“Last time we talked like this,” I said, “remember I said I’d tell you my secrets if you told me yours?”

Suisei nodded.

I scratched the back of my hazmat suit’s headpiece and then fidgeted with my bow-tie on the outside of the front of said helmet.

“What are you doing?” Suisei asked.

I smiled slightly. “Preparing to sacrifice my advantage for the sake of the many.”

“Oh?”

“Yes,” I nodded. “Things have taken a turn for the worse,” I explained, “and I’m not going to keep this stuff bottled up any longer.” I glanced over at the crowd of transformees and spirits in the Ward’s waiting area and around its reception desk. “I’m about to give a presentation to everybody, but I’m nervous, so I figured I’d practice on you.”

“Go on,” he said.

I was about to take a deep breath to steady myself, when I remembered I no longer needed to do that, and—more importantly—that a deep breath in meant a deep breath out, and a deep breath out meant more hazmat-stunt-eating spores inside my suit.

I glanced at Andalon, who nodded, smiling in anticipation.

“So,” I began, looking Dr. Horosha in the eyes, “have any of the transformees mentioned seeing a little girl in a nightgown with blue hair and blue eyes?”

He nodded. “Yes. The transformees have taken to calling her ‘Blue’. Unfortunately, there has not been much progress in understanding what she is.”

“Her name is Andalon,” I explained, “and I’ve been interacting with her since almost the moment I was infected. In fact,” I looked down at Andalon, “she’s here right now.”

I pointed at her.

She waved at Dr. Horosha as he looked at where I’d pointed.

“Hi, Dr. Sushi!” she said.

Obviously, he couldn’t see or hear her, and I was very much thankful for that. I dreaded the thought of having to explain racism and racial stereotypes to Andalon.

He looked up at me.

“Do you have any proof?”

I spent a moment in thought, and then it came to me. “Yes, I do. Greg has seen her. She was with me when we were in his RPG mind-world. I’d actually already told him most of what I’m about to tell you.” I blinked. “Wait, he didn’t tell you?”

Suisei glanced off to the side, at Greg. Amazingly, the seemingly complete wyrm hadn’t moved at all from the position he’d been in last night, on my first visit to the SHG.

“He just sits there,” Suisei explained, “coiled in a pile, occasionally nibbling on food, or having his console speak aloud some snide remarks.”

That… made sense. Greg had definitely made it clear to me when I was in his mind-world that he was fully devoted to his project of making the science-fiction of a full-dive VRMMORPG into science-(fantasy)-fact using his mental abilities as a wyrm.

Greg’s head had fully changed. It looked just like the one from Ilzee’s footage: a six-eyed dragon with pores on its snout instead of a mouth and nose. Spines adorned the back of his head and neck like the feathers of a peacock’s crest, or a crown of thorns.

“Wyrmeh!” Andalon said, excitedly, in full celebration of Greg’s prodigious wyrmliness. “Now, he’s just gotta get big,” she added, somewhat unnervingly.

“How does he talk?” I asked.

“He uses his console to type up messages,” Suisei said. “His mastery of his psychokinesis is such that he can operate the touchscreen with psychic force alone. The first message he sent this way was, ‘I just realized: I look like the poop emoji!’.” Suisei rolled his eyes at that.

Seeing Greg as he was, curled up in a tight, coiled mound, I had to admit, he wasn’t wrong about what he looked like.

“Should I go over and get his attention?” I asked.

Suisei shook his head. “No, and there is no need—not yet, at any rate. I believe you, Genneth. I merely wanted to know if you had evidence to back up your claims, in the likely event that someone required it.”

I nodded. “Understood.”

“Tell me everything,” he asked.

And I did. I told him about Andalon, and her quest to destroy the darkness. I told him that she was probably some kind of shard or fragment of the divine, and the fungus was Hell, itself, emerging from the chaos that the Godhead had sealed behind the Veil of Night at the dawn of creation. I told him that the fungus’ goal was to corrupt the souls of its victims and turn them into demons to fight in its armies of darkness, and that these plans even extended to attempting to countervail Andalon’s countervailing creation of the wyrms in the house of being able to corrupt the souls that were uploaded into the safety of her wyrms’ minds.

