WildBoots
Don’t underestimate seeds.
- Pronouns
- She/Her
- Partners
-
Summary: We have few facts about this place, all strange: the edges of the cave system are expanding, and no one who has entered has returned. But a creeping vine always moves towards the light. "You're changing too, aren't you."
Word count: 7,579 (one-shot)
Rating: G
There are a couple of fights, but nothing graphic.
Genres: PMD (kinda), horror/action/adventure
Other notes: I took some inspiration from @Pen's one-shot The Tessellation Solution and a lot from the novel Annihilation to hopefully add a different spin to the canon of both. I’m thinking of it as a sort of translation. If you wanted to read Annihilation at some point, maybe do that first.
I am open to constructive criticism! This fic definitely needs an overhaul, and especially in the last third, but I haven't had the motivation or clarity to do it yet. It might be a long time before I apply any crit and make edits ... or you might be the thing that kickstarts me into doing it?
We agree it would be most efficient to explore in pairs—to cover more ground. None of us points out how dangerous it is to split up. It's dangerous to be here at all. Even if no threat has made itself known yet, there is an understanding that as a group of four we are no safer than each of us would be alone. But in pairs at least there is someone else to help carry samples and artifacts and, for those who are inclined, make conversation.
The caterpie marks the wall with sticky strands as we pass, so it'll be easier for the others to find us. At dinner, we will regroup and share what we learn. No light reaches down here, so we keep time by the wax and wane of our hunger and by our footsteps. Since we entered, the passimian has kept up a quick, whispered chant to match her trotting pace: "Nine oh six, nine oh seven, nine oh eight …." I've given up keeping track of the time, and I am glad for the reprieve from her counting.
I wonder if the passimian's incessant counting is why the solosis first tried to partner with me. Then again, she would hear the passimian's thoughts from nearby or far away. And that is likely why she changed her mind and left me with the caterpie after all: she can monitor me from far away, too.
Passimian and I can keep pace with each other more easily, she said, projecting the thought to all of us.
And it's true. My legs are short, and I make frequent stops to taste the soil or to examine the glowing mushrooms that light the corridors. The caterpie walks behind me, even slower. By unspoken agreement, we both move without talking for now, listening.
Something hits the ground wetly behind me, and the caterpie makes a squeak of surprise. I turn, unfurling my vines, ready to attack. But there's only a dark splotch in the dirt between us. She curls her body and stares at the stain, shivering, so I stretch out tendrils to investigate.
Sticky. Sweet.
"Oran berry …." I can't keep the hesitancy from my voice, not because I'm uncertain but because there is no good reason for an oran to be here.
We crane to look at the ceiling and, sure enough, berries hang dark and fat above our heads. At first, it's hard to make out how. So I draw energy from the ground to make a ball of light and extend it in a loop of vines. "Oh," I say, "they're the roots of the bushes aboveground." As if this is something that makes sense.
Turning to the caterpie, I ask, "Would you be able to bring one down? I'd like to examine it."
She bobs her head. Then she inches up the wall on suction feet—until she's climbed high enough to snag a berry with a blast of webbing and reel it in. She climbs back down and holds it out the berry.
I turn it over between two vines and then tear it into sections. I sniff the fruit and then, finally, eat a piece. The caterpie watches in silence.
After a moment I say, "It's like any other oran."
"Then at least we won't go hungry," she answers.
"Hm."
We have few facts about this place, all strange: Compasses do not work here, and even magnemite and nosepass cannot find north once inside. No plants should grow here, not this far inside the cave, and yet they clearly do. We know the edges of the cave system are expanding, as if the cave itself were an enormous creeping vine. There are rumors of terrible monsters. And we know that no one who has entered has returned.
Yet the berries are still berries and the soil is still soil. It's not much of a comfort.
I imagine stretching a tendril out for the solosis, and then she's in my mind with me. She acknowledges and, I assume, makes a record of our discovery. And then the caterpie and I continue on.
"Tangela," she blurts, "Why did you decide to join the exploration team?"
The solosis is listening too, perched on the edges of my thoughts.
I can't help flaring my vines. I'm not sure whether it's because of the invasive question or her use of Tangela, like it's my name. The Guild didn't have much advice to offer us before we set out, but on one point they were clear: who you are out here does not matter once you're inside. The Dungeon will take anything you give it, even your name. So we each left ours outside.
Tangela is not my name. But the way she says Tangela, I can hear traces of all the other names she's packaged with it: roll-about, vagabond, shadow-face. Stranger.
After a moment, the caterpie lowers her eyes and offers, "My village ... we had to abandon it. Parts of it started falling in, and the rest …. Well, things have changed."
I don't need to hear this, but I can recognize that she needs to tell it. So I wait.
"We have to find a way to stop this …." She falters not knowing what words to use. "So it has to be us, doesn't it?"
She wants reassurance I can't give. I say only, "We're the ones who came."
Squeezing through a narrow passage, we find ourselves in a chamber much like those we've passed through before, a large one, judging by the echo of my footsteps. For an instant, I wonder whether we have already been this way, but the caterpie's sticky signature is missing from the walls.
I resist the urge to look behind us. There's nothing there but more rock and more darkness, the same as ahead. I know that if I look I won't be able to stave off the feeling that the walls are slowly crushing us. The darkness grows heavy if I allow myself to linger on the thought.
While the caterpie gets to work marking our trail, I wander in deeper. I come to a point in the center of the chamber where the walls are too far away to catch my light, nothing but shadow in every direction. Only the caterpie's squelching reminds me that she's still somewhere behind me. I sway in the cool dark. Something sets my tendril hairs on end—not quite a breeze, not a scent nor a sound—nothing else I can name. Perhaps it's only in my mind. Being away from the sunlight has me on edge.
And yet.
Light held out in the crook of my tendril, I creep forward until I come within sight of the far wall. I suck in a breath. "There are markings here," I call out to the caterpie, managing with effort to keep my voice level.
The squelching pauses. "What kind of markings?"
"I don't know," I answer haltingly. But even as I speak, I realize I do know: they're words. The markings look nothing like words in any language I know—alternating curved and angular segments connected by rings, the surface raised from the wall. Yet it's obvious they're words from the moment I look at them, and the meaning jumps to my mind—
And of the other worlds we know only what the light touches as it arcs across the sky tearing and splitting with fire and weight and what is carried by the visitors inside it who twist into their arms the history of forms that have never been that writhe with impatience ….
The words go on and on. As I read, I'm filled with a powerful calm. There is no fear or weariness left in me, only the desire to read those words.
Only the caterpie's approach interrupts me. She gasps, and I draw away from the wall as if rising from a deep, dark pond.
"Be careful," I say, "they're …." But I stop, unsure what kind of warning to give. They're what, strange? They're part of the Dungeon—of course they're strange.
She hardly hears me anyway. Her horns pulsate as she leans in, her snout nearly touching the stone.
For the first time, it occurs to me to tell the solosis about this discovery. She is the only one who can send reports to The Guild outside, so that if we don't return ….
I reach towards the solosis in my mind, but it's like hitting a wall. There is no answer. That's never happened before—is she hurt, or …? I coil my vines tighter to my body.
The caterpie makes a small sound, and I turn in time to watch one of the strange word-marks peel itself off the wall. Another already floats above the caterpie's head, and now I can see that the center ring is an eye, blinking.
"They're people," I say, not quite believing it.
That loosens something in the caterpie. "Hello! We're sorry if we're intruding."
They make no sign that they've heard. Dozens of them float over, between, and around us. As they bob and weave in the air, I can't help hearing their meaning. Forms that have never been writhe with impatience for the light that waits within for there is no true darkness only spaces in between …. The air buzzes with their motion.
A word comes to me: unknown. I mistake it for an accusation until I realize they're telling me what they call themselves. The unown.
It slowly dawns on me: they're psychic. Why don't they speak normally?
The caterpie asks, "Have you been here very long? We've only, um, recently arrived."
The word-people, the unown, make no reply but to change their floating pattern, shifting the meaning of their long, impossible sentence. And portals open onto other portals and a fire that knows your name and whose light will consume everything except itself ….
I shudder. I struggle to follow the thread of those words, each blurring into the next, but what I can understand unsettles me. Yet I can't look away. The unown continue zigzagging, and the cloud of their bodies drifts slowly left. I watch the caterpie tilt her head to follow, and I take several steps forward before I notice my feet moving.
I plant a few tendrils into the earth to hold myself still. "Why don't you just tell us what you want."
"Tangela, they might be able to help us understand this place." She trails after them, seemingly in a daze. Her head jerks left-up-down-right to watch as the unown jumble and rearrange themselves.
I coil and uncoil my vines for a moment. Then I follow a few paces behind.
