“I can’t believe he did that without a fight!” Naia said sourly, looking out the door to the street where Aran had left. “If it had been me suggesting he go after that guy, he’d be standing around arguing until the guy had gone!”

“You two maybe have some things you should talk about…” Shale suggested with a small shrug.

Ailmon cleared his throat to get their attention. “So, if I understood our new possible suspect correctly, there is only him, two empty flats, and the one down here, occupied by a woman possibly named Nebbeth. I vote we just quickly ascertain whether that is true.” He nodded towards the stairs.

“I’ll go knock,” Shale said and took the stairs three at a time. A few moments later, Ailmon and Naia heard knocking at one door, then two others after a pause, and Shale came down from upstairs.

“Nothing to report,” she said. “I looked in through the keyholes and all places appear empty. One didn’t even have furniture in it.”

“So, did you two look in through the window to this place?” Naia nodded towards Nebbeth’s door on the ground floor.

Ailmon nodded. “They were blocked by… crates or furniture or some such. We couldn’t look in, but if someone was going to break out and flee that way, it would require a decent amount of rummaging.”

Naia grinned. “Perfect. But now we don’t have a locksmith with us. Do you want to break the door in, or do I have to be unbearably brilliant?” She wiggled her fingers in the air, grinning broadly.

Ailmon went to the door, grabbed the handle, and turned it. The door swung open a crack. “I’m very sorry,” he said to Naia. “I’m certain you…” he faltered and took a step back as the others came closer.

“Arse on a stick!” Shale exclaimed and covered her nose in defence against the sickly, rank, musty smell that sneaked out of the room. “Something is definitely dead in there!”

“Oh, this isn’t good…” Naia commented, unaffected by the smell. She quickly looked towards the doorway to the street before she went over there and closed it decisively, leaving them in near darkness.

“Ehm… Perhaps we should keep some light since the windows inside have been–“ Ailmon began but stopped when Naia’s soft voice was heard to whisper, and the darkness was suddenly lit up by a strong golden glow coming from her entire hand.

“Neat, isn’t it!” she said, grinning eerily in the glow.

“Alright, you’re our torch, good…” Shale said, muffled. “Just don’t let anyone see you do that. You’ll probably be attacked quicker than you can shout ‘dwarf’.”

“Ehm, yes? That’s sort of why I closed the door, genius!” Naia said and walked to the entrance to the stinky flat, pushing the door fully open. “Besides, I have a caster’s permit, so I’m actually allowed!”

“Really?” Shale asked. “How come?”

“I work with the courts.” Naia shrugged. “When I’m not being bossed unfairly around by you buggers… How did you think me and Ailmon became friends if not through work?” She walked inside a few steps, holding her glowing hand aloft. “Oh, dear…” she commented, taking a few steps inside. Something crunched under her feet.

“What is that?” Ailmon asked, following her inside, with Shale looking over his shoulder.

The entrance into the flat, which should have been an open room, was a narrow corridor built largely out of what appeared to be trash. There were crates that appeared to be full of utterly random objects of no value, ancient, folded cloth bags, different pieces of clothing in stacks, small pieces of furniture and boxes overflowing with strange, worthless objects that seemed to crowd the group. The smell was excessive, pungent and stale, and it violently assaulted their noses.

Naia lowered her hand to let the magical light sweep the floor. “Ech! Wish I hadn’t done that!” she exclaimed. The floor was absolutely littered with small, dead, almost mummified rodents, their fur flat and lustreless. When Naia moved the light, it seemed almost like a vague, effervescent glow somehow hovered over them, shining in a pale greenish tint.

“Lovely,” Naia said. “The deaders are glowing. That’s so one of the qualities I look for in a dead gerbil.”

“How did they die?” Ailmon turned one of the numerous small corpses over with the tip of his shoe. There didn’t appear to be any wounds on the small creature.

“Don’t know, but we should be really careful in here. I’m getting all sorts of wobbles off of this,” Naia said, almost in a subdued tone.

Shale hunched over a bit and cumbersomely squeezed past the others down the nasty corridor of trash. “I’ll go first,” she said into her elbow, drawing the knife strapped to the small of her back. “Naia, stay close and light the way?”

“I’ll do you one better,” Naia said, “just to show off, you understand! Not to be actually helpful!” She gestured with her shining hand and Shale gave her a puzzled look. “Come on, give me the knife, I’ll shine it up.”

“I…” Shale hesitated a little. “You’ll cast magic on it? I’m rather fond of it.”

“It won’t break it!” Naia snapped, crossing her arms, which left them in near darkness until she sighed and unfolded her arms again, so her glowing hand was visible. “It’ll just shine, that’s all.”

“Will it stop again?” Shale asked.

“Of course it will! If I could cast permanent enchantments at a whim, I’d be a lot richer than I am!”

Shale hesitantly handed her the knife, handle first.

