Centuries after Trespass, new intruders arrive at the Greensea: human ones. They’re here to explore and learn, and the Greensea is eager to explore and learn as well…
guest story by Zyzzyva
tags: the Greensea, mind control, modern Azuras, nsfw, transformation
The convoy bounced over the rough ground of Western Forest Province. It was nearly two weeks since they’d left the lumber company road behind, and everyone was sick and tired of the journey by now. They’d been jostling and jarring along from the roadhead for longer than the entire first leg of the trip from the university, and had gone maybe a quarter the distance; and had endured well more than four times as much discomfort. So when the frontmost vehicle suddenly slalomed to a halt and pilot Micksa’s head popped through the sunroof and shouted “we’re here!”, it was only a matter of moments before the whole expedition had spilled out of the trucks and milled around them excitedly.
Arbitrator Kevnay, sitting beside them, watched the chaotic, unapproved disembarkation in exasperation. No one had been told to get out yet, and the hazards around them only increased with every kilometer west; if these academics wanted to live through the trip, they needed to follow the professionals’ instructions. But arbitrator Kevnay’s legs and ass were also aching from the long journey, and they wanted to be standing on their own just as badly as any of the others. So they hollered a commanding “No one is to go more than three meters from their vehicle!”, muttered a more measured “keep an eye on your passengers, everyone” into the radio clipped to their jacket front, and then climbed down onto the springy soil themself.
Academician McMasters was already more than three meters from her truck, although not more than that from the convoy; she’d rushed forward to press pilot Micksa with questions.
“This is it, then?” she said, gesturing to the curtain of trees stretching across the field a hundred meters or so in front of the lead truck.
“Yes,” agreed pilot Micksa, who would not have told everyone they were here if they were not here, but understood the academician was simply excited to have reached the part of the expedition where she could set to work: what all the travel had been for, really. “We will go in in the morning.”
“Not now?” asked McMasters.
Arbitrator Kevnay sighed and shook their head. “It is too late to set up camp inside, and in any case there are still preparations to make.” The scholars needed to unload the vehicles and assemble equipment, and arbitrator Kevnay and their team had a task of their own before they would let anyone pass under that shady canopy. “Get your people organized so we can be ready in the morning.”
McMasters, nodded reluctantly, her glance flickering to the treeline, but she had been told her safety depended on following the instructions of the guides. And in any case the two orcs had a head of height and probably her entire bodyweight of muscle on her, each, and no compunction about using it to protect the expedition, even from itself. “All right then. In the morning.” She turned back towards her milling students.
On the truck door beside them, the expedition’s logo was stenciled on in cheap paint: the white facade of the university washed by neon-green waves. The Huldage University 1773 Greensea Expedition had arrived.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Alicia Siuvet, botany grad student, clutched the straps of her heavy pack nervously as everyone walked together towards the forest. The Greensea was an ecological miracle, that much was clear, even from the rare specimens pickled in alcohol or dried and pressed that occasionally made their way back east. But it was also west, deep west, and everything out here was terrifying and strange. The orcs that Academician McMaster had contracted to guard the expedition had said they knew this place—”knew Her”, with the odd approach to pronouns that orcs always took—and even now they were surrounding the group, keeping a causal, alert watch around them. But even that worried her. The whole trip had been an endless litany of instructions for what to do when they arrived: stay with the group. Don’t leave line of sight of the guides. Never go out alone, day or night. Touch nothing except with care and with a buddy. If given an order by a guide, obey it immediately and without hesitation, as if your life depended on it. They wouldn’t be giving such a strict set of rules if the Greensea wasn’t tremendously dangerous, somehow. Alicia’s eagerness to be on such a groundbreaking expedition had ebbed by the mile, and there were a lot of miles from Huldage to the Greensea. Now there was little left except the cold knot of awareness that going someplace no one had ever explored before meant going someplace no one had ever returned from.
The front of the expedition was already passing under the outermost fringe of the trees. Alicia was near the back—no one behind her except Will with a handcart full of supplies and escort Tekref, as rearguard. But even the slow walking pace of academics loaded down with equipment and water filters and can after can of dehydrated vegetables ate up the bare dozen meters from the front of the party to the back. Alicia was terrified, but the fear of looking afraid in front of the academician and all her colleagues and the orcs was stronger still, and she stepped into the shade with nothing more than a tremor in her stride.