The chamber is quiet. The only sounds are footsteps and the endless sentence unspooling in our heads—not a sound at all.
Then rock scrapes on rock. The caterpie is half a step too far ahead for me to see the cause, but she cries out and reels back. The unown scatter.
"Are you alright? What hap—?" A cloying smell hits me. Powder dusts my face and settles between my tendrils. Choking and sputtering, I thrash my vines until my panic subsides. But I know I've already inhaled something, and I can't shake the image of dust coating my insides.
When I stop, I'm lightheaded and turned-around. I'm alone in the darkness for a moment. Then my breathing slows, and I hear the caterpie's whimpers.
"Tangela?"
"I'm coming. Don't move."
I move towards her, holding up my small, sputtering light. I sweep my gaze along the walls, but there is no sign that the unown were ever here. My light spreads across the floor, where the caterpie crouches before a hollow in the rock. No, not a hollow—the edges are straight and square. To one side I spot the stone tile that must have slid out from under her. A gray mushroom squats at the center of the exposed square, mashed flat.
Someone made this. A previous explorer or…? My tendrils prickle.
The caterpie looks up at me with eyes glassy like the heat shimmer around a flame.
Before I can figure out how to respond, the solosis' voice cuts through my head. Tangela? Caterpie? Hello?
We're here, I answer silently.
The solosis' relief seeps through the connection. I called and called, but you didn't answer, and I couldn't find you. I thought ….
We're alright. I steal a glance at the caterpie. She's picking herself back up, her gaze clear and steady. I imagine she's giving the solosis her own response, but I have no way to know what passes between them.
I tell the solosis about the mushroom and my concerns that the caterpie has inhaled the spores. I don't tell her that I might also be affected—I don't want her to second-guess me. Fortunately, she doesn't probe.
After a moment, the solosis says, Stay where you are. We're on our way.
Even though the strange beings and their stranger words have vanished, I don't trust that room. Instead, we four make our way to an adjoining chamber, watching our feet as we go. We search and secure the area. At the solosis' suggestion, the caterpie runs a silken trip cord across each of the two entrances—at least we'll have a warning if someone with feet sneaks up on us. Then we make camp, such as it were.
None of us carries much, mostly food. The passimian carries the biggest pack. She pulls a sewaddle-stitched leaf blanket from inside and huddles sullenly beneath it. The caterpie wears a small silk pack, which she has to be helped in and out of. The solosis holds a few items in her orbit—an apple, a water pouch—but nothing heavy enough to strain her capacity to send psychic messages. I carry only what I can weave into my vines.
We pool our findings. The caterpie and I have gathered oran berries and, carefully wrapped in caterpie silk and leaves, the squashed gray mushroom from the other room. The solosis and the passimian present two kinds of berries and a rock with a flickering light inside it. At the passimian's touch, blue sparks crackle beneath the rock's surface. She dusts her hands off after handling it, and I can understand why. It's as difficult to look at as it is to avoid looking at it, much like the strange words on the wall of the other room.
But I feel better after getting something in my belly—an answer to the problem of hunger if nothing else. Even the passimian's perpetual glare softens, and she begins to speak between bites. "We think there are other people here."
"You saw them?"
She shakes her head. "No. We heard—" the passimian scrunches her nose, considering, "—voices, down the tunnel. We never caught up to them. But there were markings on a wall."
I look to the caterpie, but her eyes are unfocused, gazing out into the darkness.
"Words," I say.
The passimian's frown deepens. "No. A drawing. Berry juice." She pantomimes painting with a finger.
"What did it look like?"
She passes a berry from hand to hand—smack, smack, smack. "Big spiral."
I try to picture it. The words rise in me, unbidden: And portals open onto other portals ... The words have rooted inside me. Perhaps it's not the cave walls I should distrust.
The solosis turns and affixes me in her relentlessly blank stare. Did you also see markings on the walls? she asks.
Knotting and unknotting my vines, I explain as best as I can about the strange beings we saw. I don't mention lights and portals and consuming fire, not wanting to give the words more power by repeating them.
But the solosis pushes past my explanation, reaching into my head before I can stop her, and she sees what I carry inside. She pulls away as if the words from the wall have burned her. I wonder what she must think of me now, but she only offers a flat stare.
"Are you sure those were people though?" the passimian says. "Sounds like ... something else."
I tear away from the solosis' gaze. "What else would they be? They spoke to us."
The passimian squints. "And you saw them too?" she asks the caterpie.
I try not to take her doubt personally. After all, we've been told that past explorers of the Dungeon suffered hallucinations, imagining the walls were attacking them—oh, perhaps not hallucinations at all. But I also don't know what the solosis might be telling her beyond my hearing.
The caterpie shakes her head, blinking. "Yes, I saw them," she answers as if speaking takes great effort.
Most of an oran berry sits uneaten on the ground in front of her. "You haven't eaten much," I observe.
"Not hungry."
We've been walking for hours, says the solosis. You should try to eat something.
The caterpie shakes her head again.
"I'll take it if you don't want it." The passimian waits a beat before snatching up the oran and taking a juicy bite.
The caterpie says softly, "I think I'll lay down for a while, if you don't mind." Without waiting for a response, she scoots away from us and curls up on her side.
The rest of us silently exchange looks of alarm.
The solosis eventually says, It would be good for all of us to rest. We don't want to over-exert ourselves. We'll sleep in shifts.
"I don't mind taking the first watch," I say.
An uneasy glance passes between the passimian and the solosis. "You can take it easy. I got it."
Cold grips my insides. My vines uncoil. "If this is about—"
A howl rises in the distance, raw and ragged. The sound echoes off the walls, warping with each reverberation—impossible to tell which direction it came from. I don't want to picture who or what would make a noise like that.
In an instant, the solosis has thrown a shield of light around us—the items she held in her orbit clatter to the floor. The passimian raises her fists, and I raise my tendrils. The caterpie does not react. We shift our eyes between the chamber's two entrances. But no one emerges from either passageway, and no other sounds follow. After what feels like a long time, we sit back down.
"We should make a fire," whispers the passimian.
Good idea, agrees the solosis.
They both turn towards me, waiting for me to protest. If I say no, they'll be resentful and maybe even more suspicious. I pull my vines in tightly but say, "Alright."
The passimian takes flint, steel, and a clot of dry grass from her pack. The solosis and I help her arrange rocks into a ring. We tear some of the roots from the ceiling to burn. I wince at their pain and the smell of sap, but I don't argue. Then the passimian strikes the flint and the steel together, and I scurry back.
After so much time in darkness, the light and the heat are as glorious as they are treacherous. For a moment, the three of us bask in the light without speaking.
"I'll keep the fire going through the first watch," says the passimian. There's a challenge in her gaze.
I nod. I don't want responsibility for the fire. "Fine. Wake me when it's my turn."
I can feel the solosis watching me, looking for signs of weakness or instability, so I turn away. As close to the fire as I can bear to sit, I wrap my vines around myself and hunker down. The last thing I see before I close my eyes is the reddish shadow flickering along the caterpie's shivering back.
When I wake, the fire has burned to coals. The caterpie is gone, her pack abandoned on the ground.
Slowly, I sit up and taste the air with my tendrils. Across the fire ring, the passimian sleeps under her leaf blanket. The solosis is nowhere to be seen.
I move to the passimian's side, intending to shake her awake. The instant my vine touches her shoulder, her eyes fly open, and she swings. The blow catches me off-guard and sends me rolling until I hit the wall. We both sit up, breathing hard and glaring at each other from across the distance.
"Earth and sky, Tangela. Don't sneak up on me like that."
As I climb back to my feet, I pat myself over with my tendrils, checking for injuries. Some bruised vines, but nothing serious. I'm grateful she didn't knock me towards the fire pit. "Did the solosis tell you she was leaving?"
"What?" The passimian casts a scowl around the cavern. When she realizes we're alone, she draws her blanket close and goes soft for a moment. Then she reaches for her helmet, growling, "Solosis was supposed to be on watch."
"The caterpie is gone too."
She hops to her feet. "Let's check the trip cords."
The trip cord is still intact across the passageway that leads back to the rooms we've already explored. Someone like the solosis still could've gone in or out, but not the caterpie.
On the other side of the chamber, the passimian snarls a curse. "This one's snapped." Swishing her tail, she turns away from the doorway.
When she drops down beside the fire pit, I warily draw closer. "Should we go after them?" I ask. It's still possible, of course, that they've wandered off separately, but I find that harder to believe. It's also possible that someone else—the howler?—came in and took them by force, but then why ignore the passimian and me?
"No. We wait here for Solosis." She begins to stack dry roots to start a new fire.
I watch her for a few moments. Then I announce, "I'm not waiting. I'm going to look for them."
