I left E9 quietly, weeping.

Out in the hallway, I walked off.

I could multitask now. I could grieve while making my way over to the self-help group.

I owed it to Mr. Himichi to unravel the mystery behind the fungus that had murdered him—that had murdered everyone.

My idol was dead. My idol. My god.

I kept wondering if I did enough. Had I eased his passing? Had I kept despair at bay, even if only for the littlest bit?

All my life, he’d never known who I was. I was just one fan among the millions. It was me who depended on him, not the other way around. I mean, it was because of Mr. Himichi that I had something to look forward to, even in the darkest of times. But now… I think I might have gotten it all wrong. Mr. Himichi needed us—those who loved him—far more than we ever needed him. He needed our compassion, our devotion, and our forgiveness.

I just hope I’d been able to do enough. I’d helped him make those final drawings, and with them, that final bedtime story. I hoped he didn’t feel alone in the end.

And, as crazy as it was, I found myself praying that I’d have the honor of housing his noble, noble soul.

The walk to the self-help group’s headquarters in the [name] building was the shortest longest journey I’d ever made. I drew many faces—and even more snouts—as I entered through the half-refurbished Ward’s safety-tape-covered double doors.

The self-help group was even livelier than before, no doubt due to the military’s crack-down on closeted transformees hiding among the staff. Though I suppose “lively” wasn’t quite the right word to use. Ghosts phased in and out of existence, turning the ward into the weirdest cocktail party I’d ever seen.

By now, you would have thought I’d seen all there was to see: angels, time travel, turning myself into a half-pangolin whatever.

You’d be wrong.

I made a mental note to never think that I could no longer be surprised.

The surprises lurked at the fringes of the ghostly crowd, often with half or more of their bodies tucked away inside one the Ward’s patient rooms—“They” being the wyrms. Not transformees, no, but fully formed wyrms.

As seen on TV.

My mind played a dreadful guessing game as I took in the view, wondering which wyrms had once been humans that I’d personally known. The wyrms were similar and yet different; alien and individual. Their body plans were identical, but varied greatly when it came to the details—length, color, ornamentation.

I saw one dark brown wyrm tightly coiled around a support column, their body studded at regular intervals by squat flanges resembling shelf fungus or trapezoidal ailerons. A console levitated in front of them, which they used by pecking at it with delicate taps of a single claw-tip.

Another wyrm had decided to hide all but the front five feet of their length inside a patient’s room, leaving their fully transformed head sticking out into the main hall, crowned in cauliflower agglomerations that erupted in two recurved, trumpet-like horns.

A third wyrm—barely ten-foot-long wyrm—hung from the ceiling, upside-down, held aloft by a psychokinetic cocoon of blues and golds. Thinning my wyrmsight brought the wyrm’s scales into view: so black, they were almost blue. An almost grassy mane ran from the back of the ceiling-wyrm’s head to the tip of their tail. The mane’s fibrous “hairs” brushed against the ceiling as the wyrm slithered and swerved.

Particularly mesmerizing were the sight of the wyrms’ heads. In person, I’d only seen bits and pieces of a fully transformed wyrm’s head, never the whole thing—except for the silver-eyed wyrm, and he/she had not made it easy to gander at them.

But now, it was like a trip to the dinosaur zoo. It was terrible and wondrous, truly otherworldly.

The wyrms’ heads were symphonies of pizzicato motions. The many pores on their mouthless snouts twitched and snorted. Sometimes, the contractions were like rain falling on pavement, other times, the motions swept across their snouts’ pores in synchronized ripples as they sang their ethereal song, stilling only when the wyrm had nothing more to say. They had six eyes, lined up in rows of three on either side of their head. The eyelids for those glistening golden orbs were an odd mix of different poses and emotions: wide open, half-shut, horizon-thin, irregularly blinking.

Several transformees came up to me, eager to shake my hands, but I rebuffed them.

“I’m sorry, not now,” I said. “I need to speak with Dr. Horosha.”

One of the transformees pointed me toward him.

I bowed graciously as I stepped away from the crowd. I walked down the main hall, waving my hand as I passed the cauliflower-horned wyrm. The wyrm curved their neck, following me with their head, their pores rippling with contractions. Wisps of green swirled in their breath, in vortices and helices that seemed to make the wyrm’s excited toots come to life.

Rearing up their head and raising their arms, the wyrm pointed at themself, made a heart with their thumb and fore-claws, and then pointed at me.

Apparently, I now had a fan-base.

I bowed respectfully and walked off. I was nearly there when a voice caught me by surprise.

“Gennef? Wha’ are you ‘oing here?”

I almost didn’t recognize it, due to the almost burlesque lisp. I turned toward the sound.

In addition to (metaphorically) gutting Suisei and laying his secrets out in plain view, I’d also been planning on checking up on Brand. It had been the better part of two hours since Suisei had wheeled him over to the self-help group, and I wanted to see how he was doing. Apparently, Brand must have read my mind because, while I’d been looking for Suisei, Dr. Nowston had been looking for me.