It was cool here, immediately, and quiet; but normal forests did that too. Pilot Micksa was leading them to a flat spot near a small creek where they would establish their base camp. “I don’t know what it’s like scientifically,” pilot Micksa had explained the previous night, “but it will fit everyone and we can keep an eye around us from there.” Alicia wasn’t sure why they weren’t just camping outside the Greensea every night like they had the night before, but McMaster had insisted and the orcs had agreed: “the Greensea’s not the only dangerous thing here, and we know where She is.”
None of that had encouraged Alicia at all. But the orcs still seemed, if not quite at ease, at least calm as they proceeded towards guide Micksa’s site. The forest around her was unfamiliar, but they were thousands of miles west of Hymaera Provincial Park where she’d spent her undergrad summers working; even if they weren’t in the deep west, she’d likely recognize no species. But she could begin making observations anyways. Boreal forest, appropriate for this climatic zone. Old-growth (of course). The main vegetation was deciduous, seemed to be mostly oak, or an oak-like species, with some interspersed ash-like trees. Ground cover mostly leaves and humus, with broad-leafed ferns in the low places. Botany helped distract her, and by the time she saw the front of the expedition start to disperse into a small flat area and begin dropping packs and totes, she was almost calm again.
On a rise above the campsite, a pale green stag stood, tall and still, watching them with gleaming green eyes. Alicia shouted in alarm and grabbed Will’s shoulder. “Do you see that!? What is that!?” The stag was already gone, but escort Tekref padded up to her and nodded.
“Sharp eyes. She’s been watching us since we entered Her, of course.”
The “Her” didn’t sound so much like orcish anthropomorphization anymore.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Derine Mestuya, also a graduate student, also in botany, was excited beyond all belief. This was a career-making opportunity of the kind that came along once in a lifetime, if that—everyone here was going to come out with a graduate thesis at the very least—but more than that, it was just fascinating to see an entirely new ecosystem. And it was a new ecosystem. It looked like a boreal forest but by the time she was done setting up her tent she was sure this was something different. There were no animals, for one, or at least no insects—which honestly would have been weirder than no animals at all, but she suspected there weren’t any larger animals either. She’d poked at a fallen log and found it covered with moss and mushrooms and lichen, of far more different varieties than would seem to have been able to grow on such a small section of wood. They also were growing in clumps, and each patch seemed quite loosely attached to the log for something that had grown there.
Already the idea that the various plants had not grown on the log from spores but had instead somehow physically migrated to it as grown plants was floating around in her head. Which was silly, of course, or at least unsupported by any real evidence, but it was the sort of thought that this place inspired. The idea of a whole forest without animal life, with motile plant life filling the decomposer niches. Maybe all the animalian niches.
No. She was getting ahead of the evidence again. It was so hard not to let the imagination run wild in this place. The others were feeling it too. By the time the camp was set up, rather late in the day, as everyone kept getting distracted by some new feature of the clearing they were in, the whole expedition was buzzing with excitement. Even Ian, who was a biologist of the animal sort, seemed more intrigued than frustrated by the apparent lack of his entire field.
The orcs were insistent that no one leave the campsite after it began to get dark, and the various scholars had accepted the firm restriction with greater or lesser grace. Instead they huddled around the hotplates they’d brought and ate hot canned stew. McMaster had brought six bottles of champagne, three for their safe arrival and three for their safe departure, and they opened the first set and drank a good Culevan vintage fizzing in steel canteens.
Even with the orcs politely declining the toast, it was little enough alcohol to go around the sixteen of them, but Kerry the mycologist, in his inimitable way, was loud and boisterous on the mouthful of champagne. He was next to Derine, unluckily enough, and she spent the evening listening to excited talk about the strange fungal growths he’d noticed towards the boggy ground near the creek—which was fair enough, she was already plotting out her rotten log experiments—and listening to increasingly unsubtle suggestions that she spend her first night in the Greensea in his tent instead of hers. She hadn’t been in his truck on the journey up; she wasn’t sure who had been, actually, but she felt a sudden twinge of sympathy for them. She ate her stew, tried to ignore Kerry, and thought ahead to what she would do tomorrow.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Well after nightfall, once the humans had all returned to their tents to sleep, arbitrator Kevnay wandered away from the camp, across the ridge where the stag had been that morning. On the far side the rolling ground got rougher and more choked with outcrops of mossy rock, making it a perfect place to hide, if you needed to. Arbitrator Kevnay walked casually around one of the rocks and greeted offering Lyndistin, seated there.
