None of the wyrms had any idea what was going on, and, as far as Brand could tell, he was the only one who was excited about that. Mrs. Elbock was screaming, Mr. Clawless was screaming. Really, most of the wyrms were freaking out to one degree or another. Brand was, too, but in a good way.

He wondered if the beings responsible for the inexplicable entities that had appeared in the skies above the world could see him from up there, a single wyrm looking up at them, all six of his eyes sparkling with childlike glee.

Merritt slithered up to him in a panic.

"—Dr. Nowston!"

"Yes?"

Mrs. Elbock pointed up at the silver things right as they started attacking the city with those heat rays of theirs. The energy weapons cut through skyscrapers with pyroclastic fury, leaving whole swaths of the ruins cauterized and a glow.

Brand went Ooh.

Merritt shrieked. "What are you doing?"

"I never would have expected transforming into a magical fungal lindwurm would be only the second most interesting thing to happen to me this week."

"Are you insane?" Kurt roared. "Why are you just sitting there? We need to get out of here!"

Dr. Nowston was deeply conflicted. On the one hand, he really, really, really wanted to study the silver things up close and in person. On the other hand, all of his tools were back at the pathology lab: microscopes, spectroscopes, the radiation crystallographer, and so many others.

Nothing upset scientific progress quite like a lack of adequate tools when and where you needed them. Also, losing funding. That always sucked.

"Dr. Nowston!" Merritt yelled. She was panicking.

"Fine, fine, I'll just get to it later," Brand said.

It was funny: the more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

So many test tubes, so little time.

Wyrms were pouring into the sky. Only a handful of them were Elpeckians flying off the tops of buildings to join the fight. By far, the vast majority of the wyrms engaging the invading fleet had appeared out of portals that had materialized mid-air. The new arrivals' eyes were as silver as the strange vessels looming up above. Fungal islands floated out from the portals, and continued to hover preternaturally, serving as staging grounds from &alon's war.

"What do you think those things are made of?" Brand mused.

He wondered how they did the portal trick. Maybe some kind of violation of the exclusion principle?

It made the Green Death seem boring by comparison.

The Elpeckian wyrms joining the battle roared at their attackers, venting fear and outrage, in stark contrast to the silver-eyed regiments. The silver-eyes said nothing, yet their wordless war-song was also oddly familiar.

"Doesn't that sound like Genneth's music?" Merritt asked.

"Holy shit," Kurt said, "yeah, you're right."

"What does it mean?"

"I…" Mrs. Elbock shook her head. "I don't know."

All of a sudden, &alon's voice shot through Brand's head.

"Wyrms, the meanies are here! I'm fighting them! You should run away, where it's safe! Protect your ghosts!"

"Did you two gentlemen just hear that?" Merritt asked.

Brand nodded. "I feel like she's in over her head, don't you?"

Kurt stared at him for a while and then slithered off to Verdiger Fountain, which had survived the battle with Verune mostly intact. Mr. Clawless coiled around it and pointed his head up at the sky.

"Maybe I should just stay here and wait for the end…" he said.

The situation on the ground was deteriorating rapidly. Crackling energy streams dissected one building after another, sowing fires wherever they went. The wyrms &alon had arbified were helpless; the best they could do was swing their heads and scream.

It was mostly obscenities. A few of them cried, begging for forgiveness.

As the strangers' destructive capacities became more and more apparent, Brand came to the upsetting conclusion that studying them probably wasn't going to be easy.

He hated it when specimens played hard-to-get.

We never got around to examining fully transformed wyrm's mind under an MRIs, one of Brand's accessory selves suggested. That could be interesting.

Brand agreed with himself, though he couldn't shake the strong Plan B feeling that came with it.

"You know what? I think we should probably leave," he said.

"You think?" Merritt trumpeted.

As a wyrm, Merritt's face was far less expressive than a human's. Worry had contracted all across her snout pores, while her eyes were narrowed in indignation, but that was all. Despite this, Brand really did feel her distress. It must have been getting transmitted through her cries.

That would be something interesting to study!