Suisei’s face grew longer and longer as my explanation progressed. Finally, when I told him that I was finished, he slouched backward, leaning against the wall of the hallway, and slowly slumped down to the floor while letting out a lengthy, ragged sigh, slinging his arms between his legs.

He shot a nervous glance at the Ward’s main area. I figured he didn’t want the others to see him like this.

I couldn’t blame him.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

With a harsh chuckle, Dr. Suisei Horosha looked up at me. “This is faaaar above my pay grade, Genneth.” He shook his head. “With each new revelation, I worry I might finally blossom into a madman, or—worse—a fool.”

I wanted to join him in sitting on the floor, but I was worried my legs couldn’t handle it, so I compromised, and leaned back against the wall—well, as much as I could lean back, what with the tail packed into the back of my hazmat suit.

“Are you a man of faith, Genneth?” he asked me. “You already know my position.”

Last time we were talking like this, Suisei had explained that he was a Neangelical Lassedile—specifically, an Oatsman.

“I was, then I wasn’t, and now…” I let out a chuckle of my own, “now,” I glanced at Andalon, “I believe in Andalon. With her, I feel like I’m finally going to get to learn the truth.” I cocked my head at an angle. “Why do you ask?

“I believe this is a divine tribulation,” Dr. Horosha said. “As broad and deep as our knowledge has become, there still remain questions that I do not ever think we will be able to satisfactorily answer. What is consciousness? Why does the world exist? What happens when we die? Is there such a thing as free will?” He paused. “Until… recently,” he said the word like it was something to regret, “I had been able to trust my faith to guide me, especially through the difficult times.” He sighed. “I have had more than my fair share of difficult times.”

Even in the dim light, I could see tears glisten in his eyes.

Suisei swallowed hard. “To get external confirmation that the truths of the faith are linked to these awful events… it is sobering beyond words.” He sighed. “Once, I think I would have been relieved to learn this, but now…” he shook his head. “Now, I am no longer certain.”

“Why not?” I asked.

He shook his head again. “I wish it was that easy to explain.”

“What?” I said, taken aback. “Whatever story you have to share, I guarantee you, it isn’t half as insane as what I’ve been through.”

Dr. Horosha chuckled humorlessly. “You would be surprised.” Shakily, he inhaled, and pushed himself up off the ground and stood. Somewhat to my shock, he put his hand on my shoulder. “But that can wait. You need to tell the others what you have told me.”

“I’m worried I’ll mess it up,” I said.

He removed his hand from my shoulder. “You will do fine; I am sure of it.”

Then, much to my surprise, Suisei suddenly stepped out of the hallway and loudly clapped his hands together. “Everyone,” he said, in a commanding voice.

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All the chatter stopped, as did the wyrmsong. The ghosts vanished en masse, leaving only a handful of transformees scattered about the Ward and its abandoned construction projects.

“Dr. Howle has some important news to share with us. He has much to say, but I will start with the most important detail: he can talk to Blue.”

With those words, a spell was cast. I suddenly rocketed up to celebrity status. Everyone turned to face me, dropping anything and everything that they might have otherwise been doing. Gasps and whispers filled the room.

“What is she?”

“What does it mean?”

“Why can I talk to dead people?”

More than one face muttered numbly, or grew moist with the trickle of tears of wonder and terror. I might as well have been anointed as the next Lassedite. One by one, they gathered round.

Crud, I thought, flashing a frustrated glance at Dr. Horosha, who just smirked at me.

“Well,” I muttered, under my breath, “here goes nothing…”

— — —

I wasn’t as well-versed with group therapy as I was with the one-on-one version. I fully admit that my most comprehensive experience with the technique was on the receiving end, having joined a self-help group in my late high-school, early university years to help with my struggle to process and accept the loss of my faith. Had you asked me then, I don’t think I would have imagined I’d ever lead such a group on my own, let alone on the same topic.

We’d ended up setting out chairs in a loose approximation of a big circle—very loose. A little more than half the transformees in attendance couldn’t sit in a chair, on account of having either too much tail, or not enough legs. Everyone sat down, asking me question after question after question. You didn’t need to be an expert to tell from the tone of their voice and the motions of their body language—tails included—that they were desperate for an explanation they could believe in.

It went a lot more slowly than it had with Suisei, simply because there was so much more surprise and curiosity. In that respect, I suppose my practice session with Dr. Horosha had been somewhat spoiled by the fact that he was an exceedingly good listener.

