In the blink of an eye, my world had become a train crash wrapped inside a roller coaster. I had to slow my perception of time to a crawl, freezing the world in an off-kilter moment just to figure out what the heck had happened.

My attacker was wearing the half-ruined armor of an elite soldier, white as fresh paint. The almost gaudily orange wyrm scales visible through the breaks in his armor told me everything I needed to know about what had happened: a transformee had tackled me.

Our thrashing tails tore through the hallway's drywalls as we grappled—not a very pleasant experience, let me tell you.

Meanwhile, my ears buzzed with Andalon's worries: "Mr. Genneth! Mr. Genneth!"

I gritted my teeth as I reached for my attacker's eyes.

Now that I had a better view of the guy, it turned out he wasn't as far along in his changes as I'd thought. Heck, I was probably more wyrmy than him; he looked more like a long-tailed lizard than anything else, albeit with a terrifyingly human face at the end of his elongated head.

While claws certainly have their downsides, one of the really nice things about them is that it means you always have a sharp object if and when you ever have the need to gouge someone's eyes out.

I pushed my hand down on his face, hard, and then pulled, raking my claws down, starting from his forehead.

The transformee let out a truly impressive blood-curdling scream.

"You'll pay for that!"

The next thing I knew, he'd used an invisible wall of psychokinesis, to launch me backwards and slam me into the wall of a vending machine niche. Tables, chairs, and empty pots all crunched beneath my tail.

I fought back, wrapping plexuses around my claws to push back against my attacker's forcefield with a psychic thrust. Unfortunately, despite being further along in the changes than he was, the two of us were evenly matched.

Of course!

I was diverting power to Yuta and Geoffrey; that's why I was underperforming.

Happily, that was easily fixed.

I didn't even need to yell for them. I just willed my spirit-companions over to where I was. Yuta appeared to my left, and Geoffrey to my right, both of them floating several inches off the floor with their plexus-wrapped weapons in hand.

"I knew I recognized you," my attacker said, with a sneer. He stuck out both arms in front of himself and doubled down on his forcefield. "You're the one from the scout's vision. The Sorcerer!"

In another universe, I might have been honored that a figure of legend like Mordwell Verune knew who I was and what I looked like, but here, no, absolutely not.

"They'll give the lion's share of the food if I take you out!" he said, eyes burning with greed.

The wounds from my claws were already healing, covering my opponent's face in scaly orange cross-hatching.

The weight of the forcefield pushing against me doubled. I groaned as the wall cracked behind me.

I roared, struggling to keep the forcefield's weight from crushing me into one of Pel's pancakes. "Get off me!"

Glancing at one another, Yuta and Geoffrey leapt through the patch of quivering air where the forcefield was, floating around behind my assailant and then struck as one in a deft pincer maneuver. My whole body buzzed as their weapons struck, and the plexuses around my claws sputtered out of existence. Sparks flew as their ghostly weapons bit into my attacker's sides, as if they were slicing through metal.

The forcefield promptly fizzled out. I fell forward onto my hands and the part of my underbelly that I was using in lieu of knees. The orange transformee fell forward, as well: part of him to the left, and the other half of him to the right, both of which were still very much alive, much to my spirit warriors' dismay.

"He's still screaming…" Andalon muttered.

Geoffrey made the Bond-sign.

The four of us stared in shock as the two still-screaming halves of the orange transformee sent little tendrils out toward one another, to begin the regeneration process. Each half of his body used its respective arm to crawl toward me, no doubt in search of vengeance.

"Hello, nightmares," I muttered.

Yuta lifted his sword, and was about to strike the horror when I stuck out my claws.

"No!"

Not wanting the transformee to hear—and also because the screaming was genuinely disturbing, I scooped up a little plexus and smacked his pieces with it, sending them flying down the hall and out the broken window in the frontal façade that he'd burst through in the first place.

There, now he couldn't hear me.

"Why did you stop me?" Yuta asked.

"You put waaaay too much power into those strikes," I said. "Both of you." I shot a glance at one and then the other. "Cutting a wyrm to pieces like that takes a lot of strength out of me."

Saliva was already pooling in my mouth as I spoke.

I pushed myself off the floor with a groan. "So stop trying to chop them into pieces. It's too draining."

"I'll keep that in mind," Geoffrey said.

I turned around and slithered off down the hall, only to stop and go about face as the Garden Court bloomed with a massive burst of pataphysical power. The energies swept across the wyrmsighted corner of my field of vision like waves of falling water.

Through the windows and the hole in the front wall of the Administration building, it was raining of serpents

Andalon stared, transfixed, as did Yuta and Geoffrey.

"What's happenin' Mr. Genneth?!" Andalon pointed at the view. "They're… they're—"

I reached for her with my claws.

