Thirty

The fire eventually burned itself down to embers leaving Fyndraxis alone in the dim light that they offered. The silence of the forest was beginning to give him the creeps. He kept checking his radio to see if the Wendigo had followed them and were about to come and finish them off. The radio was silent on that front though.
After one of his hundreds of obsessive radio checks, he noticed something very small and thin coming out of the ground. It looked like a worm, only much thinner. It was very long and paler than starlight. In fact, it was giving off a very slight pale green light. Fyndraxis knew immediately what it was, it was the Wendigo coming to eat their bones.
He hit it with a blast of radio static that was sure to render it to dust. Nothing happened. This little hairlike worm grew longer and quested about, looking for something. Fyndraxis shouted to wake up Bird, but she was fully unconscious. She was sleeping the sleep of the dead.
The little worm was joined by some friends and they began to braid themselves about each other. More and more of them poured out of the forest floor, raising themselves to the height of a man. Thousands of them came together and started to coalesce into a central mass. This mass became a pillar. This pillar throbbed and bulged eventually opening itself up, and its walls peeling away like lotus petals. These petals crumbled to dust and left behind an infant in the fetal position, Its flesh paler than a trout belly and glowing radium green into the night. Anywhere that articulated like knees and elbows and the insides of knuckles, there were the sort of black gills you would find on the underside of a mushroom cap. They were so fine that they shone iridescent in the pale green light.
This tiny form began to grow before him, not only in size, but in age. In the span of about thirty seconds he was looking at a toddler, after a minute, a youth and then a teenager. Like a timelapse of the aging process.
Eyes and a face formed on the head that regarded the Daemon Blade. The eyelids blinked over obsidian orbs as the creature took in its surroundings. What stood before him now was a nude figure of a human. It seemed to be an exercise in androgyny, lacking any of the helpful clues where the arms and legs met the torso. It was anchored to the ground by thousands of gossamer strands like a puppet being controlled from below the earth.
“Terribly sorry to disturb you,” it said in a crisply aristocratic British accent, “but I’d like to have a word if it wouldn’t trouble you.”
Fyndraxis didn’t know what to do. There were many approaches he could take at this point. There was the theatrical approach, the coolest dude in the universe, the straight shooter. All of them seemed silly when brought to bear on this embodiment of high strangeness.
“Ahem, allow me to introduce myself,” the alabaster figure intoned, “I am Mycellus.”
“Good evening, Mycellus,” he decided that meeting them with an equal amount of formality was a solid bet, “I am the Daemon Blade Fyndraxis. To what do I owe the honor?”
“A pleasure, Fyndraxis,” it gave a formal bow, “you see, I am an emissary from the mushroom kingdom.”
“The mushroom kingdom?” Visions of plumbers and lost princesses danced in his head and he stifled an inward chuckle.
“Yes, in the biological sense of the word. Not the hegemonic. I speak for the mushrooms as a whole. As a concept. As a species,” it let that sink in for an appropriate amount of time before going on, “it seems that we share some common concerns. I represent a very old firm, with interests in a diverse portfolio of markets. I come to you this evening to speak about some fluctuations in a market that has caused us some… shall I say… disquietude.”
“Are you talking about the Wendigo?” Fyndraxis asked.
“If you are referring to the nasty little buggers who have been wreaking havoc across the land for the last couple of years, then yes,” Mycellus continued, “our firm is a very old one with an unmatched reputation of success. When a new business opportunity presents itself, we pride ourselves on our ability to realize it to its full potential. Take land for instance. Everybody thought it was a fad, a blip in the market, but we saw it for what it was and took full advantage. We innovated and brought novel things to market, like dirt. Do you ever stop and think about where you would be without dirt? ”
“I guess I’ve never really thought about it,” this was a half truth to avoid a broader conversation, Fyndraxis had thought about dirt a number of times.
“Well, still breathing seawater I suppose,” Mycellus continued with their pitch, “through countless eons we have made a steady and reasonable profit. Through unsteady market trends like mass extinctions we have not only endured, but thrived. We are everywhere, more than happy to take out the trash, or aid trees in their endless pursuit of social media dominance.”
“Social media?” Asked Fyndraxis, truly puzzled.
