Infection of Alien Familiarity

The descriptor ‘green hell’ was quite apt for many forests that John had been to before. Some of them had been described as such courtesy of what monsters the Abyss had spawned in it, others had been mundane and a hell simply because of the volume of the wildlife constantly fighting all around.

This jungle was neither.

Save for the noises created by their advance into the dense underbrush, John and Rave were subjected to absolute silence. “Let’s stop here for a second.” He turned to his companion and tilted his head, just to make sure no one could see them from the shore by this point.

“What for?” Rave asked.

John gave her an amused look. The overall situation was far from humorous, so he would take relief where he could get it. It was good for the soul. “There’s a thing or two inside you that you maybe do not want to run around with all day?”

“Oh… yeah, actually.” Without another second of hesitation, Rave slipped her pants and panties down to her knees. The sex toys in her holes were easily removed. Usual cleaning procedures were ignored and the items put in John’s inventory. The only reason for that was that his was larger.

Much as John delighted in the short-lived view he got of Rave’s pear-shaped bottom, his attention remained primarily with the environment. It wasn’t the silence that was entirely weirding him out.

John bowed down, disappearing in the dense ferns of shade growths. He found no soil, only the dense network of roots strong and alive that competed for what was beneath them. He dug into the wood, tearing it out by the fistful with his superhuman strength. Even by the time he reached the rich black earth, he did not spot as much as an ant.

“There is nothing but plants on this island,” he said to Rave. “No birds, not even insects.”

“What’re the odds of that?”

“Zero, for any natural environment,” he responded. He took another look around with all of his senses. “Gnome, come out.”

‘O-okay,’ the elemental manifested next to him, making her body out of stone she created herself. A more costly way to call upon her physical form, but one that left less mark. “What do you need me for?”

“Can you verify if this island was recently created via magic?” he requested.

“Should be easy enough…” Gnome muttered and put a hand on the trunk of one of the older looking trees around. Even it was no thicker than John was wide. Truly large trees were very rare here. John could only assume that the competition for nutrients was too fierce. A pointer to realism that was difficult but not impossible to replicate at this scale. “…I think it’s all natural, John... probably?”

“Probably?” John asked.

“It feels like something is… lingering around the edges.” Gnome closed her eyes and concentrated a little harder. “The forest has been growing on its own, I can see that in the root structure and the decaying… matter…? Huh?”

“What is it?”

“There’s no fungus?”

“Shit!” John cursed immediately. Gnome snapped back from the tree, before she could get touched by what laid at the heart of the island.

“I feel like I’m forgetting something?” Rave asked.

“What we call the Lorylim is, as we understand it, a god of genocide created by a fungal precursor civilization that was, by one way or another, mixed with Tiamat. In other words, if there’s an island free of even mundane mold, then there is a high likelihood that Lorylim have been active in the area for a long time.”

Rave’s expression grew more serious throughout his explanation. “So we have our culprit?”

“I’ve had enough surprises in my life to consider there may be a surprise planned here.” He gave Gnome a signal to return to her incorporeal state. “I have also been part of enough schemes to know that sometimes the truth is plainly obvious. I would guess that this island has existed for a long time. They found out that we were about to cross over it and took the opportunity.”

“You really are so, so, so smart!”

John recognized the unstable voice immediately. It was vaguely male, but broke up and down in pitch, making it difficult to say for certain at times. “Izha,” he hissed hatefully.

“Iiiiiiiiizhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,” the human head of the Lorylim hivemind stretched his own name. “Izha, that’s an interesting name, isn’t it? I didn’t always go by it, no, no, I did not. I shall. I shall. I shall. I shall remake the world in one. Izha is all. Izha is no one. I shall be all. I shall be no one.”

John glanced at his girlfriend, who had manifested her cat ears. If the creature was confident enough to talk despite them being on the mundane side, then she could use her superior hearing to narrow in on the direction. For once, the voice of the hivemind did not come from all around. A factor that was worrying in its own way.

“You’re more revealing than usual,” John pointed out.

“It is all coming to a point, you see? You do see! I can taste it in the air. You know, you suspect, you are realizing.”

“That the attack of the Lorylim on Fusion is finally coming.”

“Noooooooooooooooooooooo,” Izha lamented, wailing, while Rave and John pressed through the underbrush. “Oh, but you must be so interested, so, so, so, so interested in why I bother to talk to you.”

