I recentered myself into my body, and all the gnawing hunger that came with it. The Flower-Wyrm War spread on the sky like blood, pooling wider and wider as it pooled over the land. All of the flowers were cocooned in twitching webs of power, just like Suisei had been.

They were using pataphysics!

So, they really were from another world.

A sonic-boom roared overhead, sending shockwaves rippling across my sound-sight. Looking up, I looked up to see a flower hugging close to the ground not far from the Continental Expressway. Minuscule things swarmed out from the flower, much like the flocks of fungal bats that the six-legged behemoth had released back in the city. They couldn't have been much bigger than a PortaCon, however, it wasn't until they descended toward the Expressway that I was able to get a decent look at them.

They moved like leaves stirred by a hot wind.

It was a swarm of drones; mechanical pixies, you might say. Each individual drone was a faceted silver orb surrounded by gleaming lacework made of the same substance. The lacework was like snow-flakes, and, from the look of the pataphysics around it, seemed to be responsible for keeping them aloft. The orb was nearly featureless, save for two eye-like openings at its front end, one atop of another. The lower eye glowed with an inquisitive green light; the upper, with an ominous red.

So, not just mechanical pixies, but laser pixies.

The laser pixies arranged themselves into lattices as they zoomed through the air. The metal lacework rippled and shimmered.

Darn it!

It was kind of hard to protect my family when just the proximity of my presence was enough to make them into potential targets!

We needed to change course.

At first, I considered yelling, but then decided to be more tactful. I didn't want to do anything that might alert the aliens to our presence any more than my existence already had.

I softly thumped the roof of the car with the back of one of my claws. Thankfully, Pel seemed to understand my worries. There was an off-ramp just ahead, and she took it. My protective fishbowl and windshield plexuses—now woven together into a single combo unit—flickered as we swooped through the steeply banked off-ramp. Tiny gaps formed in my exhausted, dilapidated force fields, through which gale-force winds freely streamed, blasting my spores around me, turning my fishbowl into a broken snowglobe.

The car shuddered as we hit the asphalt road.

We'd been riding the Expressway for about half an hour, during which we'd gone a little less than 100 miles due south of Elpeck. We were out in the boonies now, deep into Trenton's eastern coast. Before &alon had come to my world, this would have been a marshy green landscape rippled through by hills. The marsh reeds and suburbs growing along the coast would have still been fighting their never-ending arms race as to which could outpace the other first.

They never would have guessed that the victor would be a dark horse candidate—an evil fungus from beyond the stars.

Still, even if everyone was dead, at least the communities themselves remained, though I wondered for how much longer. You couldn't pass one of the Expressway's on-ramps without coming across a small, insular neighborhood clustered around its base. Prelatory-era freeways lurked beneath the Expressway's shadow, linking patches of new-old suburbia all the way down the coast; long stretches of mini-malls, low-density housing, xenophobia in varying shades. The usual.

By the turn of the screw, we happened to get off the Expressway at one of the few off-ramps that didn't have a community immediately surrounding it, and what was there hardly counted. Vehicle charging stations, a Gilman's supermarket, and various truckers' amenities did not a community make. According to the street signs, there was a marina nearby from which visitors could engage in a variety of activities, such as watching the elephant seals congregating at a breeding beach, taking a whale-watching tour, or exploring the "marvelous" sea-caves. Also, boating, because you couldn't be an out-of-touch zillionaire without having a boat or three.

The human presence continued down a road perpendicular to the coast that curved behind some bluffs by the water. The actual community, up in the hills, was of decent size. I saw dozens and dozens of homes, and even a couple of office buildings, midgets though they were in comparison to Elpeck's giants, not that &alon cared. She was hard at work subsuming the structures into herself.

The Sun was up, and climbing steadily. The morning light revealed just how thoroughly &alon had destroyed my world.

Even the earth itself was sick. Fungus covered the land like gangrene. The fungus had remade entire stretches of forested hills. Many of the infected trees had either shriveled into nothing or pulled out their roots and walked away. Those that remained had transformed, growing into building-sized towers topped in cups and tubes of sporestacks that pumped green into the sky. Pond water viewed through a microscope would have been half as lively as the remade landscape. &alon had filled it up with the stuff of her nightmares and daydreams, creating a self-sustaining fungal ecology as beautiful as it was horrifying.

Bioluminescent bulbs grew in giant, curling fronds. Segmented monstrosities stalked the underbrush. Fungus-life thronged in herds and packs, like nature half-remembered: horses without heads; dogs with too many limbs. Spreading vines that hissed as they crawled.

Several alien ships passing overhead scoured their heat rays over &alon's creations. Several more had gone so far as to land a couple of hills inland. I saw flights flash near there—fighting, probably.

Nearby trees uprooted themselves and marched toward the light and out of sight, no doubt hellbent on infecting and absorbing as many aliens as they could.

It was insane.

From what I could see from my spot atop the car as we drove, the town itself wasn't faring much better. At this point, their biggest office building was concrete, glass, and steel stretched into a couple of loose, flimsy garments that just barely clung to the furcated fungal plant-form growing within it. &alon was doing to high-rises what strangler figs did to other trees in the Arrakan jungle.