“Yes, you see we created a world wide network ages ago and the trees just went absolutely bonkers for it,” they mused and stroked their bone white chin, “not only do they use it to trade resources, they spend all their time posting their equivalent of cat memes and getting into flame wars with grass. That’s why you don’t see them running about like you chordates. Bunch of layabouts if you ask me, but we make an absolute killing on them. To each their own I guess. Which brings me to you.”
“Me?” He would have pointed at himself and checked over both of his shoulders if he were able to do so, but he wasn’t, so he settled for sounding confused.
“Indeed,” they answered, “very recently, we noticed an emerging market opportunity in the form of plastics. Humans were churning out metric tons of the stuff on a daily basis. They were basically manufacturing it, just to bury it almost immediately. It was a drop in the bucket compared to the sucrose trade, but we like to keep our portfolio diverse, so we began research and development almost immediately. We were making some steady progress, when some bloody upstart went and beat us to market.”
“The Wendigo are eating all of the plastic that you were planning on eating?” Fyndraxis was trying to settle on the crux of the matter.
“Precisely,” Mycellus tapped on their nose to show Fyndraxis that he had inferred correctly, “You see, the little buggers move at a shockingly rapid pace, and historically we, as a firm, tend to do things in a more stately manner. Try as we may, there just hasn’t been anything we could do about it, they out maneuver us at every turn. They seem to be driven by pure greed, and aren’t seeing the bigger picture. Short term gains often preclude long term survival,” a chair grew from the ground and he had a seat, like they were having a nice man to man chat, “you see, we make a tidy profit in the death industry. Everything that crawls upon the earth, flies through the air, or eats sunshine for a living, they all die and we like it that way. We can’t exactly continue our current business model if everything is dead. At this point in the business week, a pivot would seem…disingenuous to our mission statement. We are the stewards of life on this planet, and the thought of going back to eating rocks at this point is so distasteful. We’d all be lichen for god’s sake, splitting our profits right down the middle.”
“But, I thought they were just eating plastic,” Fyndraxis added, in clarification.
“For now, yes,” they got up from their chair and began to pace, dragging thousands of mycelia behind themself, “but these things tend to change once a young upstart gets a taste of the market. We’ve seen this sort of thing before, just not quite on this scale.”
Fyndraxis was standing face to face with the earthly avatar of death. They were the taxman that inevitably came for us all. They were a fundamental concept of the universe, and they needed a favor.
“We propose a partnership,” Mycellus clasped their hands, “and perhaps a bit of a merger of sorts. What we want is rather straightforward, how we get it may be a bit of a sticking point for you. We of course want you to make the Wendigo nothing more than an unpleasant chapter in both of our histories. They are out of our reach. We occupy fundamentally different technological domains, and the lads in research and development, as talented as they are, just don’t have enough time to work up something sufficient to solve the problem. You on the other hand, are a ready made off the shelf solution. You can affect them, as you demonstrated so wonderfully last night.”
“You were there for that?” Fyndraxis thought back to his time in the forest and the boy who had found him in the earth.
“We are there for everything I’m afraid. There isn’t much that happens on this planet that goes unnoticed by us,” Mycellus observed, ominously.
The trees around them began making popping and creaking noises and leaves began cascading to the ground and turning to dust. Grass began to wither and puff away into nothingness in the light wind that was playing over the beaver dam.
“What’s with the trees?” Fyndraxis asked, as calmly as he could manage.
“The cost of doing business, I’m afraid. For me to maintain this form here like this is quite expensive and I’m afraid there’s just no getting around it,” they waved a hand over their chair, and it dissolved into dust as well, “the forest itself will survive, but I’m afraid the surrounding area will be rendered lifeless for some time. Normally, our expenditures are quite modest. This is not one of those cases.”
Fyndraxis looked over to Bird, who was still asleep. She was covered in a light layer of dust.
“If you hurt the girl, I will kill you. I will burn this planet to the core and end your firm’s long and storied history,” it was an empty threat, but Fyndraxis needed to make some space on the road here. He was in so far over his head that bluffing and bluster were his only real option.
“I wouldn’t dream of hurting the girl,” they said as they looked over their shoulder at her. He seemed sincere, so the planet burning would have to wait for another day.
“You have the power to stop them I think. A bit of fiddling with the radio you are so fond of and you’ll have them licked,” they suggested, like it would have been the easiest thing in the world.