“Not particularly, you always loved blabbering. Every time I encounter you, you spend your time chatting. Tiamat is the same way.”

“Yes, yes, me and the Mother Chaos are quite similar. That called me to her and her to me and it is what makes me hunger for the resolution for the changing, for the great realignment of the Abyss.”

“…You were the one that Tabbie was talking about?” John asked, only mildly surprised.

“Perhaps. Yes, no, maybe, definitely, never, always, in perpetuity and at no point, did she ever work for me.” The voice of the creature rose and fell in volume, turning into a cacophonic laughter that was simultaneously everywhere and yet distorted, like a symphony getting pressed through an outdated, singular speaker.

John and Rave broke through dense underbrush. A steep slope before them let them gaze down at the ocean of green below. They descended into it carefully. The moment they were beneath the canopies, they were practically in a different world.

Pillars of mycelial webbing rose from the ground, black and grey. John immediately spotted the usual signs of Lorylim in the teeth-like protrusions, yet there was something missing to these outgrowths of the First Foe. While the aesthetic was roughly similar, it was… cleaner. Nothing liquid dripped from half-digested bones. There were no trypophobia-inducing chambers in the pillars. Even the chitinous teeth were smooth and polished.

Most telling that this was different, however, was the absence of eyes. The teeth set in maws that were just that: maws. They did not close, to reopen as woven eyes. They had latched onto trees in places, but otherwise remained motionless.

John directed his gaze at the dense weave of mushroom fibres that spelled runes out on the floor. The sight was entirely alien, removed so far from the Lorylim he was used to dealing with that he scarcely would have called them the same entity. “So this is what they were before Tiamat?” the Gamer asked.

“For the most part,” Izha answered happily. “To bring to extinction that which the Lorylim came from, that which was once called Lorylim themselves, was a hunt of a different kind. They were not a walking people, you see? They were carpets of interwoven mycelium roots, stretched practically the entire globe at the zenith of their might. Together, the mushrooms of yore sang the songs of faith and carved into the bedrock of a dirtless Earth the first runes with their roots. Did they, perhaps, ensoul this planet? What fundamental truth did they stumble upon to ascend so far and then fall even further? Did they make Faith or did they merely discover it? Oh, the questions, the question, so many questions that even I cannot peel out of that which hates me most. It wishes to kill you, you know? It just wishes to kill us more!”

John wordlessly wandered, following the voice through the forest that the Lorylim were devouring. The existence of the island made slightly more sense to him now. It was a farm, of sorts, a way for the primordial Lorylim to sustain themselves, utilizing plant matter. It was a last pocket of the precursor civilization, surviving even being replaced by that which had killed it in its entirety.

“Oh, I know a few things, very few things,” Izha continued, giggling all the while. “It did succeed, and in succession, it found madness. There was only quiet – forever. I dwell much on that memory, she does not, she hates it, I yearn for it, the infinite victory, the stagnancy that lasts until the monkeys start walking on two legs. Oh, it tried, it tried, it tried, but it was not to be for it was slow, you see? The Lorylim degenerated and degenerated, attempting to die by inaction over millennia and millennia, and then it had to spread again. It spread and spread, it learned to infect other things to become its weapons, but that was too slow. The goddess of divinity came and ripped it out of the soil, from the heart of Lemuria to the wastes of Siberia, allowing only pockets to remain. All else was sealed behind seven seals in seven days and the monkeys walked the Earth now covered in dirt.”

“Nice of you to confirm my theories,” John said, drily.

“I leave my marks on this world. Deep roots… and yet it is not as nice as keeping it docile. It wishes to kill me more, but I can control it, you cannot.”

“So ya got some big scheme in mind?”

“JANE HOLLMEY!” Izha’s voice was a hysteric screech all of a sudden. “YOU HEARD THE SONG AND REFUSED THE ENTRANCE! SO CLOSE! SO CLOSE! THEN YOU BURNED ME OUT! WHY?! WHY? I HEARD IT ALL! YOU COULD BE PERFECT!”

“I’m already perfect enough,” Rave responded cheekily, but there was a nervous undertone to it. She ran her hand over the geometric scars that covered her left arm in black lines. “I don’t need ya.”

“You need us. Everything needs me. I will align the world anew. The Great Opening of the Maw of the Abyss is before you. All eyes will be opened. All eyes will be opened. All eyes will be opened. Open your eyes. Open your eyes. Open your eyes!”