Until the previous night, offering Lyndistin had been chaplain Lyndistin—a nonsense name, barely comprehensible, let alone grammatical, but the humans had accepted it without question. Now that they were offering Lyndistin once more, the orcs were hoping to avoid direct questions; the humans, all busy with their own work, had not seemed to notice their absence yet.
“She hates the cooking,” said offering Lyndistin. Their eyes glowed bright green in the dark of the forest night.
“If we get through this with nothing more than grumbling about propane burners, I will be intensely grateful,” replied arbitrator Kevnay.
Offering Lyndistin’s mouth twitched in amusement. “Yes,” they agreed. “They are curious, and She is curious; they are already taking samples, and She is planning how She will take samples.”
It was not arbitrator Kevnay’s place to argue with one such as the Greensea, but they made what feeble riposte they could: “I agreed to protect these people. We all did.”
“She says She will not harm them. But She knows humans are… brittle. She says that if they do not leave the same as they have entered Her…” Offering Lyndistin shrugged.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
In the morning, Alicia set out to catalogue the plants of the area immediately around the campsite. Escort Tekref and escort Vinmey were staying by the camp itself all day, to keep the base camp secure; Alicia intended to stay in eyesight of them all day long. It wasn’t like going exploring would find species that were somehow more novel than the novel species right here, after all. Pilot Micksa and arbitrator Kevnay were leading a group of six or seven down the creek to a lake that pilot Micksa said was twenty minutes’ hike that way. The remaining orcs were patrolling a loose perimeter around the Huldage scholars as they dispersed into the near woods to start studying.
Alicia had her notebook and her camera, and began working her way through the plant life inside the ring of tents itself. Groundcover fern, broad leafed, reminiscent of the ostrich fern, although physically smaller and with no visible sporangia in May. Growing in low ground, probably requiring damp soil. Roll 1, exposures 1-8. Moss, unusually vibrant blue-green, modestly tall nonvascular stems 3-4cm above ground level. Fairly widespread in the areas around individual trees. Roll 1, exposures 9-14. Flowering plant, resembling a violet with its thick spade-shaped leaves and blue-white petals. Taller, though, stems looking almost vine-like. Only the one clump of it near a rock at the side of the camp. Roll 1, exposures 15-24. On the rock, lichen…
The others around the campfire last night had been right; there were no animals here at all, even when carefully poking through moss and humus to look for insects, where there would certainly have been in a normal forest. She hadn’t mentioned the stag, for some reason. Shyness and unwillingness to contradict all the others, or embarrassment at how she had panicked at seeing it. She wasn’t sure. It seemed less real a day later, a manifestation of her worries about the trip.
… of course there were animals here now, two dozen of them, camped out on the middle of this plants-only zone. That brought the nervousness right back. She wasn’t sure what had happened to the animal life, if they’d never existed or if they’d been eaten by the plants somehow, but it somehow made their intrusion seem all the more hazardous. What did the plants think of them?
She fought it down by concentrating more on the survey. Plants didn’t think, not this second, slightly different clump of violet-esque flowers (roll 3, exposures 8-19) not this shelf fungus (roll 3, exposures 20-24 & roll 4, exposures 1-2) growing from the trunk of an older oak-like tree (roll 4, exposures 3-16) nor—
She looked up to search for the next plant to examine and it was there, only a dozen meters away or less. The stag. It was a huge animal, and it was an animal, even if its fur was matted so thick with moss until it looked like the green stuff was its fur, she could see its flesh on its muzzle and its bright green eyes, staring back at her coolly and without fear, she could see its gnarled brown antlers with the first red berries of summer just beginning to bud-
She screamed and threw herself back away from it. Escort Tekref was at her side in seconds, in what must have been a heck of a sprint and which the orc, of course, barely seemed to notice. The stag-thing turned and ambled away, as if it disdained to be seen by two people at once.
“Are you all right,” asked escort Tekref, intperposing their massive musculature between her and the stag-thing as they helped her back to her feet.
“We’re not supposed to be here,” said Alicia, wildly, “this isn’t a place for us.”
“We have permission to be here,” said escort Tekref, which did less to reassure her than they might have hoped.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Derine was trying to figure out what this ecosystem did instead of animals. So was half the team, of course, but she figured her experiment might provide the best data quickly. Really the hard part was finding deadwood that wasn’t already blanketed in one or all of the dozen different shades of moss and mushroom in this place.