I slithered a bit toward the side of the car and, without letting go of it, stuck a claw down and gently tapped the L85, right next to the window.

Pel turned to look after the second time, and once I had her attention, I stuck out a finger, held it horizontally, and then slid it downward, pantomiming a window sliding down.

The driver's side window slid down.

"Just a little bit," I said, dropping my fishbowl altogether. "It only needs to be enough for you to hear me."

The window shuddered upward until there was just a sliver of space between it and the top of the sill.

"Pel… I need to eat." I made sure to keep my head turned away from the window as I spoke. "More importantly—"

The flower ships that had been burning the fungus forest zoomed past us overhead, filling the morning resounded with their eerie whines.

"…we need to find someplace to hide," I added.

"Shit!" Pel cursed. "Genneth, look!"

I looked, and then heard and saw two golden-eyed wyrms swim out from one of the town's office buildings and slither across the sky.

Stolen novel; please report.

"What are they doing?" I muttered.

They should have been hiding!

"Fudge! They're making a beeline for the flower-ships."

The fronts of the vessels were already lighting up in angry red.

They were preparing to fire!

"We need to get out of here, now!"

"But where do we go?" Pel asked.

I pointed at the bluffs, toward the coast. "The Sea caves! The signs said there's a marina over those bluffs. If it's small enough, maybe the aliens will ignore it."

"Aliens?" Pel asked.

I sighed out spores. "It's a long story."

The flowers fired their heat rays at the wyrms.

Angel…

They hit one of the wyrms, which roared in pain. Even the sound of their pain was enough to make me shake my head and wince, only for my eyes to go wide as the second wyrm rammed into that same ship with a pataphysically-enhanced impact that cracked both the ship's shields and the wyrm's neck.

Before the beam completed its firing sequence, the burned wyrm spewed out a cone of spores that immediately exploded, breaking through the rest of the damaged ship's shields. The aircraft (spaceship?) tried to veer out of the way, but it was too late, and was already covered with spores. The ship wobbled in place as its exterior melted away in sizzling chunks. The vessel's path grew increasingly more unstable; it drifted off to the side and then began to descend, quickly crashing into the fungal wastes beyond the next row of hills, spewing plumes of dirt into the air.

The lights of combat further away got brighter. I watched electric bolts and laser beams fly up from the ground and pelt the wyrm's flanks from somewhere out of sight.

"Drive, Pel, drive!" I said, adding, "And close the window!" right before pulling myself back onto the roof.

We made our way down the road. Movement flashed darkly across the infested plain; fungal creatures, darting about, stalking their prey.

Fortunately, they ignored us. Wolf-things snarled trumpeted as they sprinted toward the battle on the other side of the hills.

I couldn't tell if this section of the road had a speed limit, but, if it did, we'd definitely broken it. It quickly brought us around the bend and behind the bluffs, revealing a cove sheltered in the cliffs' leeward side. There was a small pier on the waterfront, with two or three buildings, next to a marina and the couple dozen boats that were moored there. A few of the vessels had sprouted fungus—bulbs and stalks. Give it a couple of days, and they'd probably become fully fledged sporestacks.

The beach was on the other side of the cove, where it spread out in a long sandbar that strutted onto the sea. Holes riddled the wave-worn cliffs, getting larger and deeper the closer they got to the sand.

Those had to be the advertised sea caves.

They sank into the ground at the base of the cliffs, with several directly exposed to the sea.

Even from a distance, I could tell the beachhead out on the sandbar was littered with corpses. Delicious, delicious corpses. I pointed at it, and Pel drove us there. I started unraveling myself from the car as she pulled up to the dead end in the road, so that I could quickly slither off the car, across the asphalt road and onto the sand as soon as the car came to a stop.

The sand was gushy yet firm against my underbelly. I had my scutes to thank that the rocks and pebbles scattered on the beach didn't bother me. If anything, they helped me move better, likely because of the extra traction they provided.

Hearing the car doors open behind me, I turned to see Jules standing on the road. Her mother followed in short shrift, along with a sharp but well-intended glare of concern. A breeze off the sea blew past, tousling my girls' hair. The way it toyed with my back spines made me shiver. If anything, the feeling brought to mind the sensation of a firmly pressed fingernail being gently drawn down the back of my head.

"What's happening?" Jules asked.

"I'm starving." It was hard for me to stay focused on them with the corpse-buffet waiting for me just a stone's throw away. "I was holding out for you guys, but now that we're together again, I can finally stop. I'll eat, and then I'll change. I'll try to keep myself as human as I can, but…" I lowered my head in dejection, "…I can't make any promises. I wish I could."

"Is this… goodbye?" Jules asked.

My lips quivered. "Never."

I slithered forward, following the ground's downward slope, only to stop and groan.

Let me tell you: being in front of food that disgusts you while you are also ravenously hungry is miserable, not to mention as weird as heck.

My nose hadn't lied: there was plenty of food to be had. It was an all-you-can eat corpse-fest. There was just one teensy-weensy problem: the corpses were not human. I repeat: not human.