As much as it shames me to say it, part of me wished Brand hadn’t. It was like Cassius and Merritt, all over again, just more upbeat. Brand clearly had little interest in stalling his changes. Very, very little interest. It was honestly frightening, and I refrained from asking what (or whom) he’d eaten to get so far in such a short span of time.

Dr. Nowston had cannibalized his slacks into a loincloth. His tail, though slender, was already near four feet long. Splotches of necrosis were encroaching his legs. His toes had gone AWOL, leaving cross-sectioned stumps on his shriveled, blackened feet. The last three fingers of his left hand had merged together into ten inches of burnt-red wyrm finger and two inches of curved, obsidian claw.

But the worst parts were above the belt. I had to remind myself that, despite his appearance, Brand was still Brand. It was like all those years of squicky conversation topics had finally caught up with him.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Brand was turning into a creepy crawly, like the ones he knew and loved. He no longer had any teeth. His mouth was all tongue and gums. A small golden wyrm eye blinked at the center of his right ear, with the rest of his external human ear surrounding it like a rind. I spied fungal antlers poking out from the back of his balding head. They were colored red and white, almost like a candy cane.

Any difficulties I had with seeing my friend like this were washed away when I realized that there was no stronger proof that Brand Nowston was still himself—heart and soul—than the eager zeal radiating from his person. Only Brand would be stoked that he was turning into a wyrm. I mean, this was the person who felt that the micro- and macroscopic and structural changes in human bowel movements caused by various protistan or helminthic infections made for a pleasant, and perfectly ordinary conversation topic for a chopped chicken salad lunch.

“If fomefing wrong?” he said.

But my relief deflated like a sad balloon as I remembered what Mistelann had asked me: Please. Give Brand my kisses. All my kisses.

Angel…

How could I tell Brand that his colleague was dead, and—not only that—but that the mycologist had been secretly in love with him. That Mistelann had been too afraid to say it out loud while he was still alive? If I could have gotten Brand close enough to Mistelann’s corpse, the mycologist’s spirit probably would have been uploaded into him, and then Dr. Skorbinka could tell Brand how he felt face to face. Tragically, there was no chance of that happening now. With his current looks, Brand would either be fired upon or worse if General Marteneiss’ troops caught him snooping around.

“Gennef?” he said.

I shook my head, letting it hang in dejection. “Nurse Kaylin is…” but my voice trailed off.

“Yef?”

I sighed. “It’s just… awful. Everything. It’s Hell. It’s Angels. It’s Stars and Time-travel.” Briefly closing my eyes, I fidgeted with my lucky bow tie before rubbing an aching shoulder.

This costume of mine was not going to hold out much longer. It was already straining against my bulk. Any more changes and the whole thing would split wide open.

Looking Brand in the eyes—ear-eye notwithstanding—I let out an ineffectual shrug. “It’s the end of the world, and I’ve come here for answers.” I looked over his shoulder, down the hall. “I was hoping to talk to—”

“—Answers?” Brand asked, eyes brightening. “Daff perfeck!”

My slouching posture worsened. “Brand, I—”

“—Dake off your helmed, quick.”

“What?” I started to step back.

Waving a hand, Brand shook his head. “I’ll do id. No drouble ad all.”

Bicolored threads of psychokinetic force spindled out from Brand and raked across my neck, slicing through my hazmat suit’s self-repairing green plastic. The threads swarmed around the suit’s headpiece like snakes, levitating it over my head.

Brand stared at the lone wyrm claw on his hand for a moment, but then seemed to think better of it. Then, before I understood what was happening, he leaned forward and kissed me.

On the lips.

I was still staggering back in shock—my arms flailing at my sides—as my lips began to tingle, and not just from the sporey saliva at the edges of Brand’s mouth. Digital snow swept across my vision, and then everything went black.

— — —

For a split second, I was lost in yet another void of perfect darkness, only for that void to quickly give way to a familiar sight. Water splished softly beneath my feet as I beheld my reflection on the floor, as ordinary and human as I’d been the day Merritt had come to ask me to kill her.

We were in my Main Menu. It was as transcendent as ever. The sphere of soul crystals rotated slowly overhead, beneath the world-cubes above it, and the cloud-drift and the dome of unblemished sky.

Yes, we.

“I hope I wasn’t too malapropos back there,” Brand said.

I whipped around to see him standing behind me. Like me, Brand was perfectly human again, right down to his sponge-curl-styled hair, and—thankfully—with a nice pair of slacks, instead of the loincloth he’d made of them back in the Thick World.

I stamped my foot, venting a terribly confusing mix of emotions, absolutely none of which were sensual or pleasant.

“You kissed me!” I said.

My stomp sent ripples across the film of water over the floor. I’d never thought I’d need to give Brand the “personal space” talk twice in one day.

But, I guess there’s a first time for everything.