In the end she found a bit of log that was at least partially clear, scraped the main vegetation off of it with a rock (it came off easily) and carried it back to the camp. She placed it carefully next to the larger log she’d first noticed, so close it was almost but not quite touching. She took a t+0h photo, and settled back to watch.
The idea was straightforward. The state of all the rotting material in the forest—which her search that morning had only confirmed—meant that the various theoretically-sessile decomposers had to be colonizing new matter very quickly indeed. She would watch the logs and take photos every hour to see if anything was moving, and study the plants settled in on the larger log in the meantime.
After the first hour, the outermost flake of lichen was no closer, and she took a second photograph and returned to trying to classify the various fungi. By the second hour, there was still no change in position, and she was wondering if she perhaps had misjudged and was going to be wasting her day. But even as she started turning back to the battered paperback Taxonomy of Mushrooms that she’d been consulting, motion caught her eye.
It was a pillbug, a regular old woodlouse, crawling from the old log to the new one. If Derine hadn’t spent the last two hours picking through the log with a steel sampling rod, she would have thought she’d somehow missed it. Instead, she just stared, fascinated, at the first wild animal she’d seen since she entered the Greensea.
It crawled onto the second log and stopped about halfway up the outer surface. She wondered for a moment what it looked like when a pillbug ate detritus—she’d knew they were decomposers, but wasn’t sure if they stood still or grazed or tunneled or what—and then the pillbug exploded. Green fibres curled out of its underside, across the wood, tiny rhyzoids rooting it to the surface, even as its shell disintegrated into a mass of thin needle-shaped gametophyte extrusions off of tiny soft stems. In moments—no more than five or six seconds, tops—a small bed of moss was planted on the side of the log.
“Holy fucking shit,” said Derine.
She poked at the centre of the patch as gently as she could in her excitement, trying to see if there was anything left of the pillbug. Is this how the animal components of the ecosystem worked? Had they somehow syncretized themselves into the plant life, or were the plants imitating animals they themselves had since outcompeted, or what? This was incredible. This was the find of the damn century, doctorates and a lifetime of papers for her and frankly everyone else, she could hand them out like fucking party favours, this was amazing…
She had not found the pillbug. It seemed to have dissolved completely. There was still plenty of room on the second log, though, which meant more instances would be following, and soon. She wondered how the pillbugs appeared—did the moss condense back down into them, or did it grow them like berries? She turned to the larger log and began combing through the growths on it, looking for anything that might be another insect growing or forming or who knew what. She was close in now, her face practically pressed to the rotting wood as she scraped it over and over again with the sample rod, looking for something she hoped she would recognize when she saw it. She did recognize the sporangia of the fungal growth when she reached it—she’d spent two hours in the mushroom guidebook this very morning, refreshing her undergrad fieldwork memories—but barely noticed it. It was normal plant life, not the miraculous monster she was looking for. She glanced at it for a second from a distance of only a few centimeters, then started to move on.
All the sporangia popped at once. A cloud of spores so thick as to look like smoke for a moment engulfed her face. She coughed, coughed again, instinctively rubbed her watering eyes with an arm.
What had happened? She’d just had a huge load of unknown spores dumped into her. Was this bad? It might be bad. She grabbed her canteen and splashed her eyes and nose with cold filtered water, took a huge swig to clean her mouth out. The fungus was growing on a log, decomposing dead cellulose. It probably couldn’t grow on a person, even if it was a weird animal-hybrid thing. And besides. The orcs had laid out an endless list of safety precautions on the way up, but they’d all involved staying in groups and not exploring out of sight of the guides and knowing how to sprint for the trucks if ordered. Reading between the lines, they were trying to keep the expedition safe from big scary things hiding in the woods, not the forest itself. If the plants were dangerous the orcs would have known, and would have told them. So she was safe.
This was fine. Everything was going to be just fine.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
On their way back from the lake, arbitrator Kevnay’s radio crackled. “Seeing something ahead and to the right,” said offering Lyndistin, the code for wanting to speak to them.
“I’ll check it out. Probably nothing but better safe than sorry,” said arbitrator Kevnay loudly, but the humans were too busy discussing the strange fish they’d seen to be paying attention to what arbitrator Kevnay was doing. “Stick close to pilot Micksa.”
They turned away from the group into the woods, knowing that offering Lyndistin’s possession by the Greensea would let them find them quickly if necessary, but in fact offering Lyndistin turned out to be right at the large tree atop a rise that arbitrator Kevnay instinctively went to first anyways.