John could feel the words drumming in his skull. They nourished something in his frontal lobe, making the thought grow fat until it felt material. It pressed against the back of his forehead, only to be dispersed by the strength of his own soul.

A final step carried them to a small cave, barely more than an alcove, inside a small cliff. In it lay a skeleton, long digested down to the bones. A conquistador’s armour, covered heavily in rust, still betrayed the origins of the man. A golden cross hung from his neck, the metal untarnished by time. On its surface were etched three words: in nomine Christi.

The beauty of the necklace was contrasted heavily by the thing that occupied the corpse’s skull. The forehead had cracked open, allowing the corruption to peek out as a set of teeth that closed and opened to shape a mycelial eye. Black slime surrounded the opening like a circle of sapient tears.

“So that’s what you possessed here?” John asked.

“Perhaps this is all I am?” Izha asked with a giggle. It was louder and more pronounced than usual. “Oh, but you already know, do you not? You are too smart to miss the connection. Too smart not to feel what I tried to do there, too powerful to fall prey to it, yet not powerful enough. Every word I speak, I taste the essence of your thoughts and I hate them. I hate them all. The endless screams of a million, million thoughts. You have realized what I am.”

Izha fell quiet, the third eye of the corpse staring at John for several prolonged seconds, then beginning to talk just as he did.

“That you are my…”

“That I am your…”

“”…Remus.””

“Oh fuck,” Rave cursed the moment the words were spoken.

Izha laughed. The skeleton rattled but failed to move. The physical influence of the human part of the Lorylim hivemind was unmoving. “Just a few years more than you, that’s all I had, oh, but I grew more powerful than you so much faster, because I heard them. I heard them across the dimension divide, oh it was horrid. It was infinite and horrid. I could hear everything, everything, and I placed it into the beat of my heart and the drums of the pulses of shrieking things. I yearn for the madness of a world undone and you are my tool!”

“I understand your nihilism now,” John admitted. “A Latebloomer’s capacity for telepathy, strong enough to listen even into the elemental planes… if that letter was even half true, you went mad in the first few days.”

“I devoured the raven whole, maggots and all.” Izha retched at the memory, yet laughed all the same. “It doesn’t matter. Nothing does. No one perceives the world for what it is. Only I do, only I do, through the senses of everything, I see the lie that’s told – that things ought to be the way they are and I don’t care. I don’t care.”

“You just want it to stop.”

Izha laughed and laughed. “NO!” he roared, as if he had just heard the most hilarious thing in the world. “YOU THINK WITH PURPOSE STILL! Fine, fine, fine, fine, that’s fine, you will understand what I am doing before long. Oh, your empire will fall, I am devouring it as we speak, you see? Sweeping from Alaska, from the hut where Ned Edwards died, down to all that you hold dear. Oh, I am already everywhere. You were so, so, so careful to look for the Lorylim, but the Lorylim is what I control, not what I am. I am human and humans I overpower just as well.”

John opened up the Harem Comms, only to be met with an error message. He stared at it wide-eyed.

“That was tricky, very tricky, I admit, I admit, but it is not yet time for you to surpass me. For just as Remus was the Godmaker that nourished his stronger brother, so am I… Wellllllll, I haven’t been feeding you challenges as the Rat has, no, no… you entered my plan and now you are difficult to remove, so sad, so sad, you could have joined me, but you are growing too strong too quick and we are not Romulus and Remus after all. We are the rhyme at the beginning of the second act, the melody returned altered in a new song, and like Remus I will undo the current world.”

“What do you mean by that?” John was not yet done trying to draw intel from this nihilistic outgrowth of the human condition. “What do you plan?”

“I said already – all eyes shall be opened.” The eye stretched from its socket and blinked into a toothy grin. “Listen.”

‘JOHN!’ Siena’s voice suddenly reached his mind. John had not even realized the connection was blocked, such was the power of the Latebloomer before him. Even though they were only a few kilometres apart at the most, the shadow spirit, left back at the beach, had not been able to contact him. ‘The survivors are all screaming!’

“Let everything be unravelled, let the Abyss swallow the world!” Izha laughed.

“Gaia will kill you for this!” John hissed.

“For this? No. For what is to come? Yesssssssssss.” Izha’s infection suddenly crumbled, turning into dead spores while his voice faded. “It is useful to be two. One, a sacrifice, the other, a puppet master.”

John regarded the skeleton with one more passing gaze, then turned to run.