I withdrew to the nearest stairwell, where I slumped down onto the first few steps, sat down, leaned against the wall, hunched over, pulled off my visor and mask and hairnet and bawled like the baby that Ileene would probably never get to know—much like me, and my own mother.

Cassius and Jonan had rolled the poor young woman into the operating theater together. Even as I wept, they were hard at work. But all I felt was emptiness. Emptiness and dread. I was a leaf in the wind, and I was crumbling.

Eventually, I calmed down, but not because I felt better. If anything, I simply ran out of fuel. I was numb. Shocked.

I wanted to find the light at the end of the tunnel. I wanted to see a way out to the other side. I’d been trying and trying and trying, only to come up with nothing.

Nothing but darkness.

Taking three deep breaths, I looked up the octagonal stairway. The antique wrought-iron stairs and railings cast shadows beneath the light fixtures on the wall. And, overhead, through the glass, darkly, Night reigned.

I knew what I had to do.

I’d gotten three packages of shortbread cookies, frosted—Seasweep-style. They came two per package. I pulled one out of my PPE gown pocket, ready to stuff it down my throat, packaging and all.

Andalon appeared in front of me, floating in front of me like a woebegone fairy.

“Please, Mr. Genneth,” she pleaded, “don’t do this.”

I chuckled grimly.

No, it wasn’t even a chuckle, it was a covered-up sob. “I thought you liked wyrms, Andalon? Why the change of heart? Why now?”

“I don’t remember, Mr. Genneth,” she said, “I don’t remember, and that makes me scared. I know wyrmehs are great, but…” she wept, “so are you. And, I… I don’t know. I don’t know if you will be Mr. Genneth anymore when you become wyrmeh, I… I don’t. I don’t want you to be sad. Mr. Genneth. I,” she averted her gaze, “I like you how you are. You know so many good stories, and you tell Andalon lots of stuff.” She shook her head, “No one’s ever done that before.”

“I can’t just do nothing, Andalon. I’ve lost people I’ve cared about because either did the wrong thing, or didn’t do the right thing. And doing nothing is no thing at all. If I’m going to lose my humanity, I’d rather go out on my own terms than have it stolen away from me.”

I tossed the cookie-package into my mouth before Andalon had the chance to get another word in edgewise. The plastic crackled and popped in my mouth like rice crispies, giving way to the frosted shortbread underneath. The cookies dissolved even as I bit into them, the usual dry texture of shortbread changing almost instantly into something like water chestnuts: porous and crunchy. Delicious goop coated my gullet as I swallowed, and like in the cafeteria, I could feel it flowing into my flesh as it passed down my esophagus. Only the tiniest bits plopped into my stomach, and they were immediately absorbed.

I was eager to eat the next two packages, but I stopped myself from doing so. I only had one unit of humanity to sacrifice, and it behooved me to get the most I could out of that sacrifice. I was going to experiment. My theory was that Andalon’s memories, the blue flames, and food were all connected.

This was my chance to test that hypothesis. I felt things shifting around as my body decomposed the absorbed cookies and distributed their constituents all around. There were tingling sensations in my tail and neck. My tail pressed the slightest bit more tightly against the fabric of the pants-leg I’d stuffed it down.

The flames arrived about a minute after that.

Compared to the swarm that had poured into me in the cafeteria restroom, there were two major differences. First: the flames were far less numerous than before. What had been flocks and swarms in my two restroom dramas was, here in the stairwell, barely more than a trickle. Second: the trickle passed through me, beelining toward Andalon. Turbid, ethereal light flickered in the spirit-girl’s eyes and hair as the pale blue flames encircled her. The ghostly fire extended into hair-thin arcs that wound around Andalon tighter and tighter, first forming sheets of a piecemeal cocoon, then grazing her body, and then merging into her being.

“Are you remembering anything?” I asked.

“I… I…”

I downed cookie package number two. Something shifted in my torso. The feeling of my shirt against my chest changed. Had my chest gotten deeper?

Then the tingling sensation concentrated in my neck, and then—

—I groaned.

My neck lengthened, and, Moon’s mists, I felt it. My point of view shifted slightly as my neck nearly doubled in length. I raised my hands to touch it, only for my fingers to graze against my nose and upper lip as I changed.

I wasn’t used to my head’s new location. My neck was now long enough that I felt a smidge of motion blur from the way my head bobbed atop my neck as I looked and turned around. Running my fingers along the back of my neck let me feel the patches of smooth wyrm flesh that now covered my skin like stretch marks.