He made a note to ask her about it later..

As much as Brand wanted to stay to study the fascinating new beings that had arrived on his world, safety was still very important, and three wyrms out in the open between Cascaton Park and the Melted Palace's basilica made for excellent targets, and that was before taking into account all the wyrm-trees scattered about, including the giant one.

Then he remembered. "Wait, maybe I can go get a tissue sample from the Lassedite tree? I wanna check if time travel left any residual radioactivity."

Kurt stuck up tall and then, startled, hopped off the fountain.

"No!" he yelled. "A squad of those silver aerostats is coming toward us! We gotta get out of here, now!"

"Can you fly?" Brand asked.

As a wyrm, 'talking' was very peculiar. Dr. Nowston was keenly aware that there was some component of his wyrm neurophysiology that already knew how to convert what he intended to say into the polyphonic wyrmsong that would convey them. Not only that, but, as he'd discovered a short while before the big fight, he could even modify his song so that only specific wyrms were able to receive its contents. The physical feeling of the singing process was also really interesting. It was like his face was made of noses, each one of which flared and snorted and twitched.

It was fuckin' awesome.

Kurt lowered his head. "I… uh… I can figure it out."

Nodding, Brand turned to Merritt. "What about you, Mrs. Elbock?"

Mrs. Elbock brought her claws close to her chest and scratched at her neck in a very sheepish gesture. "Um… y-yes…?"

He didn't believe it, and, from the sound of it, neither did she.

Without a word, Brand slithered up beside Mrs. Elbock and grabbed her hand, claws against claws. She recoiled skittishly, not that Brand cared. He was focusing on his midsection, coiling himself up to accumulate the muscle tension necessary to leap. He wove pataphysics around him and Merritt, watching through his third pair of eyes the interplay of blue and gold filaments of the fuselage-shaped construct.

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He gave Merritt one last glance. "Okay, hold on tight."

Merritt started mumbling something out of anxiety, only for her mutterings to leap into a roar as Brand lunged forward and used his body to push off the street like a spring. He set his power flowing through the woven spirals, rings, and waves.

Merritt cried out as the two of them soared. Brand kept his body flexibly rigid, undulating with the air currents as they buffeted them. Mrs. Elbock flailed like a wayward kite, her tail thrashing behind her. Tension pulled at their grip, but, to her credit, Mrs. Elbock took charge, conjuring psychic filaments around their claws to bind them together.

Off to the side, Kurt rose up in a winding curve, wobbling slightly. It was an inefficient, circuitous path, though Brand figured that was probably intentional, as a way for Mr. Clawless to help acclimate himself to flying.

If Brand still had lips, he would have smiled.

The wyrm was a fast learner. He came out of his spiral about three stories up, and after that swam behind Brand and Merritt without too much trouble.

Brand flew at a good speed, faster than any car ever would have gone on Elpeck's streets, faster even than the monorails, but still a far cry from the dizzying speed of a hoverer on an Expressway.

Skyscrapers' unbroken windows caught the morning light, giving Brand a glimpse of his, Merritt, and Kurt's reflections as they zoomed past. He couldn't resist slowing his perception of time to linger and stare at his flowing form and his branching horns; at the three golden eyes on either side of his snout, lined up in a neat row.

With all due respect to his former body and its three-plus decades of dutiful service—excellent skin, a fine sense of taste, shapely genitals, and no troublesome anemia—Brand couldn't deny that his wyrm body had far more impressive specs, and really wonderful functionalities. Wyrm eyes might not have been quite as good as some of the analytical equipment back at the lab, but they still let him see far more than he ever could before. His first pair of eyes saw a wide spectrum of light, from the upper end of the radio waves to the lower frequencies of ionizing radiation, filling his field of vision with more colors than he could ever name. Frequencies too low to make out clearly appeared as faint blurs, while any stupidly dangerous high frequencies looked like static on his field of vision. Dealing with it had been pretty disorienting at first, but he'd fared much better once he discovered that he could alter his visual bandwidth at will, to the point where he could selectively filter out individual wavelengths. He'd settled for confining his visible range to the spread of frequencies detectable to the human eye, and had been slowly expanding the allowed bandwidths in order to acclimate to it.