The passimian lowers her ears. "Fine. Go ahead." She doesn't stop piling roots in the fire pit, watching from the corner of her eyes as I take several berries from our pile.
"If I don't return after ..." I begin. But nothing else I could say matters down here in the Dungeon. This could be the last I see of her and—I flex my bruised vines—I'm not especially sorry. "Well. I'll try to come back soon."
She finally looks up, holding her tail very still. "Good luck."
I pause at a fork in the tunnel. The two pathways are indistinguishable, vanishing into shadow. I hear nothing in either direction, only the sap flowing through my vines. Left, I decide at last on impulse alone.
As I step through the entrance, I hesitate. Then I untangle an oran from my tendrils. I make no attempt to paint symbols, half-fearing what I might create. Instead, I simply crush the fruit against the wall to mark my path with a blue stain.
At the next crossroads, there's no need to waste a berry. The wall is spattered with webbing. I'm sure it's the caterpie, but it resembles her previous markings in substance alone. Normally, she makes a tidy arrow or a simple pictograph. Here, clumps dribble down the wall seemingly at random. I have to hug the far wall to keep from catching in the sticky ooze.
The tunnel leads to a dead-end cavern, but I don't immediately turn back. The wall directly ahead has been overtaken by a floor-to-ceiling spiral—like the painting the passimian described, only this time done in webbing. In the dimness, the lines are luminous
I'm seized by the urge to trace the spiral, to recreate it bodily. I force myself to look away. Is it the spores? Is that going to happen to me?
The solosis' voice cuts through my thoughts. Tangela.
Vines trembling, I turn and demand, "Why did you leave without—?"
I stop when I see her. There's a crater above her eye, the membrane there puckered and dark. Green fluid leaks from scrapes all over her surface.
I wanted to see where Caterpie would go, she confesses. Her hovering is unsteady, jerky.
"Did she do that to you?"
The solosis' bitter chuckle drifts through our mental link. I followed too closely. I wanted to make a record, but ... I interrupted her.
I can picture it then: how the caterpie shuffled down the tunnel, glassy-eyed. At a noise behind her, she turned and fired, spattering the wall. After a moment, she inched further head. In the dark chamber, the caterpie set to work, driven by some inner fire. And the solosis drew closer and closer, until—
Why would she do that? I can't decide if I mean the attack or the spiral on the wall. Both are so unlike the caterpie.
She's changing, says the solosis.
I bristle. It's the invasion of privacy, responding to a thought I haven't yet voiced, but it's not only that. Something in her tone— "You don't sound too concerned."
It was inevitable.
I feel as though I am sliding sideways, though I still stand with both feet firmly on the ground. "You knew this was going to happen."
The solosis begins to slowly circle, and I back away. You're changing too, aren't you. It's not a question.
"What in black rot does that mean?"
But I know. The desire to trace a spiral on the wall. The words that burn inside me, demanding even now to be spoken. And I know that she knows these traitorous thoughts too—my mind lies before her like a platter of fruit.
Listing to one side within her leaking membrane, she says, You came here without light.
I start to protest, but I realize she's right. I hadn't thought of it. Even now, I'm not holding a light in my tendrils, and it has been a long time since I spotted a mushroom's glow among the rock. I am becoming like the fruiting roots along the ceiling, perhaps: thriving in the dark when I should not.
Drawing my vines to my body, I take another step away from her. "I'm not going to attack you."
No, you won't. You're not like her. Not like any of us.
With each word, panic rises in me. "You never liked me. What is it, my face?" She only stares, as always. I think, Was this inevitable too? "We're no different—you have your protections and I have mine."
She continues slowly circling. You don't want to destroy the Dungeon.
Ah, there it is at last: the reason for her distrust. Not spores or strange words on a wall but something I carried from the start.
I won't apologize.
"It's alive." I root down, tendrils scraping rock and clay and sand—and something else. Something that wants. "I want to understand it."
The solosis says, I was curious how the Dungeon would react to you. I wondered if maybe you would lead us to the heart of it. But now we're all getting sick, and you— The solosis stops circling and considers me. It was a mistake.
The solosis doesn't so much as twitch to betray her intent, just that unreadable stare and then—pressure inside my head, like a fist squeezing with all its strength. For a moment, her thoughts force out all else: You told it my name! Give me my name back!
I shove against her mind, but it's like hitting a wall again. I don't want to fight! I can't tell if I've said the words aloud or only thought them, my voice smashed small.
Finally, I manage to raise a vine and crack it across the solosis's face. We reel apart. My breath comes hard and fast, bright spots dancing in my vision, but my vines drip green.
"No more," I say. "Let's find the caterpie and ..." I know there's nothing else that can possibly come after, but I reach for words anyway.
The solosis makes a terrible sound I've never heard from her before, a high-pitched keening. There's something in it that reminds me of the howl earlier. Her eyes have gone glassy like the caterpie's. She swoops—
Words seethe from the depths of me: I won't let her extinguish my light.
And then she's grabbed my mind with crushing force, and for a moment my vision goes completely dark. From out of the darkness, green bubbles rise and burst. Inside, something that was one becomes two. Flint strikes steel. A town suffocates under vines.
Through it all, I struggle against her psychic grip. Deafened and blinded, I thrash and tremble until spores come loose from my vines. And then until I fall. A light bursts, and then there's only darkness again.
When at last I sit up, blinking painfully, I can't tell how long has passed. All is quiet. The solosis lies on the floor nearby—a bad sign. Even at rest, she normally hovers a few inches above the ground. I feel sick, but I force myself closer, to be sure.
She's alive—only stunned. Her eyes are closed, but her body pulsates under the green film. Gold flecks her membrane where the spores hit. But something about her shape is wrong, distended. She rolls slowly inside her bubble, and I see a pair of tiny hands dangling from her head where there were none before. A piece of her body floats loose in the green.
I scramble back. Whatever is lying on the floor, it is not a solosis anymore.
Is this what happened to the other exploration teams—they attacked each other not recognizing what they had become? Unsure what else to do, I turn back.
"That doesn't make any festering sense, " the passimian says, pacing.
"No, it doesn't." I fight to keep the frustration out of my voice. She's made herself a set of torches, and I keep my distance. "But has anything made sense down here?"
The passimian squares her shoulders, but her tail is between her legs. "If Solosis has ... lost contact with the Guild, it doesn't matter what else we learn here."
I almost laugh at the suggestion that we've learned anything.
"We should go back," she says.
Maybe she's right. Each step forward has brought with it something sinister. The solosis and the caterpie have become hostile. There is someone or something howling in the tunnels. Words on the wall. And yet—"I don't want to go back. I want to continue farther in."
She hisses, "What? Why?"
I don't know how to explain what I feel instinctually. I think about the darkness of the earth where seeds sprout, how their tendrils strive towards the sunlight despite never having known the sun's warmth, how they push and push into the black dirt. I'm not sure the passimian would understand.
Instead, I say, "If leaving were that simple, surely other explorers would have returned."
She passes a berry back and forth between her hands. "Maybe no one got a chance to try."
My vines go slack. I warned her—I don't owe her anything else.
Aboveground, tangela don't prefer each other's company. Some people find it strange or callous, but it's simple practicality. Too many tangela in one place trip over each other's tendrils and compete for light. Instead, we wander.
And the caterpie and the solosis have proven with finality that one is no safer than two in the Dungeon.
"You can try, then. I'm continuing on."
As I turn away, the passimian busts out, "Wait. I don't want to be alone."
I shrug to her with my vines. "Then are you coming?" I wait for her to gather her pack—she hesitates over the caterpie's abandoned bag before deciding to leave it—and then I lead the way down the tunnel.
Before long, she overtakes me. Her stride is longer than mine, and I also suspect she believes she can somehow outrun her fear. When we come to the split in the path, we take the tunnel unmarked by my oran berry smear.
Winding our way through the endless dark, we pass through so many caverns and tunnels that I lose count. Then begin to feel like one endless tunnel. As we come around each bend, I scan the walls for signs of the unown, more eager to see them than I'd like to admit. Their words replay over and over in my head. I want to know how that sentence ends—if it ever ends.
After some time, the passimian looks over her shoulder and blurts, "Why are you so quiet?"
"What do you want me to say?"
She lays her ears flat and walks on. "Never mind."
In the hallway before a cavern, the passimian halts and draws back a fist. "Hang on. There's something up there."
I keep behind her, out of the ring of torchlight, but I can see it anyway: something green leaning against a wall. I wonder for a moment if it's the thing the solosis has become—she was resting on the floor the last time I saw her—or even the caterpie, exhausted from her spiral-making. But it's the wrong shape to be either.
"It's not moving."