I was pretty sure my tail had gotten thicker, too.

And, lo and behold—right on cue—about thirty seconds after swallowing, another small cluster of blue flames appeared overhead and descended toward me. It passed through my body before merging with Andalon, who glowed briefly as it touched her. The spectral blue motes appear in an eerie echo of the rhythm with which I’d chewed.

I concluded the changes had come to a stop when I couldn’t feel any tingling or tickling sensations anymore. I’d honestly been expecting the changes to be more dramatic, but, in hindsight, six shortbread cookies and the plastic packaging they came in wasn’t the most substantial of meals. Considering what I’d seen Kurt eating, I’d probably have to down a lot more food to before I started looking noticeably… wyrmy.

So… time for seconds. And this time, I’d be sure to get more.

Perhaps another visit to the cafeteria?

I got up from my seat on the staircase.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“Stop! Mr. Genneth! You can stop! I remember! Andalon remembers! Please, st—”

“—Andalon,” I said, “if it’s working, why should I stop?”

“I remembered things, but… I don’t think you’re gonna like all of them.”

There were many ways to distress someone, but, in my opinion, none were as maddening or infuriating as telling someone you had bad news, and that you weren’t going to tell them because you knew it would make them upset. It was a lot like describing, in detail, that there were barbs along the length of the foot-long needle that was about to get stabbed in your eye. It just made things worse.

“So… you want Andalon to tell you?” she asked.

I nodded. “Tell me everything.”

“The darkness… it fights back,” she said. “I don’t know if it knows Andalon, but… I think it knows.”

“How does it fight back?”

“It twists everything. It makes everything into monsters.” Distraught, she lowered her gaze. “Even wyrmehs…”

That sent a shiver down my tail.

“How does it twist wyrms?”

She shook her head, “I’m not sure, but—”

“—Then I’ll just eat more, and—”

“—No!” she shouted, in tears.

“Andalon…?” I asked, in a whisper.

She sobbed. “The wyrmehs aren’t totesally like the ones in Cat. They can’t talk. And… they make people sick.”

I froze. “…what?”

“They…” she lowered her gaze even more, crashing in dejection. “They spread the fungus.”

“How?” I demanded. “How!?”

She shook her head and cried. “I don’t remember—but, you can’t. Please, Mr. Genneth, don’t make it go any faster than it has to go. If you start makin’ people sick, you’ll be sad, and they’ll be said, and Andalon doesn’t want anyone to be sad. Andalon wants to help. I wanna help.”

I swallowed hard.

Why does everything have to be so complicated?

I held my head in my hands, running my fingers through my hair.

“I’m damned if I do, and I’m damned if I don’t.”

Hello powerlessness, my old nemesis.

“I bet the corruption of Frank’s spirit is also the Hell-fungus’ doing. It’s one of the ways it’s fighting back against you, Andalon.”

Rising from my seated position I walked over to the railing and latched on tight. My feet were still numb. My legs tingled. I greatly appreciated getting the new information, even if it scared the belasses out of me. And if that wasn’t enough to sap away any sense of satisfaction, I found that, the more I learned, the more frustration I felt toward the mysteries that remained. And there was a great big mystery staring me right in the face; two crucial pieces of the puzzle were still missing: why and how?

I looked Andalon in the eyes. “The fungus wants to take souls and turn them into demons so that it can bring about the end of the world. And you,” I pointed at her, “you and your wyrms are trying to stop it, and you do so by ‘saving’ people, and ‘saving them’ has something to do with putting souls into wyrms. But… how do wyrms keep souls safe, Andalon?” I asked. “What is this salvation of yours?” I asked. “What does that entail? And why does the fungus care?”

Andalon looked at me in befuddlement. “What…? Giving people tails?”

“No,” I said, rolling my eyes. I had to fight the urge to slap myself in the face. I sighed. “I meant… what do you really mean when you say that you want to save people, and not let their souls be lost? How does it happen?”

“To be saved is to live,” Andalon said. She floated up into the center of the stairwell.“It’s the only way. Everything else is death. Saving people means putting them inside of you, Mr. Genneth; inside of everyone I can fit them in. They live on inside you all, in…”

Following her, I walked up a couple steps. I soon had to stop, leaning with my hand on the railing to rest for a moment. Walking up the stairs was proving to be a bit more difficult than it should have been.

“In where, Andalon?”

She paused for a moment, searching for the right word. She looked up at the glass ceiling, at the gold of the fading day, and then looked back down at me.