Case in point: the transformees couldn’t get enough of the simple fact that I could talk to Andalon.

“What does she say?” they asked.

“What do you ask her?”

“Why is she here?”

“Why is this happening to us?”

And so on and so forth. It didn’t take long for my audience to start looking at me like I was next in line for the Lassedite’s office

With there being significantly more transformees in the SHG than were under my care in Room 268, I had a much larger sample size to assess. This helped drill home just how unusual and unique my interactions with Andalon were.

For all the other transformees, she was little more than a specter; a dream-speaker, intoning mantras; a specter, an enigma; a watcher-in-the-distance, deafening in her melancholy silence. She almost never spoke to them, and if she did, it was in laconic lines, repeated again and again, as she flitted in and out of sight over the course of a day, like something out of a ghost story. Yet, no matter how loud they yelled, she never heard them.

“I’ve seen her standing across the room, watching me,” one said.

“She just stares at you.”

“I can’t tell whether she even knows I’m here.”

“I blink, and she’s gone.”

“Maybe it’s Amplersandalon they’re seeing,” Andalon suggested.

That… was actually a really interesting idea. I made a note to mention that to the SHG once I got to the part of the conversation where I explained the all-important Andalon/&alon distinction.

The main concern among the transformees was that some of them had managed to piece together some of the messages that Andalon/&alon was sending to them, and—like with me—these were about how something awful was coming, and the she was here to help “save” us from it.

Unsurprisingly, the transformees of the SHG were having nearly as difficult of a time wrapping their minds around Andalon’s salvation as I had.

“How? How is doing this to us ‘saving’ anyone? Enlighten me!”

Well said, I thought.

So, I told them what I knew, and what she knew—well… most of it.

“She doesn’t remember?” one asked.

“You’re kidding.”

“But she is remembering, right? So there’s a chance we’ll get an answer out of her?”

I chuckled. “You know, I went through exactly the same train of thought a couple days ago,” I said.

Then I told them about her power, and her desire to save us from the fungus. That she—well, technically, her greater self—was the one responsible for spiriting away the souls of the dead and vouchsafing them within our hearts.

And I told them about Hell.

I swear, I could see the wave of silent awe as it rippled across the room and made their mouths go mum. Some were shocked; others, however, appeared confident and justified.

Nurse Costran stood up, her face beaming. Her body coiled with excitement—maybe even ecstasy.

“I knew it…” she said, softly. “Andalon is our Savior, come at last. These are the Last Days.”

More than a handful of our circle muttered prayers and orisons in response to Yuth’s words.

But then, someone asked the most difficult question of all: “If Andalon is fighting the fungus, and the wyrms are her creation, not the fungus’, why do we need to be infected by the fungus before she can intervene and start our transformations?”

It was a question I, myself, had struggled with, and continued to struggle with.

Andalon still didn’t have a full answer for that one. The best I’d been able to get from her was that she wasn’t strong enough to transform us directly, but instead had to use the power present in the fungus to accomplish it.

But then Dr. Rathpalla spoke up.

Like many of the transformees, Ibrahim Rathpalla’s changes had progressed since I’d last seen him, leaving him looking like a long-bellied lizard with fearsome claws, flimsy legs, and a human face. He loomed over me as he reared up to speak, and I knew he’d only get bigger as time went on.

“I’ve just spent time in my mind thinking things over, reading up on Lassedile theology,” he said, “and I think I have an answer to that question.”

Ibrahim was a second generation Biyadi immigrant. Like many immigrants, his parents had left their homeland to go live in the Holy Land after they’d converted to Lassedicy. I’d never met his parents, but, as far as I knew, they were significantly more religious than he was.

“Yes?” I asked.

Ibrahim nodded. “The standard account is that the Age of Miracles came to an end when Lassedite Athelmarch screwed up and lost the Sword. But what most people don’t consider is the question: why, during the Age of Miracles, did so few miracles actually occur?”

The "Age of Miracles" is a term used to refer to the era of human history in which miracles and other supernatural events still happened, unlike the present day (at least up until last week).

“Because the Sword had to be involved for them to happen,” someone said.

Dr. Rathpalla grinned. “Exactly!”