To his eyes, the Sun was a fireworks display forever erupting. The streaks of high-energy particles battered the sky in luminous, nearly numinous, rain. It was almost painfully beautiful.

Brand let time flow normally again once he noticed Merritt had started to speak.

"Stay low!" she yelled. "They'll see us if we go too high!"

"Good point."

Brand slithered downward, flying low to the ground. Wrecked vehicles clogged the streets below like stones in a river.

They swerved around a corner, with Merritt holding on tight. Glancing back at her, Brand noticed a weave flickering into place around her.

Was she trying to fly on her own?

Further behind her, Kurt suddenly pulled back. He came to a stop mid-air and bellowed in alarm.

"Guys!"

Brand looked straight ahead, and then roared in shock.

Silvery objects were falling from the sky. Smaller than the flower-ships, they had the shape of rice-grains, only man-sized or larger, and facted and edged, like polyhedra. Red lights crackled on their flanks, just like the flying flowers did when they fired their death rays.

Fuck.

Brand screamed. "Merritt, go up!"

Brand himself tilted his body nearly to the vertical and swam up the corridor of buildings. Halfway to the skyscrapers' spires, the feeling of Merritt's weight dragging against him suddenly disappeared.

"No!"

Roaring, he looked down and back, right as the rice-grains hit the pavement and fired their energy beams up at him.

Brand narrowly dodged one, but it and the others were so loud and bright that he could hardly see anything at all.

Where was Mrs. Elbock?

Then he heard something like a rock in a blender.

Glancing down, he saw one of the pods break through the street and dig down, throwing up dust and debris as it opened up a fungus-edged hole.

Brand flew over the nearby buildings and turned around, floating inches above the roof of an apartment complex several stories tall.

"Merritt!"

Witnessing the debris in the air alter the flow of sound was as incredible as it was terrifying. The vibrations washed across his field of vision, rippling down from somewhere overhead above, and he only understood them as sounds once they finally touched his body.

Like with the other two pairs, Brand could change what his ear-eyes heard and how strongly he heard it. He almost closed them altogether, but then, through his third pair of eyes, he saw Merritt's powers sputter into action.

Beast's teeth!

She shot up like a rocket, roaring as she emerged from the clouds of falling dust. The sound's vibrations ripped through the turbulence. A death ray blasted down at her, nearly grazing Merritt's mane, but the beam petered out a second too soon, and she got away.

"Go!" Kurt yelled.

Brand saw him hovering further down the street.

"I'll hold them off," he said, right before launching himself at the ground.

Brand tilted his head toward the street on the other side of the buildings. Merritt lingered beside him.

"But—"

"No," Brand said. "You heard him!" He waved his hand. "C'mon, before they follow us!"

He swam away with her, leaving Kurt behind in the dust cloud as the lasers fired. Brand spotted figures moving through the dust, but Kurt swung at them with his tail and his psychokinesis, knocking them out of sight as.

"Merritt!" Brand hissed.

She followed along, cooing softly.

The two wyrms slithered into the adjacent city block, away from Kurt and the evolving fight, and then swam through an alleyway and turned down the street on the opposite side. Close to the ground, some of the smaller, older buildings had been so overgrown, it looked like they were melting into fungal trees.

Another flower zoomed by overhead. Merritt cried in alarm.

Kurt rose up to meet it, his massive body undulating through the air. He slashed his claws and sprayed spores in a wide cone.

Up ahead, abandoned buses, tanks, and troop transports clogged the road.

"Up!" Brand said.

He and Merritt flew about one story above the ground, out of the vehicles' way.

Merritt pointed with a claw. "Dr. Nowston, look!"

Brand got his first look at where the giant silver rice-grains had come from. Here and there, close to the ground or to buildings' rooftops, the flowers stopped to hover in place, and then pieces of themselves detached from their undersides and fell to the ground, becoming the rice grains.

Seeing that gave Brand an inkling of what the rice-grains were.

