I took a step forward and let my feet slide down the side of the wound. “What’s wrong?” I asked as I hit the bottom, taking three more steps to kill my momentum. “Does the stingprey know we’re here?”

“Yes. But that is not why we’re worried.” Mortician quickly said, looking frantically around as if there were enemies everywhere. “What has us worried is that there are carvurch all throughout its rock. There are thousands of them burrowing through this monstrosity, and it cannot purge them itself.”

I took in what Mortician said, but it didn’t make any sense. “So what, you can talk to the stingprey now? And it told you about its carvurch problem?”

Mortician nodded seriously. “It did.”

“Okay, that’s something impressive.” I whistled. “When did you start hearing it? And, uh, how?”

“It started when we took in the oils. At first, nothing happened. Then we somehow felt the carvurch crawling through the rock beneath and around us, and we could tell exactly how many there were. We assume that was because we took in the carvurch oil.” Mortician explained. “As for the stingprey, all we heard were a few words. It did not request our help. It demanded we evict the carvurch before it destroys itself to get rid of the centuries-long annoyance.”

“Centuries long annoyance. This thing has had parasites for centuries?” I shook my head with a shudder. “Fucking hell, I’d want to kill myself too.”

Mortician started to nod in agreement, then froze. Their oil glistened with the slightest golden sheen, and when they spoke next, another powerful voice joined their cacophony. “I… no. We have suffered for long enough under the whims of the creator. You have freed the lost titan and given us hope, along with the souls of all our lost. The other titans will heed the call. End the creator and free us from this timelost prison. But first, uh, please get rid of the carvurch. They itch so badly.”

A shudder, and Mortician’s body went back to normal. Well, mostly normal, except for tiny flecks of gold in their rock. “Well, that was strange.” They said seriously. “We thought that retrieving all the slyk pods would bring back all the memories that survived through the ages, but it would seem that some of them have transferred into the slyk titans. Which we were apparently a part of, at one point, as the stingprey referred to us as the lost titan.”

All I could do was stand in stunned silence and stare. My mouth was dry as I imagined Mortician being as strong as the thing we were standing on, and then the fact that the thing under us was technically a part of Mortician. A very strong, very old part of them.

When I eventually found my voice it came back with questions. “You were one of these things once. But then you died, or got lost somehow, and became one with all the memories your people left behind. And now the stingprey wants us to de-worm it so it doesn’t kill itself, which will kill us in the process.”

“Exactly.” Mortician chipperly confirmed. “Before you ask, we do not have any memories of this place from before you found us. Whatever we were before then is both gone and forgotten.”

“Good. Good?” I said, then shook my head. I really wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. “How are we supposed to get the stingprey’s memories into you?”

Mortician’s gold sparkled before they answered. “We only gained these memories when Mortician awoke. We will gladly become part of the collective once this body is safe to roam these seas for the rest of time. Life has become very boring now that we are actually experiencing it.”

Why the stingprey cared about its body if it was leaving it behind was a mystery to me, but if it meant I wouldn’t have to fight it, I’d take it. “Well, I guess we don’t really have a choice. How are we supposed to get rid of all the ants? You are quite literally the size of a small city.”

Mortician bent down and tapped the rock underneath them. “As you already know, these carvurch are thoughtless and mindless; slaves to the impulses of the creator and immune to all else. We can stall them for a time, whether it be by confusion or outright overwhelming, but they return to their parasitic ways at a single command from the creator. A command that comes from inside.”

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“Inside you?” I asked.

“Correct.” Mortician confirmed. “We can tell that there are three slyk that are not carvurch within the stingprey. Those will be where the signal propagates from, and if they are incapacitated or killed, we will be able to oust the carvurch from our body. …From the stingprey’s body. This is quite confusing for us.”

It was confusing for me too, but I wasn’t taking the brunt of it, so I left it alone. “Well, I guess we don’t really have a choice. Where’s the first signaleech?”

Mortician cocked their head to the side. “The signal slyk are not signaleech; we would be able to sense what they were if they were signaleech, as we consumed their oil. But we can see why you would assume that.”

