The Wyrms of &alon

153.3 - Stories


Bidding Mr. Himichi farewell, I recentered my consciousness back in my body, which had, in the interim, made it to the landing halfway up the staircase. Lark and Storn's souls had nearly finished compiling; it wouldn't be long now. I could almost imagine Andalon asking me in that chipper tone of hers about who I was going to say goodbye to, and why.

I missed the little tyke.

The shivering wyrm-trees growing up from the ground and the surrounding buildings sang as I slithered onto the old street's setts and approached the Hall of Echoes' broken doors. Their calls tossed eddies and vortices through the spore currents. The Hall itself was in ruins, as if it had been bombed, with numerous large holes punched through the ceiling and the front façade. Corpses lay in quietly burning piles beneath the grand staircase. Carbonized marble surrounded the devastated metal charnel left over from the explosion of the tank that had been dropped in from above. People hung around here and there, sitting on the floor or against the wall, lingering like ghosts they'd soon become. I attracted a few stares as I crossed to the back of the Hall.

If anyone was afraid of me, they were too tired to show it.

The situation in the hallway behind the Hall of Echoes was little better. Spores lingered like fallen pine needles on the floor of the hallway at my left, clustered beneath the boughs of a silent wyrm-tree. Mostly motionless, the trees' heads eyed the piles of discombobulated fungal creatures hungrily, though there was nothing it could do about it. Its body couldn't move enough to reach them, and Andalon had been wise enough to bar the wyrm-trees from accessing their powers.

They couldn't even use their breath weapon.

As for the hallway to my right, it was so thick with spores that I could barely see anything at all. The clouds spread down the hallway, slowly eating away at the walls and floor. Whole sections of the wall collapsed from acid damage. A glance through my wyrmsight showed clusters of fungal aura, no doubt corpses whose fruiting bodies had burst after turning ripe.

I used some psychokinesis to push the spores through the hole in the wall and clear the way.

Angel… the bodies had melded together as they'd grown. They looked less like a pile of human beings than one slug-like mass sculpted over with human faces, and contours of limbs. The hyphae the fungus had sent up the walls sprouted with protruding stalks that ended in bioluminescent bulbs.

For some reason, looking at them made the developing spines on my back itch.

I wondered how longer it would be before the fungus had completely consumed the hospital.

I took care to keep my distance from any corpses or flesh mounds as I made my way to Ward E. My natural instinct was to go slowly, but I couldn't indulge that. With so much delicious biomass around me, ripe for the taking, every second I lingered put me at risk of succumbing to temptation and finishing off my transformation before either Andalon returned or I'd found Pel and the kids.

The fungal jungle thinned as I went deeper into the Central Wing. At this point, it was mostly corpses lying on the floor, leaning on each other's shoulders, hand in hand—strangers keeping each other company in their final moments. Thankfully, the idea of desecrating the dead—let alone by eating them—filled me with enough revulsion to help keep my appetite in check.

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Then, passing through the double doors, I was back at Ward E.

How time flies.

Off to the side, the doors to the Ward's lobby and waiting-room were wide open, giving a nice view of the miniature jungle developing there. It was sobering to think that the dark labyrinth Heggy, Suisei, and I had wandered through had fit into the short hallway separating the reception area from the lobby.

Spaces that were bigger on the inside than they were on the outside were wrong at just so many levels.

I couldn't help but feel foreboding as I stared. The darkness was still there, just beyond the edges of my perception. Thickening my wyrmsight revealed something rather frightening: tiny vibration-lines in the air; little segments, like iron filings. They were barely visible, and I would have dismissed them as a side-effect of the wholesale transformation of my physiology, were it not for one uncanny detail.

Like the iron filings they resembled, all the disturbances were pointed at—or, perhaps, away from—where, several days ago, a time portal had formed, briefly bridging Geoffrey's era with my own.

A breathless voice walked up to me.

"Hey…"

Turning, I saw Ani, of all people, sitting behind the reception desk. She leaned back in the chair, with her arms atop the polished granite countertop whose wandering curve traced around the angular support pillars at the center of the room.

She was coughing rather fiercely. Even several feet away from her, I could hear her wheeze.

But, Ani being Ani, she disregarded it, and looked up at me and smiled.

The fungus's black filaments had begun to climb up her neck.

"Hey…" I slithered a bit closer. "Ani, I…"

She shook her head. "You don't need to say anything." She looked off to the side. "Thank you for… down there. It's…" she looked up at me, "it's not easy, knowing he's gone, but," she managed a broken smile, "I know you're on the case, Genneth, and that… that gives me hope."

"Though I didn't know Jonan well," I said, "I know that you made his life worth living. I know it from the bottom of my heart."

She nodded. "Me too, Genneth. Me too."

"What are you doing here?" I asked.

Ani laughed once, and then cried. "I'm waiting for him." She sighed, only to break into more coughs. "We've all been working so hard, so… it feels really fucking good to finally sit down and relax." She laughed again, this time without coughing. Still, his breathing was as ragged as an old towel. "I just wish I could get the sounds of all those alarms going off out of my head," she added. "I know they're not, but, still… it's like my body wants to keep going, even though there's nothing left to do anymore. Nothing but…" Her voice cracked and she choked up. She wept.

But she continued to speak, talking in a small, soft voice. "Genneth… I don't know what to do. What do you do when there's nothing you can do?"

Fortunately for the both of us, I realized right then and there that there was something that Ani could do. The idea came to me while my eyes had been going back and forth between Ani's dainty hands and my own, massive wyrm claws.

"I'm going to be leaving soon, Ani, to see if I can find my family." I mustered a smile. "I got a message from them. They're still alive."

Ani looked up at the ceiling and smiled.

I could tell she was picturing the vastness of the sky.

"I told you the Angel is watching out for us, didn't I?" she said, bringing her smile down to me.

"Because I don't have the time to do it myself, I gave some of the souls in my care to Dr. Rathpalla. He and some of the other wyrms are going to try to reunite them with their loved ones, whether that means finding the wyrms they'd become, or the wyrms that now care for their spirits." I pointed at the console on the mount on the reception desk. "If the hospital's PA system still works, you could use it to announce the names of the people we're trying to reunite."

"Like a lost and found…" Ani said.

I nodded. "Just, make sure to tell Ibrahim and the others about it. They… they'll be able to help you."

Ani bit her lip. "What about you?"

I turned away and sighed, letting out a puff of spores. "Where's Heggy?"

"She's in her office."

I nodded. "Thanks."

Then, lowering my head, I slithered around the reception desk and headed down the hall.

"Genneth?"

I paused. "What is it?"

"Don't forget me," she said.

I bit my lip.

"Ani, I couldn't, even if I wanted to."

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