Page 102 of The Blight of Hollowmire

And the first spore drifts down—soft and white as a mote of ash. It lands on the chopping block in front of my face. And I cannot help it—a smile curves my lips upward.

More spores fall, tens, then hundreds, falling from above in a pale, silent snow. Someone in the crowd gasps, followed by another voice crying out in shock, or surprise—and then in terror, or disgust. The executioner hesitates with his axe raised high, and I hear his breath rasping beneath the hood.

I look up.

Spores pour down from the low clouds, shimmering bone-white and silver-gray. They catch in Arden’s dark hair and dust the executioner’s shoulders. They cling to the eyelashes of starving children who stare upward in awe.

Inside my body, the Blight Mother exhales.

At the edges of the courtyard, the stones split open, wrenched apart by great wet seams of earth. Thick, white stalks thrust upward, swelling faster than the eye can follow. Massive mushroom caps unfurl overhead like a forest of parasols—red as blood, black as charcoal, and blue-violet with veins that pulse faintly beneath slick, oozing flesh. Mushrooms taller than men erupt along the walls, tearing loose mortar, toppling barrels, throwing guards backward as roots and filaments lash beneath their feet.

The crowd screams—or perhaps it is the soldiers. In all the wet, liquid squelching, it’s hard to pinpoint where the screams are coming from.

A tower of lacy yellow fungus bursts through the scaffold steps, exploding in a cloud of bitter spores. The executioner waves his free hand around as if the spores are a hive of angry bees, coughing and choking and bellowing. In his panic, he drops his axe, and I wait for the pain of the blade biting into my shoulder.

Yet none arrives. The impact is jarring, and there’s the ugly crunch of bone that should follow. There is no pain, and there is no blood.

The axe sinks into my flesh and simply stops. In an answering instant, black decay runs up the blade. The executioner shrieks and releases the handle, stumbling back as rust blossoms over the steel in frantic red flowers. The axe head crumbles at the edges, its sharp polish pitting, flaking, rotting into a pile of rusted iron filings that drift downward alongside the snowfall of spores.

Arden lunges forward to grab the weapon before it falls, and the moment his fingers close around the handle, the decay writhes hungrily up his sleeve. A pulsing orange-black stain spreads across the velvet, tarnishing the delicate silver embroidery. He shrieks in surprise, dropping the wooden haft and recoiling.

Arden’s horror is a rather satisfying sight to witness. Truly, if I knew how to paint, I would capture the expression in layers of oil upon a canvas. My gaze snags on the broken axe crumbling between us. For the first time since I set foot in Valehar, I see hairline cracks in his hardened exposure. His lip trembles, and he bares his teeth.

“You cannot kill me in any way that matters,” I say, unsurprised to hear that my voice is mine—and it is also not.

It is the sound of a thousand roots breaking through stone, and the scratching sound of mycelium devouring old, fallen trees. It the slick, wet sound of carrion beetles burrowing beneath skin, and the soft sigh of every fallen leaf slowly turning into soil. It is the sound of a death goddess singing, shouting, screaming.

Arden stumbles back while the Blight Mother surges through me, and this time, I don’t shove her away. I take a breath that reaches all the way down to my toes and let myself give way—feeling a heartbreaking sense of relief. Horrible, exquisite relief.

My antlers surge higher from my skull, branching upward in the smooth white growth of new bone. My hair lifts in a phantom breeze around me, the white strands tangling with spores and the wreath of mushrooms crowning my head. My fingernails lengthen, blackening to lethally curved points. Beneath my feet, the scaffold groans until it finally explodes in a shower of splinters as roots punch through the planks and lovingly caress my feet, up my ankles, and finally, my legs.

As they grab hold of me, my senses open to a vast network of life underground, reaching deeper and deeper, until my awareness leaves this doomed courtyard and hollowed out kingdom of ruins behind. My mycelium thrust violently forward through the earth.

This isn’t like reaching into that private pool of rot that has always lived beneath my skin—this is vast and delicate, even beyond my fae comprehension. Thousands—no, millions—of my fungal filaments slip through soil, around stones, beneath walls, under roads, under beds where starving people curl around empty bellies, under granaries full of pretty and useless grain, under the castle foundations themselves.

Gods, the taste of such unknowable power and connection. I feel everything.

I feel the roots of orchard trees—brittle with false life. I feel the bones slowly breaking down beneath the old cemetery, turning back into the earth that once nourished these lives. A buried ring. A lost tooth. A rusted nail. The ash pits behind the kitchens. Worms. Beetles. The damp, beautiful underside of the world.

And beneath all of it… Ah, there you are!

My threads are far beneath the castle now and there—there, there, there!—it sits, the knot of something so unnatural, so wrong, it nearly makes me recoil. It’s not rot, not death, and not life… it’s the spell that started this all. It’s the spell that’s been hidden away in the soil, like a thorn driven deep beneath flesh.

Life everlasting.

I can sense it even without language—I can taste it in the blood used to bind the spell to the earth. Arden. The arrogant bastard—no wonder the land sickened and the food could not feed. Nothing can nourish when death is forbidden to do her work.

I seize the spell with thousands of filaments, but it burns. Oh, oh! How it burns! The pain might be the worst pain I have ever known—worse than every cut, broken bone, slap, or heartbreak I’ve felt in my fae body. This is so much worse—this sharp, sterile bite of something that refuses change, and the wretched thing resists me with all the desperation Arden poured into it. The soil turns to black sludge, and the filaments I have sent deep beneath Valehar blacken and snap.

I scream in pain and rage—a primal scream that this is the source of the corruption, this small, pathetic man who thinks he is above everything, including the natural order of the world.

Walls start to shudder, and chimneys collapse in the lower quarter. The dry fountain in the center of the courtyard bursts apart as carpets of slime mold seep out of the stone like water. In the courtyard, people fall to their knees as the ground heaves and shudders violently beneath them. The scaffold tilts, and one corner drops with a splintering shriek. I’m pleased to see the chopping block, that ought to boast a new chip from my death, crack in two.

The Blight Mother’s will coils around mine, another hand tugging at the rope of wrongness.

Pull, child.

“I am trying,” I snarl.