The Mycelial Wastes were anything but quiet.
They were singing. From millions of fungal spires came a low, polyphonic drone, a harmonic born of symbiotic digestion. The air was warm and heavy with spores that shimmered like forgotten thoughts. Here, on the vast plains of Aethelrex's petrified skin, the god was not a carcass to be carved, but a host to be tended.
Leo Vance moved through the root-forests with a predator's silence. His feet, wrapped in living lichen, made no sound on the spongy, breathing ground. His clothes were patchworks of cured fungal leather and woven capillary fabrics. He carried a spear tipped with a shard of reflexive bone—a fragment that twitched toward sources of metaphysical injury.
He was tracking a blight.
Not a disease of the god, but of its other parasites. Cult harvesters. A small, reckless team from Sanctum had pierced a major dermal ley-line, seeking a cache of "dream-glands." They'd done it clumsily, causing a psychic lesion. The Wastes around the wound were dying, the fungal songs turning to discordant wails. The mycelial network itself was alive with distress signals that Leo could feel in his teeth.
They were trying to extract the last of the neural matter from the weeping cleft. The Carvers—three of them in environment suits made of bladderskin—were at the edge of the Nerve-Jungle, where the fungal towers merged into grotesque, pulsating trees of exposed nerve bundles and synaptic flowers that shone with painful light. Their dampeners were clearly failing; one of them was on his knees, vomiting softly, his eyes wide with stolen memories.
"You're killing it," Leo said, stepping from the shadows.
The Carvers sprang to their feet, shocked. They fumbled for their tools, which were designed for use on the body, not in a fight. Their leader, a man with the pinched face of a mid-level functionary, scowled. "This is a sanctioned harvest! By the authority of the Final Nectar!"
"Sanction or not, your actions are abhorrent to the earth," Leo retorted. His tone was indifferent. He directed his spear at the lesion. "You have severed a synaptic plexus. The pain feedback is extending. Within 24 hours, this entire grove will be yelling. In a week, it will be going necrotic and taking a square mile of your 'Wastes'' with it. You are not harvesting. You are contaminating your own larder."
"We have quotas!" the functionary hissed.
"And we have symbiosis," Leo responded. He ignored their presence and knelt down. He placed his hands on the ground, on the throbbing, wounded flesh of the world. He closed his eyes, and rather than listening by his ears, he used the connection his people had been bred for over generations. He sensed the tear in the flow, the dissonance. He sent back a pulse of intention, a concept of closure, of scarring. He felt the local mycelia responding, threads extending toward the injury.
Violent and sudden, a tremor shook the earth. The ground lurched. A psychic shockwave—the god's pain reflex—rippled out. The Carver who was on his knees screamed, clutching his head. The Nerve-Jungle trees glowed a stunning, agonized white.
Leo swore. The wound was more serious than he presumed. It was tapping into a primary pain cluster.
"You should get out of here. Immediately," he gritted at the Carvers. "The large nerves are coming to life. The next spasm will liquefy your brains."
The functionary, now white as a sheet, probably didn't need any more persuading. They took off, rushing over the roots, leaving their tools behind.
Leo didn't waste any time. With the help of his bone-spear, he carefully
singed the leaking metaphysical fringes with its natural resonance. He
performed a low, guttural melody, a song of cellular memory that his
people used to facilitate rapid sclerosis. The mycelial threads
consolidated, binding a radiant, fibrous scab over the neural orb.
The tremors stopped. The painful light was less intense.
Still, as he was at work, another pulse infiltrated the network. It was not
from the injury but rather from the deeper part. A slow, awful, aching
pulse that came from the direction of Sanctum, the very center of the
Ribcage. It was a wave of profound, existential depletion. It was the
feeling of a body that realizes its last meal has already been digested.
The Empty Plate.
The idea came to his mind, complete and dripping with dread. It was not
his thought. It was the god's. Or the network's. Or the dying world's.
Leo dropped back on his heels, gasping for air. The immediate crisis
was handled. But the bigger one… the one his people have been telling
each other for generations… was gaining speed.
The host was not only wounded. It was starving to death.
And the blight in its ribs was getting ready for a last, desperate meal.
He turned his eyes to the far, dimly lit curve of the Spine Mountains—
Aethelrex's vertebrae. Somewhere in the maze of sacred butchery, his
people needed to know the time. They had to get ready. The final immune
response was coming.
It would not be a song. It would be a scream.