“What’s your point, Ibrahim?” Yuth asked.

“Miracles happened only when the Sword was involved, because only substances of divine origin are capable of causing and sustaining miracles. There’s a consensus in Old Believer mysticism that the Sword’s disappearance was, itself, why the Age of Miracles ended. When the Godhead created the world, They separated divine substance from mortal substance. Only divine substances—like the Sword of the Angel—are capable of creating miracles. But people forget that Hell and its contents are also divine substances.”

I had a flash of insight. I was 90% sure I’d just figured out Dr. Rathpalla’s point.

“He’s right,” I said. “The Godhead made Hell, but in a different way from the rest of Creation.” (The bulk of my obsession about religion came from all the time I spent thinking about Hell, so the (figurative) frisbee was absolutely on my side of the court now.)

Ibrahim nodded. “Hell was made from the Chaos that the Godhead separated from the rest of pre-existence, in order to allow for Order to come into being and initiate the process of creation. That makes Hell pure, 100% undiluted divine substance, every bit as supernatural as the Sword was.”

I nodded. We were on each other’s wavelength. I could feel it, and I was pretty sure everyone else could, too. Suisei watched us with great intensity.

“That’s why Andalon has to use the fungus,” I said. “Since the fungus is Hell, that makes it a divine substance. It is capable of creating and sustaining the supernatural.”

“Oh shit,” Larry said. “I get it. I get it!”

Andalon looked around with great interest, excited, though also a little confused.

“You’re an agent of God, Andalon,” I said, explaining my theory as I turned to face her. “You’re from a realm beyond ours—maybe from Paradise itself—but the part of you is interacting with me and the rest of us and our world is still too small and weak to make miracles on its own. Like you said, Ampersandalon is ‘far away’, right?”

Andalon nodded. “Yeah, she is.”

“So, the only way you can make miracles happen—for example, turn us into wyrms—is to use the fungus, which is full of divine power. You can’t quite make it yet, but you can shape it!”

I suppose this also meant that Blessèd like Nina and Dr. Horosha were imbued with slivers of divine substance as well.

This reminds me: I explained Nina to them, though, for Suisei’s sake, I did not go and out him as a Blessèd. I figured he’d share it on his own in due time.

“Until the rest of the Blessèd come in full force,” Yuth said, “the only source of magic is the divine, and the only source of the divine present on earth right now is, unfortunately, NFP-20.”

“If I’m right,” Dr. Rathpalla added—and I’m pretty sure I am—this also means we need to be on the lookout for the fungus trying to manipulate us more substantially.

“Do you think it might try and take control of us? I’ve seen videos of Type One cases turning into fucking zombies,” Larry said. “What if the fungus tries to do the same to us.”

“Andalon?” I asked, turning to face her.

Lowering her head, she nodded grimly. “The darkness can do that. It can do horrible things to the wyrmehs…” she said, barely above a whisper.

“Fudge…” I muttered.

“What is it?” Larry asked.

“Andalon says, yes, the fungus taking control of us is a possibility.”

The area rocked with worried murmurs.

“If what we’ve learned so far is any indication,” Dr. Rathpalla said, looking me square in the eye, “I’d be willing to bet that, like with everything else, more and more of Andalon’s memories will return as your own changes progress. You should be eating more, Dr. Howle. The quicker you change, the quicker we’ll finally understand it all.”

“I reached the very same conclusion,” I said.

Yet, at this, Dr. Horosha shook his head.

“We do not force anyone to eat if they do not choose to, Dr. Rathpalla,” he said. “My allies need not be human, but I refuse to fraternize with monsters, non-human or otherwise.” He nodded. “And I believe I speak for the majority when I say that.”

And, indeed, most of the group voiced their agreement—though not as much (or as passionately) as I would have liked.

“So,” I said, clapping my hands together and holding them that way, “that was a lot.”

“Yes it was,” Tira said. The rest of her body was beginning to catch up with her neck, insofar as length and serpentineness was concerned.

“Well,” I continued, “there’s more.”

Groans of surprise and frustration rippled through the air.

“I haven’t gotten to the most important part.”

“Really?” Dr. Rathpalla asked.

I nodded. “Yes. I’ve finally figured out how we can help Andalon.”

That certainly got everyone’s attention.

“I figured out how to fight back against Hell,” I said.