It looked like breakfast was gonna be elephant seal à la mode.

Ugh.

The morning's gray marine layer hovered thickly over the garden of dead elephant seals. Honestly, it took me a minute just to figure out what I was looking at. The animals' corpses were horribly deformed, with cattail protrusions and other grotesque disturbances marring their silhouettes. Crooked, fungal roots grew out from their sides and reached across the ground to merge with one another corpses, forming a dark network on the pale sand.

It was only as I approached one of the elephant seals that I finally noticed the deathly silence all around us. I could just make out the sounds of lasers and worse from behind the hills over the breathy sea breeze, but that was it. The wind and the waves were the only natural sounds, and even they felt… hollow. There was no activity anywhere, not so much as a single seagull.

It was unsettling and sinister. Even so, Angel, those seal carcasses smelled good!

On instinct, I leaned forward, ready to dig in, mouth first, but I stopped myself. Given the way wyrms' bodies acted like flypaper when it came to fungal biomass, the last thing I wanted to do was establish physical contact between the dead seals and my face. Thankfully, since I could absorb biomass from any part of my body, I could just do it with my tail, if only to preserve my power of speech for as long as I could.

So, turning around, I brought my tail over to the nearest corpse. I made sure to turn my back to my family before making contact. I didn't want the sight of my own change and my family's frightened reactions to it etched into my memory for all eternity.

I groaned in the good way as my tail touched the dead seal. The effect was intense and immediate and riceroni sandalfish, thank the Angel I wasn't holding out on myself anymore.

It felt good. Gooder than good, even, so much so that by the time I looked down to see what was happening, the dead elephant seal had already uprooted itself from the network and was currently in the middle of linking the hyphae extending from itself to the ones extending from me.

It was the strangest meat-cute there ever was, and no, I do not apologize for that pun.

The mass throbbed. My scales tickled and tingled as the seal melted into me. Its dissolving biomass spread out in chewy trails that crawled up my body from the underside of my skin, starting from my tail. The rivulets squirmed as they made their way up my back and sides, deposited bits of mass along the way.

Since all of the seals were physically connected by the root network, in feeding on one of them, I'd started feeding on all of them: a second elephant seal corpse came loose, pulled across the sand by the roots linking it to the first.

I guess you could call it the second course.

Again, I cannot overemphasize how simultaneously disgusting-yet-amazing this all felt. Certainly, I needed to do so for my family's sake, muttering "I'm okay" over and over again, under my breath. Not only did I do so for everyone's emotional wellbeing—mine included—I also wanted to keep track of my ability to speak. If I lost it before feeling satiated, there was no point in not simply gorging myself until I changed all the way, or as close to it as my current, seal-based meal plan allowed.

My neck started to tingle, and, for a second, as I looked down at my hands, I thought they were getting smaller, only to realize it was actually because my neck was growing, both in thickness and length, the latter of which must have at least doubled, leaving my head bobbing pendulously whenever I craned my neck this way or that. This was followed by a strange sense of pressure on the top of my torso, as if someone had put their hands on my shoulders and started to push down. Just when I thought the tension was near to bursting, it released with a satisfying crack as my arms shifted toward the side of my body. My neck barreled out while my chest reshaped, and the change didn't stop until my throat was almost as broad as my chest. A heat set into my body, burning with a raw physical power that startled me.

It was like my arms were jutting out from narrow walls, only the walls were me. I reached all the way up and touched myself, only for my claws to graze the side of my neck, a little bit below the base of my head. I shook out my neck, flexing my back as my spines grew longer, cresting out into a mane. With just a thought, I could make them bristle out, fully erect, or fold them flush against my neck.

My face also felt weird. It was beginning to bulge out, and leaving my jawing feel… off.

"I'm okay," I said, continuing my mantra. My words became more and more distorted with each passing second, growing deeper and more resonant until I no longer recognized my own voice, even if I could still understand it.

"Dad!" Jules shouted.

I swerved to look at her, dizzying myself as I turned my neck, only to see her pointing toward the sea.

I craned over to look.

Low tones, clicks, and querulous clicks rumbled through the air as a massive creature threw itself onto the beach from out of the water, making my family run in screaming terror. I turned around slithered after them, tearing the connection between my second course and its neighbors.

And then I did a double take.

"A whale…" I mumbled.

It was a whale—or, rather, it had been. Now, it was turning into a wyrm.

The whale's baleen teeth had fallen away. Six golden eyes sprouted like submarine windows from the sides of its head, at the top of its lengthened, distended body. The way it flopped its flippers around only accelerated their break-up into distinct, clawed fingers.

I yanked my tail out of the way just in time. The wyrm-whale opened its gigantic mouth and slammed it down on the rest of dead seals, swallowing them in one big gulp, along with a great deal of sand.

It spewed a spore geyser from its blowhole and then slunk back into the water. New changes were already taking hold, horns and back spines sprouted that gave it the look of a shark as it swam away, though those same features disappeared moments later as it disappeared beneath the darkened waves.

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