It is often said that one’s life flashes before their eyes when faced with the sudden and imminent likelihood of death. Considering the circumstances required to induce this effect, there is little actual evidence that it is definitively true. Those lucky few who have reported the phenomena are a very small fraction of the overall potential sample size. The rest of them died before they could fill out the survey.
For those whose death is not so quick, it has been hypothesised that the recollections of their lives do not flash so much as crawl, and that dreams would be a convenient canvas for these memories to play themselves out.
The part of Mycal that would be considered the real him, the heartcoil of thick mycelium bands where his thoughts and sense of self resided, had been severed neatly in two. This had a number of undesirable effects. He’d been forced to withdraw from his fruiting body, cutting off most of his senses and leaving his shell to shrivel and rot. Deaf, blind, and mute, all he could do in this state was sense temperatures and the presence, or absence, of water. This was usually not a problem. He could grow a new body so long as someone planted him in a dark, damp hole and left him alone for a day or two, but it had been several hours now, and he was getting very cold and rapidly drying out. He was, in effect, dying.
More concerning was the splitting of his consciousness into two separate entities. Again, not a huge problem under normal circumstances, and a common solution to excessive workloads. Their initial meeting had been genial. They were able to communicate via impulses sent through their hyphae, assuring each other that this was just an unfortunate accident and Aggie would of course fix them up in no time.
As the hours dragged on, they found themselves having to compete for what little moisture was left in the fruit. Worse, the other half of him wouldn’t shut up about how they never should have left the colony. He started blaming Monkey and Goblin for what had happened, and just wouldn’t stop complaining about any little thing that crossed his divided mind. He was a real whinger, that one. Definitely the worst parts of me, he thought.
Eventually they reached a critical point where full consciousness was too taxing on their dwindling resources, and a deep sleep-trance took over. That’s when the dreams started.
He was a pinhead again, young and small and only recently mobile. He was full of questions that none of the bigheads ever answered unless it was about work. Work work work. That’s all they did, until there was no more work to do, and then they slept while they waited for more work.
Young Mycal wandered through the border caverns while the others slept. He’d brought another pinhead with him, a funny little cap smaller even than he. The bigheads said there was something wrong with it, that it couldn’t talk and shouldn’t have four legstalks, but Mycal thought it was cute and let it follow him around. He’d named it Shrog.
They follow a long tunnel, searching for the source of a funny smell that Shrog had noticed long before Mycal became aware of it. Past the boundary markers, over Blackwater Bridge and all the way to the edge of the Forbidden Hole they trekked, hiding when they had to from the ferocious, featherless Passage Pigeons that stalked the outskirts. It was a real adventure, the first in their small lives.
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The Hole was immense, a real wound in the world that dominated the centre of the cavern. Breathing was difficult here, the smell so intense that Shrog refused to go any further. It was a familiar scent though, even though there was something off about it. Mycal held his breath and crept forward, determined to see what was within.
Laid out on his belly, he pulled himself forward inch by inch. His eyes began to water, stung by some awful miasma rising from the pit. Finally he reached the edge and peeked over. He looked down into the blackness and saw…
* * *
Saturnii carefully packed another handful of soil into the Shrooman’s wounds, pushing it as deep as she could without further damaging the withered flesh. The body was already hard and stiff, not a great sign, but she knew they were resilient creatures. The outer body was little more than a doll puppeted by the weblike individual within.
Hunter hobbled about with an occasional groan, using a plank of wood to spread out a layer of warm ash over which they planned to lay the shrivelled body. Aggie’s potion had healed the broken bones and contusions he’d received from the falling wagon, but the magic obviously hadn’t accepted the witch’s attempt to shift blame for his other injuries. The spear wounds still oozed blood through their makeshift bandages, and his back sported a huge horse-hoof-shaped bruise.
“That’s enough. We want to warm him, not cook him.” She looped a strip of Hunter’s new, already destroyed pants around the Shrooman’s body, adjusting the fabric to hold in the dirt before tying it off. “Ag, can you bring me a watergourd?”
The witch was standing a few yards away, staring into the night at the dying embers of the scattered pyres. She’d been mostly quiet since their argument, barely saying a word as she’d tended to Hunter.
“Aggie! Water! Now, please!” The woman snapped out of her reverie with a start, looked at Saturnii and what was left of Mycal.
“Ah, yes…” She hurried over to the small pile of supplies Monkey had salvaged, found a watergourd and brought it back. “Here…sorry.”
“Pour it here, over the bandage. Not too much, just enough to dampen.” Aggie did as directed. “Good, now you grab its feet. Hunt, you get the other end. No not the headcap, you’ll pull it off. Grab it under the arms.”
“He,” said Aggie.
“Huh?”
“He. Not it. His name is Mycal.”
They moved Mycal’s body onto the bed of ashes, watching him for a moment before going to sit by the campfire where Monkey and Goblin were snoozing.
“That’s about all we can do for the moment. The heartcoil is still alive. You’ll have to keep the dirt and bandage damp, and top up the ashes every half hour. I don’t know how long it will take, but if it…if he isn’t conscious and mobile by morning, you’ll need to get him out of the sun. He needs darkness.”
She stared blankly into the fire. “Seems I’ve got plenty of that.” Aggie’s voice was soft, bitter.
Picking up on the witch’s tone, Saturnii and Hunter exchanged a look. The big man stood up. “There are a lot of graves to dig, I’d better get to work.”
“Ahh…thanks. I’ll have Monkey help…” Aggie reached out to shake the goblin, but Hunter held up a hand to stop her.
“No, it’s fine. Let him sleep.” Hunter walked off into the darkness, leaving the two women sitting side by side.
“What are you doing with a Shrooman anyway? New familiar?”
“Not exactly.”
It was obvious Aggie didn’t want to talk about it, but Saturnii didn’t care. “Well, you nearly killed him. Seriously, you’ve got to do something about that temper. Raul would still be here if…”
“Don’t! Don’t talk about him! This is nothing like…” Aggie stopped. Her usually porcelain features cracked and chipped, the inner turmoil clear to see on her face. “It’s not…shit…” She put her head in her hands. “Funk. It’s exactly like Raul. Everyone I get close to gets hurt. Mycal wasn’t even…he was just a friend! I can’t even have a funking friend!”
Saturnii sat quietly beside Aggie as she wept. All around them, the spirits of her murdered sisters watched on helplessly, their own ghostly tears falling as a silent rain.