Brand winked at me. “This is Brand 2.0. I’m done being inhibited. I’m becoming a wyrm, damn-it, and I’m loving it!” he said.

“I had a feeling you would,” I replied.

“Besides,” he said, “would you rather have had me stick my hand in your mouth?”

I shuddered at that.

Brand waggled his eyebrows. “Exactly my point.”

“At the risk of being rude,” I said, “I’m kind of having a slow-motion panic attack right now. The things I’ve learned. I…—I need to have answers, and now, or think I’m going to lose my mind.”

He pointed at me. “Then have I got some good news for you!”

I narrowed my eyes. “Dr. Brand Nowston,” I said, “if this is some kind of teasing or practical joke, I swear, by the Moonlight itself, I will lose it.”

Brand stuck out his arms in a defensive posture. “No no, this is legit. A lot has happened.”

“You’re telling me!” I said. “What’s gotten into you?”

“Time, and a new kind of freedom,” he replied.

“Time…?”

He nodded. “Out there in the Thick World, it’s been, what, a day since you brought me to the self-help group?”

“More like two hours,” I said, “though everything’s been kind of a blur lately.”

Brand’s eyes bulged. “Two hours?” He whistled, shaking his hand, smiling like the dog that caught the bus. “Turning into a wyrm is the best thing that has ever happened to me.”

“I hope you haven’t been sharing this with others,” I said. “I don’t think they’ll see it the way you do.”

Blinking, I furrowed my brow. “Wait a minute, did you just say the Thick World?” Groaning softly, I closed my eyes and pinched the bridge of my nose, taking care to mind my glasses. “You’ve been talking to Greg, haven’t you? I should have expected this,” I muttered.

Brand beamed. His teeth were pearly and perfect. I swear, they had a glint that winked at me.

“Guilty as charged,” he said. “It might have been two hours for you, but, from my reference frame, it’s been days since we last saw each other.”

I couldn’t begin to imagine the wonders that a Brand Nowston uninhibited by hunger, sleep, or bodily needs would unearth.

“Brand,” I said, “and I’m saying this not just as your friend, but as a mental health professional… are you okay?”

Brand’s smile flattened out a little. His expression turned wistful. “Yeah, Genneth.” He took a deep breath. “Yes.” He nodded. “For the first time, I think I really am okay.”

Taking several steps into the void, Brand raised his gaze to stare into an unseen horizon. “I feel… free,” he said, spreading his arms like a bird. “It’s like I’ve been living my whole life inside a single room, and I’ve finally stepped outside, into the world that was always there waiting for me.”

I smiled slightly. I still didn’t feel the least bit okay, and had a strong desire to wring Suisei’s neck, but seeing my friend so at peace with himself definitely helped with my mood.

“I’m glad someone got something good out of this whole mess,” I said.

“So much of my professional life got spent inside labs—not that I didn’t enjoy being in the lab, but…” Gazing at his hand, he curled his fingers, marveling at their movements. “It felt… limiting, I guess?”

Even though I knew Brand was thrilled by his newfound wyrmhood, I’d be lying if I said I was completely at peace with it. The happiness I felt for him came with inward worries about my own fading humanity. Seeing how well—and how quickly—Brand was adapting to the changes, it made me wonder if my fighting to preserve myself and my life had been for nothing.

“Did being human mean so little to you? Are you that keen on letting go of it all?” I asked.

“I could have chosen to appear to you as a grizzled, car-sized shiba inu in golden plate armor, but I didn’t.” Brand gestured at himself. “I chose to look like this.”

“You could have done it for my benefit,” I said.

Brand smirked. “When was the last time I did something that I didn’t really want to do?”

I sighed. “Fair point.” I paused. “But what about your body? What about mine? What about our lives? What about trying to find a way to fix all this? What about Andalon? W—”

“—Genneth: it’s not that I don’t care about the Thick World or that I don’t want to save it. It’s that I know that I can’t save it. We tried, but we failed. The world is ending.” Brand pursed his lips. “I’ve spent the past few months making peace with that.” He looked up at the endless sky. “I’m tired, Genneth. I’m tired of all the pain and suffering. I’m tired of chasing dragons. For once, I want to tackle a problem that I know I can solve.” He looked me in the eye. “Newsflash, Dr. Howle: you’re not the only person in the world who wants to be helpful.”

“So… what are you going to do?” I asked.

Smugly, Brand let his hands slip into his coat-pockets. “I’ll do what I want.”

“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law?” I said. “Really?”

I pursed my lips and lowered my head.

Brand smiled gently. “People come in all kinds. What works for one person might not work for another—and that’s a feature, not a bug. That’s why it’s so beautiful when two people find something they both value. It gives them a chance to understand each other. And if we can understand each other, maybe we won’t have to be alone.”

“Brand… that was… beautiful,” I said, softly.

He grinned. “Thanks, I spent a long time practicing it.”

“So, you said you had good news for me,” I said. “I could really use that right now.”