perfectly straight.

Serpentine motion—a.k.a., slithering—involved gently S-ing their body. When a snake's body curved around left to right or right to left, the section of the body at the curve's midpoint would always be pointing forward, giving the snake purchase it could use to push itself forward. Serpentine motion propelled snakes forward at higher speeds than rectilinear motion, though it came at the cost of requiring more horizontal space in order to accommodate for all those curves.

I figured I might as well practice both.

Rectilinear motion was… weird. It was like I was an inchworm sliding forward on my belly. If I was still human, I'd have had to fight the urge to use my arms to push myself forward. However, something about the structure of my underbelly's scutes gave my movements a really high mpg rating, so to speak, pushing me forward far more than I thought they would. It turned out to be easier than I thought once I got the hang of it, though I noticed I had a bad habit of pushing only with the upper part of my underbelly—the section closest to my torso—instead of using all of my underbelly.

As I moved around, getting more in tune with my body, I happened to notice something: there was what would be best described as a tube growing up from my stomach and pushing up against my esophagus.

I asked Andalon about it, and she said, "You can probably do some wyrmeh breaths, now."

I sighed again—really putting my effort into it this time—and, lo and behold, I produced more spores than ever before. It was no measly puff, but a veritable cloud.

Level one acid breath-weapon, acquired! It wasn't the most impressive thing, but it could melt someone's face off in a pinch, which was not nothing.

I added my breath weapon to the ever-lengthening list of parts of my changing physiology that I'd have to get acquainted with.

But, back to my physical rehabilitation.

Serpentine motion turned out to be harder than it looked, mostly because I was still thinking as a human would, rather than a wyrm. Worse, my personal tendency to try to micromanage everything backfired on me. Applying that philosophy to moving every section of my body in serpentine motion proved to be counterproductive, leaving me flopping around ungainly, instead of traveling forward all cool-like. After about fifteen embarrassing minutes, though, a particularly useful analogy popped into my mind.

Resonance.

If you've ever had a bag or lunchbox or something—anything with a long, flexible shoulder strap would suffice—I bet you've played with it at least once, enjoying the feel of swinging it back and forth or spinning it around. If you were observant, you would have noticed that as you swung the thing back and forth, if you did so too slowly or too quickly, not much movement would happen; maybe a sputter or a judder, but nothing bit. The thing is, when it comes to eminently swingable objects like shoulder bags, pendulums, or bridges, there's always a sweet spot in the swinging rate which produces big movements. That's the resonance frequency, and it depends on the length of the cord in question. And most of my body was now a cord.

This made me realize: slithering—like walking—wasn't really about micromanaging my muscles. No—like music—it was about getting into the right rhythm. If I took the part of my body that used to be my hips and swayed it back and forth while at pushing forward with my belly at the same time, once I got the swaying to happen at the resonant frequency of my body length, the swaying sent waves rippling down my tail, and all the other details of serpentine motion more or less took care of themselves. I also discovered that keeping parts of my underbelly lifted off the ground slightly helped give me more control by redistributing my weight.

Gosh, I didn't want to think about how much my changing body weighed. Well, at least our family doctor—Dr. Blender—was probably dead, so he wouldn't have to blow a gasket over my recent weight gain.

Granted, my movements were still somewhat awkward. Also, I had a propensity to bump into things—especially the table—simply because there was so much more of me to keep track of than what I was used to. Still, I was more confident than not that, as long as I wasn't in a rush, I'd be able to manage just fine.

It was while I was practicing slithering back and forth that I glanced at my hazmat and saw that my lucky bow-tie—red spots on yellow—was still wrapped around its neck.

Looking at it made me go misty-eyed.

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