“In a happy place,” she said, answering my question. Andalon spread her arms wide. “A big happy place. It’s where the saved peoples get to be; they’re there forever, safe and sound, instead of in Hell with the darkness.”

My throat went dry. I gagged and wept.

“Andalon… what you’re describing…” My voice cracked. “It sounds like the afterlife. Like…” I whispered out the words, “…like Paradise.”

Andalon nodded several times in quick succession. “I guess so.” Suddenly, she raised up a finger. “Oh, and not just Mr. Genneth. All the wyrmehs. That’s what they’re for. They dream up Paradise, and the ghosts get to live in those dreams, happily ever after.”

Wyrmehs are supposed to help the ghosts—that’s what she’d said not long ago.

But now, now I knew what “help” I was supposed to give.

“Holy forking shirtballs,” I muttered, sinking back into the sofa.

Merritt’s words came rushing back to me.

The demon said I was going to become a boat.

A boat for the dead. A barge for all souls. The afterlife was in my brain, and in the brains of all the transformees.

This obviously had theological implications, and I was in no way prepared to take the plunge and figure it out.

A bewildering variety of feelings were piling on top of me, and I couldn’t even begin to coordinate them. My horror at the prospect of becoming a monster; my stubborn curiosity, loudly demanding explanations of the who, what, when, where, why, and hows of Andalon; my gossamer hopes that Andalon’s desire to fight the plague might actually bear fruit; and, now, to top it all off, apparently, the inside of my head was in the process of becoming the eternal home for the souls of the dead.

“But, how, Andalon? How can this be? How can this happen?”

She smiled gently. “You make it, Mr. Genneth. Wyrmehs make stuff and keep the ghosts safe.” She gulped. “Keeping them out of… Hell.”

“Making stuff?” I asked, repeating Andalon’s words. “What do you—”

But I stopped, because, in that moment, I got to bask in the pleasure of one of my favorite neurophysiological events: synapse formation, otherwise known as the “Aha!” moment. Though, like most theories of cognition, there were still multiple vying interpretations of how to correlate mental phenomena with particular combinations of physiological and biochemical events in the brain, my favorite theory as that the epiphany of the fabled eureka moment was caused by the formation of new synapses within the brain—connections between previously non-connected neurons.

The epiphany was almost enjoyable. I certainly had been “making stuff”, even if I didn’t understand how or to what end.

It was hyperphantasia taken to its wildest extreme: what I imagined became real, though only to me. And, apparently, it was the stuff from which the afterlife was made.

I bit my lip, pensive and afraid. “As a child, I was taught that only God could save us. ‘Being saved’ was a gift. It was how we were redeemed in the Angel’s eyes. Being saved meant you wouldn’t be left out to be snapped up by the Night’s darkness and sent to Hell. But that…” I stammered, “if you are leading people to Paradise in… in wyrms… then…”

Holy fudge.

“The fungus. Frank’s ghost… it turned him into a demon so that he could break through the gates of Paradise.”

Andalon nodded. “The darkness keeps wyrmehs from helping ghosts. It… makes everything bad. It makes everything broken. Frank-Frank was broken. He wasn’t saved right,” she said. “He’s broken, so he does broken stuff. Hell breaks souls, Mr. Genneth. He’s usin’ the powers I gave you. You…” Her voice trailed off, “you gotta stop him.”

I felt like I was at the edge of a great abyss, staring down into depths I could hardly fathom. A whole new pit opened in my stomach.

Beast’s teeth!

I worried if I thought too much about it, I might make it real—even if it would only be a hallucination.

This was the missing piece. Wyrms weren’t agents of Hell. They were agents of Paradise. My religion had it wrong. The joys of the afterlife guaranteed for the righteous faithful? They weren’t behind the Night; they were in Andalon’s wyrms. That was why the spirits of the dead—those light-mists—flowed into me. Andalon wasn’t just saving them. She was granting them salvation.

And the fungus of darkness wanted to steal them all away.

So, by the looks of it, my favorite manga seemed to have predicted the end of the world.

But then…

I shivered.

What was the meaning of all these horrors? What was God? And what was the Angel? What were they, really? If Catamander Brave was some kind of mystical prophecy about the apocalypse, why did the apocalypse also have elements of my religion? Why were there demons? Why was there Hell?

There was no Hell in Catamander Brave!

Suddenly, my console rang.

A videophone call.

I pulled it out—

—My console clattered onto the floor as I dropped it in shock.

The call was from Room 268.