"—All the more reason for us to get more allies," I said as I grabbed her and—more importantly—imagined grabbing her, and then slithered down the hall.

— — —

My nerves were rattled as I approached Room 268. It would have been great if resolve was always part of a two-for-one deal with a free side of fearlessness, but, alas, some things were never meant to be. Lying about my condition hadn't just impacted my colleagues, it had affected my patients, too. Yes, I'd come clean to Merritt—or, rather, she discovered the truth with her own wyrmsight—but I'd yet to reveal my changes to Kurt, Bethany, Lopé, and the rest. I would include Letty and Weremed-san—a.k.a., Charles Jonathan Twist—in that group, but both of them were dead.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

But… how I felt about the matter was immaterial. We needed allies, and if some of the transformees hated me too much to want to help, I was just going to have to make do.

Still, my stress was having a field day with me. It bled out of the walls as my imagination ran wild, conjuring bits of scenery from a haunted wood—creepy dead trees with holes that looked like leering eyes and fangsome faces, the works. Andalon phased through my grip and floated beside me, keeping close. Geoffrey and Yuta flanked us, keeping their weapons at the ready, still swathed with plexus power, just in case they needed to use them.

I was about to tell them to put their weapons away when I remembered that none of the transformees would be able to see them, and—worse—that I might need Geoffrey and/or Yuta's assistance if one or more of my former patients decided to throttle me by the throat as punishment for my deceptions.

In between the hanging moss and eerie fog my imagination was hyperphantasizing into being, as I approached my transformee patients' sequestration room, I could see the scars of the earlier battle, when Letty had tried to mount a breakout. The metal quarantine barrier that ought to have sealed off access to Room 268 lay crumpled against the opposite wall. Pits and holes left by wayward bullets, dotted the walls and the floor, alongside the black streaks left behind by the elite troopers' heat rays. All that remained of the nurse who'd taken a direct hit from a transformee's acid spore breath was a section of the vinyl floor eaten away by corrosion. Missing, however, was any sign of Mr. Twist's body. After using his psychokinesis to slice Letty to ribbons, Charles had killed himself in much the same way, with a massive cut along his body's sagittal plane. It had upset Andalon deeply; even now, she wasn't over it.

"Where's the wyrmeh?" she asked, with more than a little worry. "The one who…" she looked down, "suey-sided?"

I checked my memory. "The other transformees took him inside Room 268." I turned to the door. "He might still be there now."

Someone had printed up and installed a make-shift plastic door to cover up the doorway to the antique infectious disease's small antechamber. I easily opened it with my psychokinesis, not wanting to risk damaging it with my claws.

I never could have guessed what I would find.

Firstly, Mr. Twist was far less dead than I thought he was. He was alive and in one piece, and not just figuratively speaking. The mutated Werumed-san mascot had threaded himself through the doorway from the foyer into Room 268 proper. Secondly, he had a broom in his claws, which he was using to sweep fragments of glass and wood on the floor into a dustpan. And there wasn't just the one dust and broom. Several others floated nearby, sweeping up debris as if they were alive.

Both Geoffrey and Yuta gasped in shock.

I glanced back at them. "He's not a threat."

Still, I had to admit, Mr. Twist very much looked like a threat. North of his waist, he had the appearance of a physician turned into a living rag-doll by some witch's curse. The smiling mascot's pancake-shaped face, once made of flesh-hued felt, was now covered by and discolored with threads and branches of black wyrmflesh, like evil ivy. His mouth spanned from one edge of his face to another, and was filled with the stuff of nightmares, which was matched only by the uncanny, arachnid air lent to his face by his four golden globe eyes.

Charles must have been deeply engrossed in his cleaning (and managing the plexuses animating the pans and brooms), because it was only as I was talking aloud to Geoffrey and Yuta that I finally succeeded in breaking his focus.

Mr. Twist's four eyes blinked erratically.

"D-Dr. Howle!?" His surprise was almost comical; the whole length of his body went tense.

Behind him, noises broke out in the room proper in a mix of chattersome wyrmsong and deeply distorted human speech.

"Dr. Howle… is here?" one of my patients said. I could neither see who had spoken, nor recognize them by their voice.

Andalon looked on with excitement as we saw and heard lithe bodies, claws, and tails rustle and move behind Charles. Metal scraped along the floor, likely the final remains of whatever parts of their beds they hadn't eaten.

"Charles, you're… alive?" I said. "Are you… are you still yourself?"

He nodded. "I locked him away, Dr. Howle," Mr. Twist replied, in that inimitable Crownsleep accent of his. "That awful, awful brute will trouble us no longer. No! Longer! But…" he gestured at himself, "why do you ask about me? Look at yourself." He pointed at me.