We linger in the passageway a few moments longer before the passimian slinks in, tail tucked, and I follow. The green thing isn't quite as tall as me and much smaller than the passimian, but it's still person-sized. It shines like a heracross shell. For an instant, I can see my face reflected in its surface. Then the passimian leans closer, and the glare of the torchlight obliterates my reflection.
"What is it?" she says in quiet amazement, moving as if to knock on it.
"Don't touch it." My face feels warm, sap chugging through my vines. "I think … it's the caterpie." Through the hard outer layer, I can make out the curve of her head and her red horns. She could be sleeping if not for the occasional shudder.
"What?" The passimian snatches her hand back. "How?"
She's changing.
I move back. "Let's go."
"We can't leave her here. We have to—" She gestures, tail swishing in agitation. "We have to get her out of there."
"Don't touch it," I say again. "Whatever it is, it's not the caterpie anymore. It might be dangerous."
The passimian bares her teeth. "Don't talk about Caterpie like that. She's not an it, and she's not a festering specimen. She's a person."
And you're a fool, I think.
"Fine. Then you tend to her if you want. I'm not waiting for her to wake up and attack."
The instant I move towards the cavern exit, something hits the back of my head with a crack. As I turn, staggering, I see on the ground a severed vine and the eerie glowing rock. By the time I've pieced it together—she threw it at me—the passimian is flying at me, hands outstretched.
I whip out a pair of vines, managing to soften her landing but not to stop her from bowling me over. She drives her fists into me over and over. At last, I manage to snare her fist in my vines. For a split second, she freezes and meets my gaze. Her eyes are clear—she knows exactly what she's doing. And then she twines her fingers into my tendrils and yanks instead. Vines snap and I scream, writhing uselessly to get free.
In my mind, I reach towards her. I don't have the solosis' power—I can't read her thoughts or send her mine. But I can find the throbbing core of her, a tangle of fear and rage, and push into it like I push my vines into earth. Only then does she let go and leap away from me, shaking her head.
"Stay away from me!" I wheeze. Everything smells of sap—it's dripping between my eyes and onto my feet. "Go back the way we came if you want. But leave me be."
The torch sputters on the floor where the passimian tossed it down. Her shadow bends up the wall and onto the ceiling, vanishing among the fruit-laden roots—
For there is no true darkness only spaces in between—
She snarls, "Not turning my back on you again!" And then she lunges, and I'm pinned again. Between blows, she shouts, "What really happened to Solosis, huh? What did you do?"
I flail at every part of her I can reach—head, back, arms—but it doesn't seem to matter. She's so much bigger than I am.
As my vision begins to blur, going dark around the edges—my head fills with words, as loud as if they were shouted next to my face—
Because in other worlds in other times they wore other faces and in others the light never bloomed …
The passimian freezes with one fist pulled back and the other hand twisting into my torn vines, and I know she can hear them too. A shadow falls across us. The passimian opens her mouth to scream or speak, fur standing on end, but only chokes. She tumbles off me, and I finally turn to see—
A huge blur of a figure looms over us, larger than even the passimian. There was no sound at its approach, or the sound was lost under our fighting. Hovering all around it like a frenzied halo are the unown, projecting their unending sentence so loudly I nearly lose myself in it.
To receive the gifts and burdens of those who walk worlds still unseen ….
The figure stretches and folds on itself like a curling breaker, bending towards us as if to see better—though it has nothing I can identify as eyes. There's little about it I can identify at all but quivering pink edges and something darker in its core. It's transparent, the wall and the still-burning torch visible behind it but distorted. First I think water-type, then I think some kind of enormous solosis—but I quickly realize it can't be either. It's something much stranger. I can't even decide whether it's a person.
And the choice to trade freedom for power and wear the face of another and to face into the light ….
And then my eyes catch on the dark thing at the figure's center. Two-legged with no tail, like a machop or a makuhita, but the proportions are wrong. Long fur on the top of its head and nowhere else. I've never seen a person like that—but it must be a person, because it locks eyes with me and slowly, deliberately raises one hand to point at me.
It holds me in place with its gaze, and I'm stricken by images: two figures walk along a road, a growlithe and… something else. This being or one like it. A star cuts an arc across the night, terrible and beautiful. Metal circles gleam in the creature's hand. Then a tower, so tall it blocks the sun. Fire falls from the sky, spraying up dirt. The growlithe and the creature climb. Someone is cast to the floor, pinned by the growlithe.
Once again, the word comes to me from out of the air, from the unown: human.
And when the fire brings down passengers from between the stars they carry a light wherever they go for when the fire is broken it scatters but does not die ….
I translate: seed.
In its gaze, I recognize this seed, this human, as the force of wanting in this place. It wants to grow. At that realization, I fall still and my fear calms, because I do understand after all.
The pink gel around the human shifts and stretches toward me, extending from the human's pointing gesture. The smaller figure inside is momentarily obscured. I realize with sick fascination that the enormous creature does in fact have eyes—transparent and lidless, embossed on the pink membrane—and a wide, wavering mouth. They are partners. Two beings acting as one, and also a third, new thing that didn't exist before.
Inside of me, flint strikes steel.
The cloud of unown dance their way along the pink pseudo-arm, and the never-ending sentence takes a turn that seems meant for me alone: for the creeping vine always craves the light and moves ever toward it and it grows as it burns like the fire in the sky that tears holes between the worlds ….
I feel as if I'm dissolving under the oppressive, burning force of all those eyes: human, unown, and the pink creature. Something inside me is bursting open—I imagine a flower made of light, burning—
From off to the right, the passimian cries out. I jerk my head in time to see her fling her lit torch at the pink creature. The torch hits with a wet hiss, but the creature doesn't make a sound.
With terrible slowness, the creature swivels towards the passimian. The extinguished torch floats inside it. From the shapeless mass, the creature stretches out an arm. The passimian hisses and scrambles away on all fours, but she can't outrun the arm smashing down on her like a wave.
The arm pulls away with a sucking sound, leaving the passimian suspended in her own pink bubble. She twists and writhes—and then she catches alight. I can only look at her by squinting through the mesh of my vines, and even then she's nothing but a glowing outline. She melts, swirls, forms again—now the pink bubble holds the smoldering shape of a staryu. Now a charmander, now a pikachu, now a shroomish, now—shapes cycle faster and faster until I can no longer tell one from another. I turn away.
For the first time in either years or seconds, I become aware of my body again. I try to stand up without calling attention to myself, but my body drags. Vines trail freely from me where they should wrap tightly, and I can't lift them to draw them closer. As one, the creature-within-a-creature turns its eyes to me, and its gaze burns my exposed skin.
I have to get out. I am burning.
Nearly tripping over dangling vines, I whirl around and limp towards the exit, expecting at any moment for a wave of pink to come crashing down on me—but it never comes. I stumble down the passageway until I can no longer see the cavern behind me. No one and nothing follows me. I lean against the wall to catch my breath. Something casts a glow on the wall. It takes me a long moment to realize the light is coming from me.
I am burning.
Like a sprout pushing through the soil, I keep moving. I do not mark my trail. I do not pause to consider which branch to take. I stumble my way down, down, down the tunnel. Moving is painful until it isn't anymore. A faraway part of me knows I have been walking for a long time now, that I should be tired or hungry. But the light inside me compels me forward. I can hardly feel my body, as if I am floating down the dark passages.
I am burning.
And then I arrive at the end, one final chamber. Light pours from the room into the tunnel. There is nowhere else to go, and I think I am most likely dying anyway, but I slow as I approach. In the entranceway, I falter. The room is terribly bright. I take a few more steps before I'm forced to stop, blinded. I sink to the floor.
Squinting, I can make out the source of the brightness, at least the edges. There is a staircase in the center of the room. It's set into the floor, but I know with every tendril hair that it leads to the surface and true sunlight. I feel like I'll evaporate if I take another step forward—yet the light fills me with desperate longing. I creep along the floor, pulling myself tendril by tendril, reaching—
I burn and burn and burn—
And somehow there's still something left of me to marvel at the beauty of the sky.
Pando shambles along the road, dragging her long arms. Wherever they touch, the earth begins to sink. Bizarre plants sprout from her footprints. One that begins as a vine abruptly ends in fat, heavy flowers that pull it to the ground. Another opens into rings of leaves, one unfurling after another after another. Below the soil, their roots burst forth with fruit the likes of which have never been touched by the light of day. A warm breeze stirs, scattering spores.
Over the hill, there's a little town of thatch roofs and adobe brick. Pando has been there before, but they will not recognize her grown so tall and shaggy. They bore her no love before, but now they will call her monster. They will shout and pelt her with stones. It won't matter—they will see her, and the light within will bloom. Change will come hardest for those who fight it. But change will come.