“No! Hold it normally, or I’ll enchant the hilt and that would be stupid,” she said and waited for Shale to do as she was told. When that happened, Naia muttered a few strange words, drew a symbol of some sort in the air, and touched the blade. It promptly glowed in the same golden hue as Naia’s hand. Shale held the knife with a certain trepidation.

“Well, shoo, you’re not going to keel over. Light the way and stab anything that moves! Orc off!” Naia waved Shale on, and with a slightly worried nod, Shale turned to edge down the trash-warren corridor.

In the beginning, they tried to scoot their feet along the floorboards so as not to step on the rodent corpses, but after a few turns of the maze into the flat, they gave up and just accepted the nasty crunching under their soles. The dead gerbils were so dry, they almost exploded in a cloud of dust whenever stepped on, rather like some kind of poisonous mushroom.

The first corridor branched off in two narrow directions and, picking one at random, they walked down another aisle of strange, hoarded belongings, stacked almost floor to ceiling and too high to look over to get their bearings. They came to a sort of room created from trash where a small table stood, sagging under the weight of more crates and random objects.

The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

“I believe the window would be right around here,” Ailmon said, nodding towards the wall, stacked high with mouldy things.

“Who did this?” Shale wondered, moving on with her knife held in front of her as a torch. “It doesn’t make sense. Wallsen is a shithole, but this is extreme.”

“We must assume it was the resident, Nebbeth. Perhaps she has a point with all this. I suppose we will find out if we find her alive,” Ailmon commented.

Naia turned and stared at him with an incredulous expression. “You picked a really weird time to become an optimist! This place is crawling with something nasty! There’s no way she’s still alive! I can basically feel the shick-vibe trying to hump my brain!”

“I… see. Well, proceed with caution, in that case,” Ailmon just responded calmly.

“Rosk!” they heard Shale exclaim as she carefully edged her way around a corner, mindful of not causing a cave-in of precariously stacked items. Naia and Ailmon hurried the few steps up to her. At what would be the end of a small living room if it hadn’t been filled with strange, hoarded items, a terrible tableau came into view and the smell of death was nearly overwhelming.

The end wall was swallowed by a creeping moss-like fungus, gleaming a violent green and purple hue in the golden light from Shale’s knife blade. It grew in thick, splotchy splendour over what seemed to either be a large crate or a small table. Draped across the piece of furniture was a figure that had once been alive. It was hard to tell gender and age, for the figure was swallowed completely by the gleaming mossy fungus, the features of it simultaneously bloated horrifically by the moss and strangely sagging in all the wrong places.

The dead person must have been quite large, judging from the folds of skin around the corpse. It appeared as if all liquid and fatty tissue had been sucked from the body.

A whole host of dead gerbils were lying on top of each other everywhere, barely more than teeth jutting from clumps of slightly luminescent mould.

They all stared at the scene for a while, unmoving.

“…I think this might be Nebbeth,” Shale finally said tonelessly.

“And this might be the origin of the strange stones,” Ailmon said quietly. “Look.” He pointed, and Shale turned her knife to light where he pointed at the area where the dead person’s hand seemingly slumped through the top of the unknown piece of furniture.

“Let me just… Light, please.” Ailmon looked around to find something, and Naia just looked at him, arm extended. “I need to find something I can use as a glove,” he said, tentatively poking some fabric bags in the trash-warren.

“What! You’re not going to touch it!”

“We have already breathed it in, haven’t we?” Ailmon asked calmly as he carefully tried to remove the fabric. “Quite thoroughly, in fact, to a point where we might be heading to where Sargon was. Remember the strange mist that came from Sargon’s corpse? Perhaps this plant is what has infected people.”

“But it’s clearly alive, it might attack! We should burn the shick out of it and be done with it!” Naia exclaimed.

“If we set fire to anything, most likely the entire neighbourhood will ignite. There is no way we would be able to…” Shale stopped and looked at Ailmon.

He stood still, turned to face the mossy pile, staring blankly, his breath heaving in his rigidly held body as though he was severely winded but unable to move.

“We… should probably get out of here. Right now!” Naia said, eyes flickering from the pile of corpse-moss to Ailmon and waving her glowing hand in his face. Nothing happened; he was still frozen in placed and didn’t react.

“Follow!” Shale demanded decisively to Naia and sheathed her glowing knife. Then she bent down, effortlessly hauled Ailmon onto her broad shoulder, and quickly and surely made her way through the trash warren, Naia following closely at her heels. They entered the hallway with the closed door to the outside and Naia quickly said a word of magic, dispelling the glow of her hand, as Shale tore the door open and marched outside in the sunlight.

Naia slammed the door behind them and leaned her back against it, holding it closed and looking at Shale with big eyes. “What the Hells just happened? Is he alright?” she asked. “Did you really run? From what?”

Shale put Ailmon down and held him on his feet. He was pale and his breathing was fast and superficial. His bald head was sweaty and there were tears streaming down his face.