“Their radio traffic is encrypted to an almost comedic level. There is no way I could crack it given a billion years. I don’t have the resources,” he had tried to break their encryption scheme using some tools that he had found on github, on the off chance that he might get lucky, but he had come up against the same hurdles that Terra had faced, and deemed it a lost cause. He decided that Mycellus certainly didn’t need to know about Terra and his recent discoveries about the Wendigo. He was starting to play this one close to the chest.
“If it’s resources you want, then you are talking to the right chap,” Mycellus informed him cheerily, “I am resources. You work on the same technology as the Wendigo, but I can’t bloody well sit down with them and have a civilized conversation like we are having. Believe me we’ve tried. What we need is a compatibility layer, a sort of go between. Like your young companion for instance. She’s perfect and you already have a wonderful working relationship.”
“That’s going to have to be a hard no,” he said resolutely, “I’m looking at what is happening to the forest right now and I don’t think that she will come out on top of this one.”
“She’s already having a bit of trouble with the radiation and all,” they adopted an understanding tone, “but the good fellows down in R&D have made some wonderful innovations in the radiation space and might have just the thing for her.”
“Bullshit,” Fyndraxis said, smelling a Trojan horse.
“I fear she has little time left Fyndraxis, those pills got her out of the frying pan, but there remains the matter of the fire to contend with. A merger would be beneficial to all parties involved,” they must have thought Fyndraxis stupid.
Having a rough idea of what this walking god of death meant by a merger, Fyndraxis couldn’t help but think of the early 2000’s and all the movies, video games, books, and comic books that featured the cordyceps fungus. Having read the girl with all the gifts and played the last of us, the concept was pretty straight forward. There was an accident down at the mushroom factory and now mushrooms grow inside humans and make them into flesh eating zombies. Fyndraxis would not let that happen to Bird. Mycellus held all the cards here though. That’s just what mushrooms did, they infected things and lived off of them.
“You’d make her into a zombie to save your ass,” Fyndraxis said, accusingly.
“Hardly,” they studied their black fingernails, “Are you referring to that unfortunate business in the early two thousands? Terrible time to be a mushroom. Everywhere you looked the media was absolutely rife with anti mushroom propaganda. I don’t think our brand ever had time to recover before things went pear shaped for humans. We even pumped out a couple of cancer treatments down at our Amazon campus, just out of the kindness of our hearts. The jungle, not the website,” they said in a quick informative aside, “the lads down in R&D had some pretty smashing stuff going on with arthropod neurology, but we just never heard the end of it. We didn’t mothball the project, but we did have to continue our research in more surreptitious ways.”
“Forgive me if I don’t believe you, you seem to have a lot on the line here,” Fyndraxis said, like a prosecutor strolling around the courtroom, “I’ll help you in any way that I can, but the girl is a deal breaker.”
“I’m merely trying to foster a situation in which all parties, excepting the Wendigo of course, are benefitted,” Mycellus added diplomatically, “how about something in good faith. That anti-radiation treatment that you gave her was based on technology that my firm came up with.”
They held out their hand and a small mushroom grew in their palm. It quickly blossomed and shriveled leaving a small pill. They took that pill and left it in the metal bowl that Bird had eaten her porridge out of. They walked back to Fyndraxis and knelt down before him with their elbows on their knees, trying and succeeding in making eye contact with a sword.
“Listen, Fyndraxis. You care for the girl and that is obvious,” Mycellus had returned to their man to man avuncular tone, “I would never hurt her for that precise reason. You would become uncooperative and apparently burn the planet to its core, and none of us want that. Beyond that, she bears certain ancestral traits that I have an affinity toward. Have her take that pill in the morning. I give you my word as a gentleman that it is merely a radiation treatment. I’ve kept her asleep this whole time because I wanted to speak only with you. I will be back though and offer my services to the girl. We will all come to an agreement and the world can keep on spinning. It may not seem like it, but you hold all the power here. Unfortunately, my time here has grown short. It was a pleasure to meet you, and I look forward to our next meeting. Cheerio”
Mycellus shriveled into a desiccated hollow black shell of what they had been. They crumbled to dust and slowly blew away. No doubt to be gobbled up and recycled by their world wide network of resource hungry mycelium.
“Fuck me,” Fyndraxis sighed.