Pando feels herself changing still, even now, but she is not afraid. She has always known that the form she wore was not her name.
Word count: 7,579 (one-shot)
Rating: G
There are a couple of fights, but nothing graphic.
Genres: PMD (kinda), horror/action/adventure
Other notes: I took some inspiration from @Pen's one-shot The Tessellation Solution and a lot from the novel Annihilation to hopefully add a different spin to the canon of both. I’m thinking of it as a sort of translation. If you wanted to read Annihilation at some point, maybe do that first.
I am open to constructive criticism! This fic definitely needs an overhaul, and especially in the last third, but I haven't had the motivation or clarity to do it yet. It might be a long time before I apply any crit and make edits ... or you might be the thing that kickstarts me into doing it?
--
Incubation
Incubation
We agree it would be most efficient to explore in pairs—to cover more ground. None of us points out how dangerous it is to split up. It's dangerous to be here at all. Even if no threat has made itself known yet, there is an understanding that as a group of four we are no safer than each of us would be alone. But in pairs at least there is someone else to help carry samples and artifacts and, for those who are inclined, make conversation.
The caterpie marks the wall with sticky strands as we pass, so it'll be easier for the others to find us. At dinner, we will regroup and share what we learn. No light reaches down here, so we keep time by the wax and wane of our hunger and by our footsteps. Since we entered, the passimian has kept up a quick, whispered chant to match her trotting pace: "Nine oh six, nine oh seven, nine oh eight …." I've given up keeping track of the time, and I am glad for the reprieve from her counting.
I wonder if the passimian's incessant counting is why the solosis first tried to partner with me. Then again, she would hear the passimian's thoughts from nearby or far away. And that is likely why she changed her mind and left me with the caterpie after all: she can monitor me from far away, too.
Passimian and I can keep pace with each other more easily, she said, projecting the thought to all of us.
And it's true. My legs are short, and I make frequent stops to taste the soil or to examine the glowing mushrooms that light the corridors. The caterpie walks behind me, even slower. By unspoken agreement, we both move without talking for now, listening.
Something hits the ground wetly behind me, and the caterpie makes a squeak of surprise. I turn, unfurling my vines, ready to attack. But there's only a dark splotch in the dirt between us. She curls her body and stares at the stain, shivering, so I stretch out tendrils to investigate.
Sticky. Sweet.
"Oran berry …." I can't keep the hesitancy from my voice, not because I'm uncertain but because there is no good reason for an oran to be here.
We crane to look at the ceiling and, sure enough, berries hang dark and fat above our heads. At first, it's hard to make out how. So I draw energy from the ground to make a ball of light and extend it in a loop of vines. "Oh," I say, "they're the roots of the bushes aboveground." As if this is something that makes sense.
Turning to the caterpie, I ask, "Would you be able to bring one down? I'd like to examine it."
She bobs her head. Then she inches up the wall on suction feet—until she's climbed high enough to snag a berry with a blast of webbing and reel it in. She climbs back down and holds it out the berry.
I turn it over between two vines and then tear it into sections. I sniff the fruit and then, finally, eat a piece. The caterpie watches in silence.
After a moment I say, "It's like any other oran."
"Then at least we won't go hungry," she answers.
"Hm."
We have few facts about this place, all strange: Compasses do not work here, and even magnemite and nosepass cannot find north once inside. No plants should grow here, not this far inside the cave, and yet they clearly do. We know the edges of the cave system are expanding, as if the cave itself were an enormous creeping vine. There are rumors of terrible monsters. And we know that no one who has entered has returned.
Yet the berries are still berries and the soil is still soil. It's not much of a comfort.
I imagine stretching a tendril out for the solosis, and then she's in my mind with me. She acknowledges and, I assume, makes a record of our discovery. And then the caterpie and I continue on.
"Tangela," she blurts, "Why did you decide to join the exploration team?"
The solosis is listening too, perched on the edges of my thoughts.
I can't help flaring my vines. I'm not sure whether it's because of the invasive question or her use of Tangela, like it's my name. The Guild didn't have much advice to offer us before we set out, but on one point they were clear: who you are out here does not matter once you're inside. The Dungeon will take anything you give it, even your name. So we each left ours outside.
Tangela is not my name. But the way she says Tangela, I can hear traces of all the other names she's packaged with it: roll-about, vagabond, shadow-face. Stranger.
After a moment, the caterpie lowers her eyes and offers, "My village ... we had to abandon it. Parts of it started falling in, and the rest …. Well, things have changed."
I don't need to hear this, but I can recognize that she needs to tell it. So I wait.
"We have to find a way to stop this …." She falters not knowing what words to use. "So it has to be us, doesn't it?"
She wants reassurance I can't give. I say only, "We're the ones who came."
—
Squeezing through a narrow passage, we find ourselves in a chamber much like those we've passed through before, a large one, judging by the echo of my footsteps. For an instant, I wonder whether we have already been this way, but the caterpie's sticky signature is missing from the walls.
I resist the urge to look behind us. There's nothing there but more rock and more darkness, the same as ahead. I know that if I look I won't be able to stave off the feeling that the walls are slowly crushing us. The darkness grows heavy if I allow myself to linger on the thought.
While the caterpie gets to work marking our trail, I wander in deeper. I come to a point in the center of the chamber where the walls are too far away to catch my light, nothing but shadow in every direction. Only the caterpie's squelching reminds me that she's still somewhere behind me. I sway in the cool dark. Something sets my tendril hairs on end—not quite a breeze, not a scent nor a sound—nothing else I can name. Perhaps it's only in my mind. Being away from the sunlight has me on edge.
And yet.
Light held out in the crook of my tendril, I creep forward until I come within sight of the far wall. I suck in a breath. "There are markings here," I call out to the caterpie, managing with effort to keep my voice level.
The squelching pauses. "What kind of markings?"
"I don't know," I answer haltingly. But even as I speak, I realize I do know: they're words. The markings look nothing like words in any language I know—alternating curved and angular segments connected by rings, the surface raised from the wall. Yet it's obvious they're words from the moment I look at them, and the meaning jumps to my mind—
And of the other worlds we know only what the light touches as it arcs across the sky tearing and splitting with fire and weight and what is carried by the visitors inside it who twist into their arms the history of forms that have never been that writhe with impatience ….
The words go on and on. As I read, I'm filled with a powerful calm. There is no fear or weariness left in me, only the desire to read those words.
Only the caterpie's approach interrupts me. She gasps, and I draw away from the wall as if rising from a deep, dark pond.
"Be careful," I say, "they're …." But I stop, unsure what kind of warning to give. They're what, strange? They're part of the Dungeon—of course they're strange.
She hardly hears me anyway. Her horns pulsate as she leans in, her snout nearly touching the stone.
For the first time, it occurs to me to tell the solosis about this discovery. She is the only one who can send reports to The Guild outside, so that if we don't return ….
I reach towards the solosis in my mind, but it's like hitting a wall. There is no answer. That's never happened before—is she hurt, or …? I coil my vines tighter to my body.
The caterpie makes a small sound, and I turn in time to watch one of the strange word-marks peel itself off the wall. Another already floats above the caterpie's head, and now I can see that the center ring is an eye, blinking.
"They're people," I say, not quite believing it.
That loosens something in the caterpie. "Hello! We're sorry if we're intruding."
They make no sign that they've heard. Dozens of them float over, between, and around us. As they bob and weave in the air, I can't help hearing their meaning. Forms that have never been writhe with impatience for the light that waits within for there is no true darkness only spaces in between …. The air buzzes with their motion.
A word comes to me: unknown. I mistake it for an accusation until I realize they're telling me what they call themselves. The unown.
It slowly dawns on me: they're psychic. Why don't they speak normally?
The caterpie asks, "Have you been here very long? We've only, um, recently arrived."
The word-people, the unown, make no reply but to change their floating pattern, shifting the meaning of their long, impossible sentence. And portals open onto other portals and a fire that knows your name and whose light will consume everything except itself ….
I shudder. I struggle to follow the thread of those words, each blurring into the next, but what I can understand unsettles me. Yet I can't look away. The unown continue zigzagging, and the cloud of their bodies drifts slowly left. I watch the caterpie tilt her head to follow, and I take several steps forward before I notice my feet moving.
I plant a few tendrils into the earth to hold myself still. "Why don't you just tell us what you want."
"Tangela, they might be able to help us understand this place." She trails after them, seemingly in a daze. Her head jerks left-up-down-right to watch as the unown jumble and rearrange themselves.
I coil and uncoil my vines for a moment. Then I follow a few paces behind.
The chamber is quiet. The only sounds are footsteps and the endless sentence unspooling in our heads—not a sound at all.