At the word "Look" a bunch of heads craned into view. I recognized bits of human faces in them, but most of them were near-fully transformed into wyrms.

"What are you doing?" I asked.

"He's not letting us leave," a deep voice said, in melodious polyphony.

Charles turned back to face them, pointing at me—or, rather, at the world behind me—with the broom in his claws. "There's something very bad happening outside. Bad and dangerous. Dangerously bad!" He turned back to face me. "Not you, Dr. Howle, I mean… behind you." He looked out through the doorway. "I told you to wait for Dr. Howle, and look, he's finally here!"

"Then move out of the way!" another voice said.

Charles opened his mouth, but no words came out. Then, acknowledging the point, he pulled his tail through the door and slithered down to one end of the rectangle-shaped foyer, giving me room to pass.

Spores wafted past me as I slithered inside.

How they had changed!

Kurt, Bethany, and Valentine were nearly complete. I had to go by color to recognize them: Kurt's deep blues, Bethany's yellow-green, and Valentine's dark turquoise. Maryon and Nathan more or less looked like me, still mostly human above the waist, though Maryon's arms were far larger than mine, and better matched to her claws' proportions. Lopé—the little 'Demptist—was the only one of us with any semblance of legs, though they jutted out uselessly from either side of his cylindrically-profiled body. However, as if to make up for it, his head was fully changed: a six-eyed wyrm's head with a many-holed snout and spines sticking from behind, and from the neck beneath it.

Seeing them all, in their panoply of colors, brought home the full extent of Andalon's efforts, and, by extension, of my own. While the fungus was sweeping across our world, she was fighting back, and I was helping. And though Andalon might not have been able to defeat the fungus, she still managed to mount her own form of resistance, creating these marvelous, terrifying creatures from the otherworldly plague. Our different colors were like a reminder that no matter our shape or size, we were all still people.

I just hoped they'd see the same in me.

My former patients slunk and coiled back, pulling themselves up against the walls to make space for me to slither into the middle of the room.

268 had been stripped bare. The only indicators there'd been any furnishings at all were the ghostly quadrilaterals of dust on the walls outlining cabinets and cupboards long since digested, or the scuff marks where the headboards of the antique beds had once scraped against the walls. Bits of metal bed frames and scraps of sheets and other cloth were piled in the middle of the room like an art installation, or a bonfire, and I was just long enough to coil a full turn around it.

Kurt and the others were agitated. They spoke in constant streams of wyrmsong. If I focused, I swore I could nearly make out bits of meaning in their sonorities. They weren't quite words, not exactly, but rather something more than that: words, emotions, ideas; all of them and more were packed into those sounds, as if they carried their very thoughts.

Kurt pointed his claws at the entrance, and then he pointed at me.

Lopé just stared at me. I couldn't help but think of his sister—and, within me, Nina stirred, thinking of him.

Lo? she thought.

Her spirit flickered in and out of being in front of me, hovering just at the edge of appearing.

No, not now, I thought-said. We can deal with this after the battle.

You promise? she asked me.

I promise.

I looked over them one by one.

I felt Kreston stir as I locked eyes with his mother.

Mom? he thought.

With each passing moment, the tension in the room grew. Eventually, I had to speed up my thoughts just to give myself enough breathing room to deal with all the secondary issues.

Andalon, I thought-asked.

She floated out in front of me. "Yes, Mr. Genneth?"

I kept thinking of how I'd shared my thoughts about the Lantor Incursion with Brand. Now, seeing the wyrmified loved ones of some of my resident spirits, it had me wondering.

Can I give one of my spirits to another wyrm? I thought-asked.

Andalon looked over the other transformees, and then nodded. "Yeah… I think so."

I let time flow normally once more. Nathan spoke up almost as soon as I had. "So," he said, "who've you been eating, lately? You've changed a lot since we last saw you."

There was a biting, sarcastic tone to his voice, but I couldn't tell if that was because he was making light of cannibalism or me having kept my condition a secret.

Or both.

"I need to come clean to you all," I said. "I've…" but shook my head and sighed. "I've been a transformee this whole time."

For those of them who had back spines, their back spines fell. They were literally crestfallen.

"I'm sorry for not telling you. I only recently informed my colleagues about it." I swallowed hard. "I know I—"

But then the whole building shook. There was a terrific crash. All of us looked around in shock.

"Listen," I said, shaking my head, "there's so much more I have to say and give, but…" I looked at Lopé and Maryon. "…There just isn't time. I need you. I need all of you. We're under attack. Mordwell Verune wants me; I'm not sure why, but I doubt it matters. I don't just need you to fight," I said, "I need you to save people. Don't let the souls of the dead fall into these monsters' claws. Please, help me. Help us."

The transformees looked at one another, and then, in unison, they.

"Lead the way," Maryon said.

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