"What's happening?!" Merritt said.

"Dropships, maybe?" Brand said.

A moment later, he saw-heard pressurized hisses coming from the pods once they hit the ground, followed by the thud of many hard surfaces falling onto the pavement.

That it clinched it then, they were dropships, after all!

"Come on, Mrs. Elbock," Brand said, "this way!"

They turned down a street and swam away, but not before Brand got a brief glimpse of one of the creatures that had stepped out of the pods.

He saw silvery armor, possibly humanoid in shape, though his view of it was too obscured for him to be sure. He couldn't even tell whether the creatures emerging from the landing pods were organic life-forms or machines. Regardless, there was no doubting what he saw through his third eyes' wyrmsight. These otherworlders were wrapped up in pataphysics, as if mummified in it, and the same was true of their vessels. The weaves came in more shapes, colors, and textures than Brand could have ever imagined.

Angel, if realization could cause vertigo…

No transformee had been able to make anything like what he saw, not even Greg.

Hearing gunfire echoing behind him, Brand picked up the pace, feeding more power to his flight magic to speed himself away from the dropships.

Suddenly, Merritt rammed into him from the side, knocking him into a building. She yelled.

"Dr. Nowston!"

Shaking his head, Brand pushed off the building, and then saw a six-limbed fungal behemoth two-stories tall lumber out from around the corner. Zombies and other, smaller, fungal creatures swarmed around its legs.

Merritt darted out of their way, and Brand followed.

"Thanks," he said.

If she hadn't knocked him out of the way, he probably would have fused with that monstrosity, making himself into that much bigger of a target.

"Let it do the fighting for us," she said.

They nodded in agreement and then swam down an alleyway, out of sight. Brand was more cautious after that. He and Merritt took time to hide in an alley or behind a rooftop and scan the streets ahead of them before flying down the next block. Then they'd pick somewhere else to hide and the process repeated itself.

Small, buzzing, drone-things swarmed through the skies, sweeping bright green searchlights wherever they went. They split up and spread out. Most dropped below the skyline, too low for Brand to see, while those that didn't flew up and down tall buildings, scanning them for… well, whatever it was, Brand made it his mission to find out once they were safe.

Unable to see what the other drones were doing, Brand guessed they were also scanning things, just on ground level.

The two wyrms soon reached the final stretch; Crusader Hill and its tunnel were in clear view ahead. Just then, a couple of the drones caught sight of them. Brand tore one in half with his psychokinesis, while Merritt flung herself at one, raking her claws over its energy shields, sending up sparks as she broke through. Merritt's target managed to shake her off and fly away. She breathed spores as it, but it dodged. Brand followed up with a psychic lasso, but somehow, the drone slipped out of his magic's grasp. His pataphysics slid off it like oil on water.

Not wanting to be seen, Brand and Merritt swam through the tunnel, using their extra eyes to navigate its darkness.

They landed on Garden Court Drive, near the Hall of Echoes' entrance. The wyrm-trees in the gardens shivered. A few of them even dared to speak.

"What's going on?"

"Who are you?"

"Someone's here."

"I'm scared."

"Fuck all of you!"

Ignoring them, Merritt slithered toward the garage, clutching her claws close to her chest. She glanced back at Brand. "Where is everybody?"

"Find them yourself!" one of the trees said.

Brand slithered up beside her. "I—"

—But he cut himself off. There was movement all over the Garden Court. Wyrms poked their heads out of the entrance to the garage, and the garden's massive sinkhole, golden eyes nuzzling through broken walls and windows, their slender bodies susurrous as they slunk across the ground.

"Dr. Nowston?"

Brand turned.

Dr. Rathpalla had slithered out of the Hall of Echoes. He stared at Brand with all six eyes.

The psychiatrist shook his head, and then cast a furtive glance up at the sky. "What in the world is going on?"

For once, Brand was reluctant to share what he knew.

Sensing his hesitation, Mrs. Elbock slithered up to Brand and held his claw in hers.

"They deserve to know the truth," she said.

And then, with a spore sigh, Brand began to speak.

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