Then rock scrapes on rock. The caterpie is half a step too far ahead for me to see the cause, but she cries out and reels back. The unown scatter.
"Are you alright? What hap—?" A cloying smell hits me. Powder dusts my face and settles between my tendrils. Choking and sputtering, I thrash my vines until my panic subsides. But I know I've already inhaled something, and I can't shake the image of dust coating my insides.
When I stop, I'm lightheaded and turned-around. I'm alone in the darkness for a moment. Then my breathing slows, and I hear the caterpie's whimpers.
"Tangela?"
"I'm coming. Don't move."
I move towards her, holding up my small, sputtering light. I sweep my gaze along the walls, but there is no sign that the unown were ever here. My light spreads across the floor, where the caterpie crouches before a hollow in the rock. No, not a hollow—the edges are straight and square. To one side I spot the stone tile that must have slid out from under her. A gray mushroom squats at the center of the exposed square, mashed flat.
Someone made this. A previous explorer or…? My tendrils prickle.
The caterpie looks up at me with eyes glassy like the heat shimmer around a flame.
Before I can figure out how to respond, the solosis' voice cuts through my head. Tangela? Caterpie? Hello?
We're here, I answer silently.
The solosis' relief seeps through the connection. I called and called, but you didn't answer, and I couldn't find you. I thought ….
We're alright. I steal a glance at the caterpie. She's picking herself back up, her gaze clear and steady. I imagine she's giving the solosis her own response, but I have no way to know what passes between them.
I tell the solosis about the mushroom and my concerns that the caterpie has inhaled the spores. I don't tell her that I might also be affected—I don't want her to second-guess me. Fortunately, she doesn't probe.
After a moment, the solosis says, Stay where you are. We're on our way.
—
Even though the strange beings and their stranger words have vanished, I don't trust that room. Instead, we four make our way to an adjoining chamber, watching our feet as we go. We search and secure the area. At the solosis' suggestion, the caterpie runs a silken trip cord across each of the two entrances—at least we'll have a warning if someone with feet sneaks up on us. Then we make camp, such as it were.
None of us carries much, mostly food. The passimian carries the biggest pack. She pulls a sewaddle-stitched leaf blanket from inside and huddles sullenly beneath it. The caterpie wears a small silk pack, which she has to be helped in and out of. The solosis holds a few items in her orbit—an apple, a water pouch—but nothing heavy enough to strain her capacity to send psychic messages. I carry only what I can weave into my vines.
We pool our findings. The caterpie and I have gathered oran berries and, carefully wrapped in caterpie silk and leaves, the squashed gray mushroom from the other room. The solosis and the passimian present two kinds of berries and a rock with a flickering light inside it. At the passimian's touch, blue sparks crackle beneath the rock's surface. She dusts her hands off after handling it, and I can understand why. It's as difficult to look at as it is to avoid looking at it, much like the strange words on the wall of the other room.
But I feel better after getting something in my belly—an answer to the problem of hunger if nothing else. Even the passimian's perpetual glare softens, and she begins to speak between bites. "We think there are other people here."
"You saw them?"
She shakes her head. "No. We heard—" the passimian scrunches her nose, considering, "—voices, down the tunnel. We never caught up to them. But there were markings on a wall."
I look to the caterpie, but her eyes are unfocused, gazing out into the darkness.
"Words," I say.
The passimian's frown deepens. "No. A drawing. Berry juice." She pantomimes painting with a finger.
"What did it look like?"
She passes a berry from hand to hand—smack, smack, smack. "Big spiral."
I try to picture it. The words rise in me, unbidden: And portals open onto other portals ... The words have rooted inside me. Perhaps it's not the cave walls I should distrust.
The solosis turns and affixes me in her relentlessly blank stare. Did you also see markings on the walls? she asks.
Knotting and unknotting my vines, I explain as best as I can about the strange beings we saw. I don't mention lights and portals and consuming fire, not wanting to give the words more power by repeating them.
But the solosis pushes past my explanation, reaching into my head before I can stop her, and she sees what I carry inside. She pulls away as if the words from the wall have burned her. I wonder what she must think of me now, but she only offers a flat stare.
"Are you sure those were people though?" the passimian says. "Sounds like ... something else."
I tear away from the solosis' gaze. "What else would they be? They spoke to us."
The passimian squints. "And you saw them too?" she asks the caterpie.
I try not to take her doubt personally. After all, we've been told that past explorers of the Dungeon suffered hallucinations, imagining the walls were attacking them—oh, perhaps not hallucinations at all. But I also don't know what the solosis might be telling her beyond my hearing.
The caterpie shakes her head, blinking. "Yes, I saw them," she answers as if speaking takes great effort.
Most of an oran berry sits uneaten on the ground in front of her. "You haven't eaten much," I observe.
"Not hungry."
We've been walking for hours, says the solosis. You should try to eat something.
The caterpie shakes her head again.
"I'll take it if you don't want it." The passimian waits a beat before snatching up the oran and taking a juicy bite.
The caterpie says softly, "I think I'll lay down for a while, if you don't mind." Without waiting for a response, she scoots away from us and curls up on her side.
The rest of us silently exchange looks of alarm.
The solosis eventually says, It would be good for all of us to rest. We don't want to over-exert ourselves. We'll sleep in shifts.
"I don't mind taking the first watch," I say.
An uneasy glance passes between the passimian and the solosis. "You can take it easy. I got it."
Cold grips my insides. My vines uncoil. "If this is about—"
A howl rises in the distance, raw and ragged. The sound echoes off the walls, warping with each reverberation—impossible to tell which direction it came from. I don't want to picture who or what would make a noise like that.
In an instant, the solosis has thrown a shield of light around us—the items she held in her orbit clatter to the floor. The passimian raises her fists, and I raise my tendrils. The caterpie does not react. We shift our eyes between the chamber's two entrances. But no one emerges from either passageway, and no other sounds follow. After what feels like a long time, we sit back down.
"We should make a fire," whispers the passimian.
Good idea, agrees the solosis.
They both turn towards me, waiting for me to protest. If I say no, they'll be resentful and maybe even more suspicious. I pull my vines in tightly but say, "Alright."
The passimian takes flint, steel, and a clot of dry grass from her pack. The solosis and I help her arrange rocks into a ring. We tear some of the roots from the ceiling to burn. I wince at their pain and the smell of sap, but I don't argue. Then the passimian strikes the flint and the steel together, and I scurry back.
After so much time in darkness, the light and the heat are as glorious as they are treacherous. For a moment, the three of us bask in the light without speaking.
"I'll keep the fire going through the first watch," says the passimian. There's a challenge in her gaze.
I nod. I don't want responsibility for the fire. "Fine. Wake me when it's my turn."
I can feel the solosis watching me, looking for signs of weakness or instability, so I turn away. As close to the fire as I can bear to sit, I wrap my vines around myself and hunker down. The last thing I see before I close my eyes is the reddish shadow flickering along the caterpie's shivering back.
—
When I wake, the fire has burned to coals. The caterpie is gone, her pack abandoned on the ground.
Slowly, I sit up and taste the air with my tendrils. Across the fire ring, the passimian sleeps under her leaf blanket. The solosis is nowhere to be seen.
I move to the passimian's side, intending to shake her awake. The instant my vine touches her shoulder, her eyes fly open, and she swings. The blow catches me off-guard and sends me rolling until I hit the wall. We both sit up, breathing hard and glaring at each other from across the distance.
"Earth and sky, Tangela. Don't sneak up on me like that."
As I climb back to my feet, I pat myself over with my tendrils, checking for injuries. Some bruised vines, but nothing serious. I'm grateful she didn't knock me towards the fire pit. "Did the solosis tell you she was leaving?"
"What?" The passimian casts a scowl around the cavern. When she realizes we're alone, she draws her blanket close and goes soft for a moment. Then she reaches for her helmet, growling, "Solosis was supposed to be on watch."
"The caterpie is gone too."
She hops to her feet. "Let's check the trip cords."
The trip cord is still intact across the passageway that leads back to the rooms we've already explored. Someone like the solosis still could've gone in or out, but not the caterpie.
On the other side of the chamber, the passimian snarls a curse. "This one's snapped." Swishing her tail, she turns away from the doorway.
When she drops down beside the fire pit, I warily draw closer. "Should we go after them?" I ask. It's still possible, of course, that they've wandered off separately, but I find that harder to believe. It's also possible that someone else—the howler?—came in and took them by force, but then why ignore the passimian and me?
"No. We wait here for Solosis." She begins to stack dry roots to start a new fire.
I watch her for a few moments. Then I announce, "I'm not waiting. I'm going to look for them."
The passimian lowers her ears. "Fine. Go ahead." She doesn't stop piling roots in the fire pit, watching from the corner of her eyes as I take several berries from our pile.
