Once, I suppose, the town of Springfield must have had its happy days, though, by the looks of things, only the smiling family on the sign remembered them. For a real-estate development of recent origin, it was a pretty quaint place, or at least had been. Slithering through its charming, winding grid, it was easy for me to hyperphantasize the details that the fungus had destroyed: the palm tree lined streets; the perfect lawns in front of the sleek, streamlined homes; all the porthole windows opened in various states of curiosity. Most of this past was still visible, it was just overgrown with fungus.

With &alon.

Abandoned cars littered the streets. A few were strewn about in the middle of the road, but most of them were parked by the curb, peacefully deposited there, and still surprisingly pristine, given the circumstances. The streets were similarly clean. Yes, there was trash, and shards of glass sprinkled on the sidewalks in front of friendly neighborhood chain outlets in the shopping district, but no bodies, nor wyrmsong, nor even a shred of fire. Fungal growth topped the leafless, infected palm trees in blunt cylinders of fungal growth. The fungus was wan and shriveled, dried out, sometimes even sloughing off.

There must not have been enough "food" here to hold &alon's interest.

But, there were clothes: hats, shirts, coats, shoes, and all the rest. They were haphazardly scattered about, or sometimes lying solo, other times in piles, blown together by the wind.

I kept low to the street, poking myself in through broken storefronts, scanning lightless rooms with all of my sights. But there was nothing. Really, the stillness was eerie. I didn't detect the slightest traces of heat, movement, or aura. If anything, it was cold. Gelid, even.

Rifts were scattered about, ominous cracks in the earth.

I made sure to keep my distance from them. Whatever &alon was doing there, it gave me the heebie-jeebies. I couldn't get close without feeling discomfort, even pain.

A terrifying aura exuded from the rifts. I could feel it, even from a distance. Its emanations stung, burned, shocked and froze me as they lapped at my body, slurping up my vitality whenever I drew near.

&alon must have been drawing from my and other wyrms' powers to do her time-eating thing.

I slithered away from it with a shudder. Not long after that, however, I thought I smelled something appetizing.

I raised my deforming snout-face and sniffed the air.

I hadn't been imagining things. The fungus' familiar sweet smell was coming from somewhere in the distance, maybe more than one place. But the scent was overpowered by another odor, something pungent that I couldn't quite place.

I slithered onward, belly over asphalt, following the smell. It led me to an intersection at the center of town, where I saw something that stopped me in my tracks.

"What the fudge…?" I muttered.

There was a decent-sized department store in one of the corner lots, and that was the only normal thing I could say about it. The front half of the building was there more than once.

Let me explain.

The barber shop I liked to frequent—Tony's—had a row of big, tall light-bulb rimmed mirrors running along either side of the wall, one for each chair. When you sat in one of the chairs at Tony's, you could see the mirror behind you reflected in the one in front of you. But since that reflection was a mirror, too, it reflected light as well, leading to a near-infinite regress of superimposed images, repeated within one another at smaller and smaller scales.

Now, do that, but to a building, and without any mirrors in sight. That was the department store.

With my three golden eyes and my wyrmsight, I perceived even more detail than would have been noticeable to human eyes. The essence of each copy of the department store showed the same scene playing out: a group of three people entering or exiting the front doors. But the rest were a kaleidoscope of different possibilities, and no two were exactly the same.

Across the many copies, the three figures were created and re-created in too many ways to count. A man in one would be a woman in another; in one, they'd be wearing classy autumn fashion; in another, verdant robes worthy of a master wizard. In some copies, the figures walked on two legs; in others, on four. Sometimes they had skin, other times, fur, or scales, or something blue. Some were hardly humanoid. Sometimes the store was concrete and dry wall, other times it was made of varnished wood, or glass and steel, or gently pulsing flesh. The ground flickered, pavement one moment, grass the next. And in one copy, it was night out, and sky overhead was resplendent with stars. It was just a glimpse, and it lasted for only half of an instant, but, even so, I wanted more.

The many worlds waxed and waned, as if the department store's space was breathing. One moment, the tear in space and time was open wide open, and when it was, the innumerable visions it offered were bright and clear, but then it retracted and shut closed, leaving me staring at a dilapidated, dusty-windowed department store filled with disheveled shelves and human vanity, the visions of the other worlds reduced to phantoms, lost in cosmic transmission. Then the tear would open again, the cycle would begin anew.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

When the tear was at its widest, auras and weaves within the place piled on in diaphanous layers stacked so thick, the whole throbbed in my wyrmsight.

"This place is a forbidden mountain," Lark's voice said. "I don't like it here. It's wrong. Hell, it's wronger than wrong."

I agreed. I wouldn't have slithered in there even if you paid me.

&alon had told me "the darkness" could "eat time". I guessed this was her doing that.

I wished Suisei had been here with me. He might have had something useful to say.

"What are you going to do, Genneth?" Yuta asked me.

"Move far, far away from the existentially terrifying department store," I said, and then I did just that. I slithered along the street and then turned down the next intersection when I spotted, of all things, a Might Aid drugstore.

Heckin' yes!

Like the surrounding shops, &alon had covered the building the Might Aid in an ivy-like habit. Sprigs of stalks and bulbs had pushed out from cracks in the pavement. Their flesh was dark, except for the colorful bits at the tips, which would light up in blue, or green, or gold once night fell.

Most importantly, the Might Aid was 100% free of rifts in space and/or time.