Ailmon closed his eyes and leaned against Shale, letting her support him as he seemed to calm down a bit.

“Hey.” Naia went over to him, waving a hand in front of his face, but Shale batted it away.

“Let’s give him a moment,” Shale said. “He’s alive.”

“Oh, dear…” Ailmon said weakly, wiping his face with his sleeve, still clinging to Shale’s shoulder with one hand and swaying a bit on his feet. Slowly, he seemed to gain some control of himself and he let go of the half-orc, finding his footing on his own. Awkwardly, he straightened his tunic before looking up. “I do apologise…” he said slowly and averted his gaze. “How very embarrassing.”

“Are you alright?” Shale asked.

“Yes. Well, I suppose…” He nodded slowly, looking at his shoes as if unsure about where to place his gaze. He cleared his throat. “That was quite a surprise.”

“What! What was!” Naia exclaimed urgently.

“The…” He shook his head.

“What!” Naia repeated.

“Well, the… The person, for want of a more precise term… Saibee…” He gestured at the house they had just come from. “Saibee, that’s its name, I believe. The only thing it was certain of.”

“Did you just seriously brain-speak with a meat-eating killer fungus?” Naia asked, eyebrow raised.

Ailmon looked blankly at her for a moment, then he frowned. “I suppose I did, yes.”

“The meat-eating fungus which I have been warning everyone about since we found the first shick and got barfed on?”

“Yes,” Ailmon said and held out his hands in a calming gesture. “I believe the matter is more complex than we thought, so please, don’t do anything rash.”

“Alright…” Shale said. “But you do know you sound a little like Naia now, right? All of this is awfully vague.”

He nodded, looking at her with slightly furrowed brows. “I can see that, I suppose. But allow me to explain. Please. I really don’t think it wants to hurt anyone.” He cast a worried glance around them, down the street. They appeared to be alone, but there was obviously the chance someone was keeping an eye on their antics from one of the other flats along the street. “Can we just go back inside, and I will explain what happened?”

Naia narrowed her eyes. “Why are you suddenly keen on going back? How about we go back to the Shindig, just for funsies? What do you say to that?” She stared challenging at him.

“Eh, well, I’m not certain that’s our best course of action,” Ailmon said carefully.

Naia still stared at him with narrowed eyes and crossed arms.

“We could just stay here and make sure nobody else goes in there?” Shale suggested.

“If Ailmon has gone funny in the head, Aran should be there to help make the decision. I vote we go back and meet him,” Naia stated, not moving from her position at the door.

Shale looked at Ailmon. “Will that work? You were pretty shaken. Are you sure you are alright?”

Ailmon sighed. “Please, let’s talk this over rationally. I did have… a conversation, of sorts. Or rather, I was shouted at, I think. And I think I will definitely have to go back. This thing, whatever it is… It’s scared, alone and dying. It…”

“It what? Can it still reach you out here?” Naia asked. “I bet it can! You can be ultra-shicked right now and we won’t stand a chance!”

Shale nodded slowly. “We don’t really know what this is. You will have to explain what happened,” she said to Ailmon.

“It… sort of reached out for me. You remember,” he said, gesturing at Shale, “we both caught glimpses of it through the spores or whatever it was that were stuck in the corpse. I think it communicates in emotions, of sorts. It was frightened, but when I responded, I felt–“ He stopped himself abruptly and then gestured helplessly. “I felt its hope and gratitude at not being alone.” He closed his eyes, a look of calm concentration on his face for a moment before he looked at Naia. “And yes, I can still feel it.”

“Seriously! And you’re not worried about this!” she almost exploded. “We should get as far away from here as we possibly can! It murdered several people!”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Ailmon said. “They were killed with blades. It wasn’t the plant’s doing. But it was involved somehow. And now we have the chance to ask it.”

“Do you think it’s possible to ask it questions?” Shale asked.

Ailmon nodded slowly, brow furrowed. “We should at least try.”

“And by ‘we’ you mean you, and when it goes horribly wrong, we-” Naia gestured angrily between herself and Shale. “-are the ones who have to clean up the mess.”

Ailmon gave her a little smile. “Well, that is true. But if you recall, you were right. You did put your money on a plant monster after we talked to Master Dibble. Aren’t you at least curious to meet a completely foreign being?”

“Don’t you go thinking you can charm your way out of this by petting my self-esteem!” Naia exclaimed.

Shale took a deep breath. “I say we give it a try. Ailmon is willing to try to talk to it, and we don’t have other suspects at the moment. It’s a good place to start.”

Naia gestured, clearly exasperated. “I’m the voice of reason, here. Do you see how critical that is?”

Shale grinned, showing her sharp teeth. “We will have a great story to tell,” she said.

“If we live…” Naia interjected crossly.

“But Ailmon,” Shale continued smoothly, “you will let us know if you start to feel different, won’t you?”

He just nodded in confirmation and turned to go inside on shaky legs.