"If I don't return after ..." I begin. But nothing else I could say matters down here in the Dungeon. This could be the last I see of her and—I flex my bruised vines—I'm not especially sorry. "Well. I'll try to come back soon."
She finally looks up, holding her tail very still. "Good luck."
—
I pause at a fork in the tunnel. The two pathways are indistinguishable, vanishing into shadow. I hear nothing in either direction, only the sap flowing through my vines. Left, I decide at last on impulse alone.
As I step through the entrance, I hesitate. Then I untangle an oran from my tendrils. I make no attempt to paint symbols, half-fearing what I might create. Instead, I simply crush the fruit against the wall to mark my path with a blue stain.
At the next crossroads, there's no need to waste a berry. The wall is spattered with webbing. I'm sure it's the caterpie, but it resembles her previous markings in substance alone. Normally, she makes a tidy arrow or a simple pictograph. Here, clumps dribble down the wall seemingly at random. I have to hug the far wall to keep from catching in the sticky ooze.
The tunnel leads to a dead-end cavern, but I don't immediately turn back. The wall directly ahead has been overtaken by a floor-to-ceiling spiral—like the painting the passimian described, only this time done in webbing. In the dimness, the lines are luminous
I'm seized by the urge to trace the spiral, to recreate it bodily. I force myself to look away. Is it the spores? Is that going to happen to me?
The solosis' voice cuts through my thoughts. Tangela.
Vines trembling, I turn and demand, "Why did you leave without—?"
I stop when I see her. There's a crater above her eye, the membrane there puckered and dark. Green fluid leaks from scrapes all over her surface.
I wanted to see where Caterpie would go, she confesses. Her hovering is unsteady, jerky.
"Did she do that to you?"
The solosis' bitter chuckle drifts through our mental link. I followed too closely. I wanted to make a record, but ... I interrupted her.
I can picture it then: how the caterpie shuffled down the tunnel, glassy-eyed. At a noise behind her, she turned and fired, spattering the wall. After a moment, she inched further head. In the dark chamber, the caterpie set to work, driven by some inner fire. And the solosis drew closer and closer, until—
Why would she do that? I can't decide if I mean the attack or the spiral on the wall. Both are so unlike the caterpie.
She's changing, says the solosis.
I bristle. It's the invasion of privacy, responding to a thought I haven't yet voiced, but it's not only that. Something in her tone— "You don't sound too concerned."
It was inevitable.
I feel as though I am sliding sideways, though I still stand with both feet firmly on the ground. "You knew this was going to happen."
The solosis begins to slowly circle, and I back away. You're changing too, aren't you. It's not a question.
"What in black rot does that mean?"
But I know. The desire to trace a spiral on the wall. The words that burn inside me, demanding even now to be spoken. And I know that she knows these traitorous thoughts too—my mind lies before her like a platter of fruit.
Listing to one side within her leaking membrane, she says, You came here without light.
I start to protest, but I realize she's right. I hadn't thought of it. Even now, I'm not holding a light in my tendrils, and it has been a long time since I spotted a mushroom's glow among the rock. I am becoming like the fruiting roots along the ceiling, perhaps: thriving in the dark when I should not.
Drawing my vines to my body, I take another step away from her. "I'm not going to attack you."
No, you won't. You're not like her. Not like any of us.
With each word, panic rises in me. "You never liked me. What is it, my face?" She only stares, as always. I think, Was this inevitable too? "We're no different—you have your protections and I have mine."
She continues slowly circling. You don't want to destroy the Dungeon.
Ah, there it is at last: the reason for her distrust. Not spores or strange words on a wall but something I carried from the start.
I won't apologize.
"It's alive." I root down, tendrils scraping rock and clay and sand—and something else. Something that wants. "I want to understand it."
The solosis says, I was curious how the Dungeon would react to you. I wondered if maybe you would lead us to the heart of it. But now we're all getting sick, and you— The solosis stops circling and considers me. It was a mistake.
The solosis doesn't so much as twitch to betray her intent, just that unreadable stare and then—pressure inside my head, like a fist squeezing with all its strength. For a moment, her thoughts force out all else: You told it my name! Give me my name back!
I shove against her mind, but it's like hitting a wall again. I don't want to fight! I can't tell if I've said the words aloud or only thought them, my voice smashed small.
Finally, I manage to raise a vine and crack it across the solosis's face. We reel apart. My breath comes hard and fast, bright spots dancing in my vision, but my vines drip green.
"No more," I say. "Let's find the caterpie and ..." I know there's nothing else that can possibly come after, but I reach for words anyway.
The solosis makes a terrible sound I've never heard from her before, a high-pitched keening. There's something in it that reminds me of the howl earlier. Her eyes have gone glassy like the caterpie's. She swoops—
Words seethe from the depths of me: I won't let her extinguish my light.
And then she's grabbed my mind with crushing force, and for a moment my vision goes completely dark. From out of the darkness, green bubbles rise and burst. Inside, something that was one becomes two. Flint strikes steel. A town suffocates under vines.
Through it all, I struggle against her psychic grip. Deafened and blinded, I thrash and tremble until spores come loose from my vines. And then until I fall. A light bursts, and then there's only darkness again.
—
When at last I sit up, blinking painfully, I can't tell how long has passed. All is quiet. The solosis lies on the floor nearby—a bad sign. Even at rest, she normally hovers a few inches above the ground. I feel sick, but I force myself closer, to be sure.
She's alive—only stunned. Her eyes are closed, but her body pulsates under the green film. Gold flecks her membrane where the spores hit. But something about her shape is wrong, distended. She rolls slowly inside her bubble, and I see a pair of tiny hands dangling from her head where there were none before. A piece of her body floats loose in the green.
I scramble back. Whatever is lying on the floor, it is not a solosis anymore.
Is this what happened to the other exploration teams—they attacked each other not recognizing what they had become? Unsure what else to do, I turn back.
—
"That doesn't make any festering sense, " the passimian says, pacing.
"No, it doesn't." I fight to keep the frustration out of my voice. She's made herself a set of torches, and I keep my distance. "But has anything made sense down here?"
The passimian squares her shoulders, but her tail is between her legs. "If Solosis has ... lost contact with the Guild, it doesn't matter what else we learn here."
I almost laugh at the suggestion that we've learned anything.
"We should go back," she says.
Maybe she's right. Each step forward has brought with it something sinister. The solosis and the caterpie have become hostile. There is someone or something howling in the tunnels. Words on the wall. And yet—"I don't want to go back. I want to continue farther in."
She hisses, "What? Why?"
I don't know how to explain what I feel instinctually. I think about the darkness of the earth where seeds sprout, how their tendrils strive towards the sunlight despite never having known the sun's warmth, how they push and push into the black dirt. I'm not sure the passimian would understand.
Instead, I say, "If leaving were that simple, surely other explorers would have returned."
She passes a berry back and forth between her hands. "Maybe no one got a chance to try."
My vines go slack. I warned her—I don't owe her anything else.
Aboveground, tangela don't prefer each other's company. Some people find it strange or callous, but it's simple practicality. Too many tangela in one place trip over each other's tendrils and compete for light. Instead, we wander.
And the caterpie and the solosis have proven with finality that one is no safer than two in the Dungeon.
"You can try, then. I'm continuing on."
As I turn away, the passimian busts out, "Wait. I don't want to be alone."
I shrug to her with my vines. "Then are you coming?" I wait for her to gather her pack—she hesitates over the caterpie's abandoned bag before deciding to leave it—and then I lead the way down the tunnel.
Before long, she overtakes me. Her stride is longer than mine, and I also suspect she believes she can somehow outrun her fear. When we come to the split in the path, we take the tunnel unmarked by my oran berry smear.
Winding our way through the endless dark, we pass through so many caverns and tunnels that I lose count. Then begin to feel like one endless tunnel. As we come around each bend, I scan the walls for signs of the unown, more eager to see them than I'd like to admit. Their words replay over and over in my head. I want to know how that sentence ends—if it ever ends.
After some time, the passimian looks over her shoulder and blurts, "Why are you so quiet?"
"What do you want me to say?"
She lays her ears flat and walks on. "Never mind."
In the hallway before a cavern, the passimian halts and draws back a fist. "Hang on. There's something up there."
I keep behind her, out of the ring of torchlight, but I can see it anyway: something green leaning against a wall. I wonder for a moment if it's the thing the solosis has become—she was resting on the floor the last time I saw her—or even the caterpie, exhausted from her spiral-making. But it's the wrong shape to be either.
"It's not moving."
We linger in the passageway a few moments longer before the passimian slinks in, tail tucked, and I follow. The green thing isn't quite as tall as me and much smaller than the passimian, but it's still person-sized. It shines like a heracross shell. For an instant, I can see my face reflected in its surface. Then the passimian leans closer, and the glare of the torchlight obliterates my reflection.
