Page 162 of Keldori By Daybreak

“But that’s not true.” My blue-hair apparition pointed to the skeletal figure in the web of mycelium overhead. “You are strong, but you are not as strong as Ergoth’s father. Though with your addition, maybe the father can finally rest?”

I stared up at the skeleton man for too long, and Ergoth-Ciarán shoved me forward so that I toppled on top of the real Ciarán’s body. For a moment, I thought he’d let me go, and I grabbed at Ciarán, planning on heaving him over my shoulder and running him out of the strath myself if I had to.

But the roots that had spread from Ergoth to wrap around my arms tightened, lifting me into the air, away from Ciarán.

“No!” I grabbed at him, wrapping an arm around his torso to try to hold him close, but new roots had sprung from the ground and wormed their way beneath his skin. Mycelium pulled me up while it tied him down. “Ciarán! Please!”

Roots snaked beneath my clothing, wrapping around my limbs, stinging where it touched my sin, lifting me higher, and higher until Ciarán was far beneath me and the skeletal man was at eye level.

His skin stretched over his skull, and ridges of fungus decorated his arms. His tunic had worn away into ratty threads, but there was only fungus underneath, clinging to bone-thin remains. A single blood-shot eye opened.

“Eth…” he rattled, “…thel…”

I froze in my struggle against Ergoth’s roots.

“‘Ethel?’” I repeated. “Did you just say ‘Ethel?’”

The rotting Magician had said my grandmother’s name.

But then the sting of the mycelium against my skin turned into sharp, burning pain, and I cried out as it needled into my flesh along my arms, legs, chest, neck, everywhere.

The roots twisted beneath skin, worming into muscle, around bone, into blood vessels…

I felt every movement of Ergoth’s mycelium burrowing through my viscera, and I screamed in protest. Sweat pooled and dripped down my face as I tried to generate enough heat to burn the roots weaving through my flesh, but there was too much.

Ergoth’s roots kept coming, until they were climbing my spinal cord, up my brainstem, and then—

My limbs went limp and heat fled as an entity larger than myself clicked into place. Ergoth’s expanse opened in my head. I was in every stalk of fungus, every spore, every rotting Magician trapped in this graveyard.

And they were all in me.

And we were all Ergoth.

I felt every bird, every beetle, the beating of Una’s talons as she raced for the edge of the strath, the reservoir of purified Skal that lay beneath the forest…

All while Ergoth’s roots continued to eat their way into my body.

The skeletal man gave a final, rasping gargle, and his single eye rolled back in his rotted head.

Silence fell over the strath. Ciarán lay far below, but the orange glow of his eyes percolated through the curtains of mycelium that separated us.

“Welcome to Ergoth. The Ergoth Father has fed us for centuries, but no Magician has been strong enough to replace him. Now he may rest, and Ergoth may feed.” Ergoth spoke directly into my head, buzzing through the roots that now tangled through my system.

“Er…goth…” I gasped, no longer sure of where I ended and Ergoth began.

“The man you fought so hard to save, you will spend the next centuries watching his skin stretch and bloat, and his eyeballs fester as we take what is ours.”

Ciarán stared up at me through half-closed lids, and his lips parted, but he was unable to speak.

I’d brought him in here.

A spark flickered inside my chest, somewhere still untouched by Ergoth’s roots.

“You will…” I whispered, “not…touch him.”

The spark caught, swirling and growing, even as I remained immobile in my web of mycelium. The ground below quaked and split, releasing streams of super-heated air into the graveyard, and my magick swelled until I was screaming and unable to hold it in any longer.

It burst forth, snapping my bones as it released. Spouts of lava broke through the crust of the earth. Fungus shriveled in the heat released from the earth, and the falling of monstrous fungi roared like thunder. Ergoth screamed in my mind, and I screamed with them.