The doors gave no resistance as I pushed my way through, into the drug store's dank, musty interior. Spores dusted the vinyl floor, gathering in shallow pits rimmed in acid burns.

Much to my surprise, there wasn't even a single corpse in the place—and, yes, I checked. All I found was a mournful silence, and row upon row of mostly empty shelves—emphasis on mostly.

The painkillers were quite literally over-the-counter, strewn about disorderly on plastic shelves on the check-out counter, for last minute impulse buyers, painkillers, and grabbed a clawful of the ones that my wyrmsight reported as being 100% &alon-free.

Well, that was one errand down.

Letting out a sporey sigh, with the pill bottles in hand, I slithered back onto the street and set to work on my second errand: finding something to eat. I caught a whiff of the sweet scent of fungus as I made my way down the dead, silent street. The scent was weak—stale, I guess—but it was really close, just up ahead, lurking down an alleyway a body-length and a half in front of me.

I slithered forward and turned down the alley.

And there it was.

Oh joy.

It was a giant booger, only made from three dead human beings and the fungus in between. The repugnant mass grew on the side of a hardware store, on a mural of cypressed hills overlooking a day at the beach.

The three corpses sat on the alley floor, as if they'd been hiding from something. The fruiting bodies erupting from their heads and chest merged together into a single, neuron-shaped mass—the booger. Its tendrils reached across the wall.

Feeding was simple: all it took was a touch. I pressed myself up against the heart of the body booger, too hungry to care that the mass' reaching tendrils were brittle and dry, or that their tips were frayed and gray.

My body reached into the booger with vigor. I spasmed in frightful pleasure. Aches and points of weakness I'd barely been aware of`healed and grew strong. In my despair, I'd barely noticed the pain.

The fungal tissue merged with me, flowing in and along my body, crawling on both sides of my hide. Long-overdue changes proceeded in earnest. My upper body swelled past the point my ragged, long-suffering coat could endure. It burst to shreds as. My back spines flexed on their own accord as they grew to their maximum extent. Weights dollop at the spines ends, forming bioluminescent bulbs.

Angel, I could feel the things brushing against the wall as my spines flexed.

More of the mass flowed into me.

My dilapidated lower jaw melted into my neck, my fragmented teeth getting folded away in the rest of the meat. The roof of my mouth blackened as it swelled like a balloon to join my budding snout. I could see my snout protruding into the lower-middle of my four-eyed vision, forming a dark mass.

Short horns drilled out of the back of my skull as the rest of my head grew longer and more lacertine. For a brief instant, my wyrmsight flickered and vanished, only to reappear as my third pair of eyes popped into place, behind the pair I used to hear.

Apparently, the third pair would be used for wyrmsight, among other things.

I flicked the tall, bulb-tipped spines cresting atop my head.

Angel's breath, I soaked up the fungus booger like a sponge. And I grew. Thicker, longer. Power buzzed through my thoughts. Any energy I'd lost to &alon's rifts got replaced twice over. But then… something went wrong.

What?

It came from the mass' fringes, the last parts of the thing to begin merging into me. A feeling of rot crawled across my flesh, burning hot and freezing cold all at once. The brittle tendrils cracked like sticks of ash, crumbling down onto my head.

I tried to pull myself free, but my body had its haustoria deep into the growth.

I screamed, spewing streams of spores out my twenty-four nostrils. In a frenzy—clutching tightly to the pill bottles in my hand—I summoned my power, ripping myself off the wall like a bullet shooting out of a gun.

It was the most agonizing waxing I'd ever endured. The feeling of smashing back-first into the building on the opposite side of the alleyway was almost pleasant by comparison.

Raising myself up, I realized the left half of my vision was gone, not to mention my claws.

Fudge me up the axe! The whole right side of my body had been peeled off: arm, claws, eyes and all!

I turned to the mass' remains.

Beast and Queen! What was left of the thing and my outer layer were crumbling into gray motes that dissolved into nothingness as they drifted slowly toward the pavement, as if being burned away by an invisible fire, the "ash" dissolving into nothingness where it rose and fell.

What the heck was going on?!

Coiling my lower body, I pushed off the wall like a spring. The motion sent me barreling out to the street, onto which I eventually skidded to a rude stop, protected by my scute-covered underbelly. I fell forward, thumping my neck and what remained of my head onto the ground.

A terrible cold burned from somewhere up ahead, numbing my exposed flesh.

Slowly, I raised my forepart upright; slowly, because the left side of my body was regenerating as I did so. Thankfully, the damage hadn't been as bad as I initially thought. It was more like the topmost layer of my skin had been ripped off. The hollows where my three left eyes should have been quickly filled in, my eyeballs blossoming back into place. For a couple seconds, my left arm was little more than a kickstand—and a narrow one, to boot—but it bulked up soon enough.

I scraped my left hand's claws on the road as I pushed myself up.

In moments, I was complete, and now that I was operating with a full set of sensory organs, I could appreciate just how bad things had gotten.

The icy feeling in the air intensified ten-fold. It positively burned. Electric tingles rasped my minute, purple-black scaled. The sensation was strongest on the left side of my body, where it hit me with sledgehammer force, as if grenades were exploding inside my chest.

I turned to see it.

The spirits within me screamed.

If you find any errors ( broken links, non-standard content, etc.. ), Please let us know < report chapter > so we can fix it as soon as possible.