"What is it?" she says in quiet amazement, moving as if to knock on it.
"Don't touch it." My face feels warm, sap chugging through my vines. "I think … it's the caterpie." Through the hard outer layer, I can make out the curve of her head and her red horns. She could be sleeping if not for the occasional shudder.
"What?" The passimian snatches her hand back. "How?"
She's changing.
I move back. "Let's go."
"We can't leave her here. We have to—" She gestures, tail swishing in agitation. "We have to get her out of there."
"Don't touch it," I say again. "Whatever it is, it's not the caterpie anymore. It might be dangerous."
The passimian bares her teeth. "Don't talk about Caterpie like that. She's not an it, and she's not a festering specimen. She's a person."
And you're a fool, I think.
"Fine. Then you tend to her if you want. I'm not waiting for her to wake up and attack."
The instant I move towards the cavern exit, something hits the back of my head with a crack. As I turn, staggering, I see on the ground a severed vine and the eerie glowing rock. By the time I've pieced it together—she threw it at me—the passimian is flying at me, hands outstretched.
I whip out a pair of vines, managing to soften her landing but not to stop her from bowling me over. She drives her fists into me over and over. At last, I manage to snare her fist in my vines. For a split second, she freezes and meets my gaze. Her eyes are clear—she knows exactly what she's doing. And then she twines her fingers into my tendrils and yanks instead. Vines snap and I scream, writhing uselessly to get free.
In my mind, I reach towards her. I don't have the solosis' power—I can't read her thoughts or send her mine. But I can find the throbbing core of her, a tangle of fear and rage, and push into it like I push my vines into earth. Only then does she let go and leap away from me, shaking her head.
"Stay away from me!" I wheeze. Everything smells of sap—it's dripping between my eyes and onto my feet. "Go back the way we came if you want. But leave me be."
The torch sputters on the floor where the passimian tossed it down. Her shadow bends up the wall and onto the ceiling, vanishing among the fruit-laden roots—
For there is no true darkness only spaces in between—
She snarls, "Not turning my back on you again!" And then she lunges, and I'm pinned again. Between blows, she shouts, "What really happened to Solosis, huh? What did you do?"
I flail at every part of her I can reach—head, back, arms—but it doesn't seem to matter. She's so much bigger than I am.
As my vision begins to blur, going dark around the edges—my head fills with words, as loud as if they were shouted next to my face—
Because in other worlds in other times they wore other faces and in others the light never bloomed …
The passimian freezes with one fist pulled back and the other hand twisting into my torn vines, and I know she can hear them too. A shadow falls across us. The passimian opens her mouth to scream or speak, fur standing on end, but only chokes. She tumbles off me, and I finally turn to see—
A huge blur of a figure looms over us, larger than even the passimian. There was no sound at its approach, or the sound was lost under our fighting. Hovering all around it like a frenzied halo are the unown, projecting their unending sentence so loudly I nearly lose myself in it.
To receive the gifts and burdens of those who walk worlds still unseen ….
The figure stretches and folds on itself like a curling breaker, bending towards us as if to see better—though it has nothing I can identify as eyes. There's little about it I can identify at all but quivering pink edges and something darker in its core. It's transparent, the wall and the still-burning torch visible behind it but distorted. First I think water-type, then I think some kind of enormous solosis—but I quickly realize it can't be either. It's something much stranger. I can't even decide whether it's a person.
And the choice to trade freedom for power and wear the face of another and to face into the light ….
And then my eyes catch on the dark thing at the figure's center. Two-legged with no tail, like a machop or a makuhita, but the proportions are wrong. Long fur on the top of its head and nowhere else. I've never seen a person like that—but it must be a person, because it locks eyes with me and slowly, deliberately raises one hand to point at me.
It holds me in place with its gaze, and I'm stricken by images: two figures walk along a road, a growlithe and… something else. This being or one like it. A star cuts an arc across the night, terrible and beautiful. Metal circles gleam in the creature's hand. Then a tower, so tall it blocks the sun. Fire falls from the sky, spraying up dirt. The growlithe and the creature climb. Someone is cast to the floor, pinned by the growlithe.
Once again, the word comes to me from out of the air, from the unown: human.
And when the fire brings down passengers from between the stars they carry a light wherever they go for when the fire is broken it scatters but does not die ….
I translate: seed.
In its gaze, I recognize this seed, this human, as the force of wanting in this place. It wants to grow. At that realization, I fall still and my fear calms, because I do understand after all.
The pink gel around the human shifts and stretches toward me, extending from the human's pointing gesture. The smaller figure inside is momentarily obscured. I realize with sick fascination that the enormous creature does in fact have eyes—transparent and lidless, embossed on the pink membrane—and a wide, wavering mouth. They are partners. Two beings acting as one, and also a third, new thing that didn't exist before.
Inside of me, flint strikes steel.
The cloud of unown dance their way along the pink pseudo-arm, and the never-ending sentence takes a turn that seems meant for me alone: for the creeping vine always craves the light and moves ever toward it and it grows as it burns like the fire in the sky that tears holes between the worlds ….
I feel as if I'm dissolving under the oppressive, burning force of all those eyes: human, unown, and the pink creature. Something inside me is bursting open—I imagine a flower made of light, burning—
From off to the right, the passimian cries out. I jerk my head in time to see her fling her lit torch at the pink creature. The torch hits with a wet hiss, but the creature doesn't make a sound.
With terrible slowness, the creature swivels towards the passimian. The extinguished torch floats inside it. From the shapeless mass, the creature stretches out an arm. The passimian hisses and scrambles away on all fours, but she can't outrun the arm smashing down on her like a wave.
The arm pulls away with a sucking sound, leaving the passimian suspended in her own pink bubble. She twists and writhes—and then she catches alight. I can only look at her by squinting through the mesh of my vines, and even then she's nothing but a glowing outline. She melts, swirls, forms again—now the pink bubble holds the smoldering shape of a staryu. Now a charmander, now a pikachu, now a shroomish, now—shapes cycle faster and faster until I can no longer tell one from another. I turn away.
For the first time in either years or seconds, I become aware of my body again. I try to stand up without calling attention to myself, but my body drags. Vines trail freely from me where they should wrap tightly, and I can't lift them to draw them closer. As one, the creature-within-a-creature turns its eyes to me, and its gaze burns my exposed skin.
I have to get out. I am burning.
Nearly tripping over dangling vines, I whirl around and limp towards the exit, expecting at any moment for a wave of pink to come crashing down on me—but it never comes. I stumble down the passageway until I can no longer see the cavern behind me. No one and nothing follows me. I lean against the wall to catch my breath. Something casts a glow on the wall. It takes me a long moment to realize the light is coming from me.
I am burning.
Like a sprout pushing through the soil, I keep moving. I do not mark my trail. I do not pause to consider which branch to take. I stumble my way down, down, down the tunnel. Moving is painful until it isn't anymore. A faraway part of me knows I have been walking for a long time now, that I should be tired or hungry. But the light inside me compels me forward. I can hardly feel my body, as if I am floating down the dark passages.
I am burning.
And then I arrive at the end, one final chamber. Light pours from the room into the tunnel. There is nowhere else to go, and I think I am most likely dying anyway, but I slow as I approach. In the entranceway, I falter. The room is terribly bright. I take a few more steps before I'm forced to stop, blinded. I sink to the floor.
Squinting, I can make out the source of the brightness, at least the edges. There is a staircase in the center of the room. It's set into the floor, but I know with every tendril hair that it leads to the surface and true sunlight. I feel like I'll evaporate if I take another step forward—yet the light fills me with desperate longing. I creep along the floor, pulling myself tendril by tendril, reaching—
I burn and burn and burn—
And somehow there's still something left of me to marvel at the beauty of the sky.
—
Pando shambles along the road, dragging her long arms. Wherever they touch, the earth begins to sink. Bizarre plants sprout from her footprints. One that begins as a vine abruptly ends in fat, heavy flowers that pull it to the ground. Another opens into rings of leaves, one unfurling after another after another. Below the soil, their roots burst forth with fruit the likes of which have never been touched by the light of day. A warm breeze stirs, scattering spores.
Over the hill, there's a little town of thatch roofs and adobe brick. Pando has been there before, but they will not recognize her grown so tall and shaggy. They bore her no love before, but now they will call her monster. They will shout and pelt her with stones. It won't matter—they will see her, and the light within will bloom. Change will come hardest for those who fight it. But change will come.
Pando feels herself changing still, even now, but she is not afraid. She has always known that the form she wore was not her name.
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Still sorting out some of my ideas, I suppose.