“Of course the slyk with ‘signal’ in their name aren’t signal slyk. Why the fuck would I assume that?” I muttered with exasperation. “Whatever, it doesn’t change anything. Lead the way to the first mystery slyk, Mortician.”

The glimmer of gold died out in Mortician. “Of course! The closest slyk is half a mile towards the tail, the second closest is three miles towards the head and a quarter mile off to the side, and the final slyk is eight miles away. That one is only an eighth of a mile from the head, which could lead to problems if the fighting is not contained.”

“Might as well go for the one on the tail first.” I said as I lept as high as I could. It took me just about halfway up the gouge, and I jabbed my harpoon into the rock to keep from falling. I pulled myself up onto its shaft and jumped one more time, making it all the way to the top where I looked down at Mortician. “How far are we going to have to cut into the rock?”

Mortician scrabbled up the cliff, their fingers biting into the stone like it was chalk. When they finally reached me, the gold spread through their rock was dim and barely noticeable. “Oh, right! We hadn’t considered that. If the elevation stays the same, we will have to carve through fifty-one feet of rock before we reach this unknown slyk.”

I stared blankly at Mortician, but of course they didn’t react. I sighed and unsummoned my harpoon, then pulled it from my inventory once more. “I really hope you have a good way to do that, because I am not strong enough to shatter that much stone.”

I expected to get ambushed while we ran to where Mortician was sure the mystery slyk was hidden. I expected something to swoop down from above and bite me clean in two, or for something to slam into the stingprey’s underside and make it roll us off its back. What I didn’t expect was countless guillotine-sharp mandible-blades to burst free from the rock, and to be saved by the coating of oil that Mortician had covered me in. It sparked against the gleaming black with ferocity, and before I knew it, Mortician and I were surrounded by carvurch.

Carvurch that were a little more pissed than the two Mortician had killed.

Their mandibles buzzed with electricity that seemed to take a solid form as they ripped themselves out of the stingprey, leaving behind holes three times their size. I was expecting a few dozen of the fuckers, but they made the stingprey look like swiss cheese by the time the more than a hundred slyk had emerged.

“Holy shit.” I whispered, taking a step back as the slyk in front of me lumbered forwards and tried to cut me in two at the waist. “The stingprey wasn’t kidding; this is fucked.”

“Yes, it is… fucked.” Mortician said with a smile in their voice.

“Don’t use that word.” I instinctively chided. I changed my harpoon into a spear and activated wipe-away on the closest carvurch before I sliced it in two. “It’s a bad word.”

“You use it all the time. How bad could it be?” Mortician asked innocently, but I’d heard that smile before. They knew it was a bad word somehow, even if they weren’t human. Had I given them that much context, or were they reading my memories somehow?

Mortician grabbed a slyk that jumped at them by the mandibles, completely ignoring the shearing electricity that coated them, and ripped the slyk apart. One ripped out core later, and we’d killed exactly two slyk. I swung my spear in a delicate arc as I activated all the //ENDLESS ribbons I had on me, feeling the empowerment of two of them instantly and a surge of battery from the defeated slyk. These ones screeched in pain before their oil went dark, and a notification that I had two cores waiting for assignment told me that the battery stealing blessing Keratily created was extremely effective against slyk.

“Just don’t use it, please. It’s bad enough that I can’t stop myself from using it, since I have to go undercover when we get to Rainbow Basin. You can’t be repeating shit I said.”

“Okay. We will not repeat shit.” Mortician said with barely restrained laughter.

I glared at them, but again, they couldn’t see it. “The stingprey is a bad influence on you.”

“You are a bad influence on us.” Mortician countered, and this time, they didn’t hold back their laughter.

I grumbled defeat as I mowed through another pack of weak slyk, Mortician at my side doing exactly the same. We still had quite a long walk ahead of us, and if every step was going to be filled with this sh… stuff, it would take a very long time. I hoped that we could finish helping the stingprey before Jun and Okeria found a way to get me out of my oily prison, but the chittering horde between us and success made me reconsider our chances.