“She has one,” said offering Lyndistin.
“That was fast,” sighed arbitrator Kevnay. “Which one?”
“I don’t know,” said offering Lyndistin awkwardly. In the hopes of keeping the humans from noticing their absence, the orcs had tried to keep them away from the humans as much as possible on the trip out; but it meant that they didn’t know the humans too well either. “One of the ones who stayed at the camp. Female, black hair, kind of short. Obsessed with fallen tree trunks for some reason.”
“Student Derine, sounds like, maybe,” said arbitrator Kevnay. “All right. If She has one and is satisfied, then my congratulations to the great one on Her success, and we shall continue as agreed, then.”
“Yes,” said offering Lyndistin, their eyes glowing an even brighter green for a moment. “She is pleased with us, and still comfortable with the actions of Her guests.”
“Good. Then we can move on and the expedition shouldn’t have any more trouble. They can just do their science business without us or Her having to be worried.”
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Derine noticed nothing within herself for the rest of the day, but that night her dreams were green. She was in a sea of grass, of leaves, of green flowers with green petals. There was something beneath her, swimming, vast and powerful, but she was bobbing atop the surface. She was safe from it, but would never see it if she remained up here; it would remain a mystery to her, just as she would remain a mystery to it.
She could not help but be curious. She wanted to know what it was, and dove, swimming down through the green until suddenly the sea turned glass and she saw Her.
She woke up rested, the dream already fading. Her throat and nose were raw, like she’d been snoring all night, and she took a huge drink of water before heading out into the campsite to have breakfast with the others. She’d slept late, unusually; Marco had already spooned out most of the portions of oatmeal that would be the meal, and the others were planning their days. Academician McMasters was talking to pilot Micksa about properly doing a survey of the surrounding area, another group was collecting for the day’s push to the lake, and various others were planning their own activities.
The last night, the others had been oddly skeptical of her bug observation—well, it was kind of absurd, and she’d only seen it the once, and been too shocked and amazed to take photos at the time. She was going to get photos today, maybe a specimen if she could figure out how to catch one.
She hadn’t mentioned the spores. It hadn’t seemed important.
Alicia Siuvet, also a botany student, and who she knew vaguely from before the expedition, had been more receptive to the plant-animal hybrid idea than most of the others, and this morning offered to help. Derine took her up on it. They headed together over to the pair of logs. The smaller one was just as caked in growth as the larger, now—”they’re pillbugs, maybe they move more at night,” Alicia suggested—so Derine decided to just look for a new log.
“We should go together,” Alicia insisted. “The orcs were pretty clear about that.”
“All right,” agreed Derine, although she was less worried. They set off into the surrounding woods, trying to find more deadwood they could use for the sample. It was tough: Derine had searched yesterday and not found much, and Alicia was reluctant to pass the hazy perimeter of circling orcs. Derine felt more comfortable on this second full day in the Greensea, and the orcs for that matter seemed more relaxed too; but she respected Alicia’s concerns and stayed close to camp.
Midmorning she had the sudden idea to check the top of an outcropping whose base they’d searched already, and sure enough there was a largish branch there, still mostly clean.
“Excellent,” agreed Alicia. “Head back to camp to watch it?”
“There’s some more rot just over here,” said Derine, pointing to a fallen tree a small distance away. It felt ripe. She walked over and Alicia, not wanting to be left alone even so close to camp still, followed.
Derine put the branch down next to the part where the mosses were thickest. “All right,” she said. “You have your camera ready?”
“Yes,” agreed Alicia. “But it might be a while. You said it was two whole hours yesterday.”
“Yeah,” agreed Derine, but the yellow-green moss nearest to the twig was thick and healthy and had just about finished chewing through the thickness of the tree here; it felt crowded, and was ready to find new food sources. She assumed, looking at it. It only made sense.
She watched that patch of moss closely, and soon enough there was some kind of swelling towards the centre. The outermost surface of the plant swelled outwards, like a tiny balloon was inflating beneath it. “Look, there!” she said, pointing.
‘Where?” asked Alicia. Derine almost had to poke the bulge with her fingertip before Alicia saw it. “Oh, right. Sharp eyes, Derine.”
Around the edge of the patch of moss, the plant was… drying out. Not quite withering, and not dying, either, quite, but all the vitality of the organism was being concentrated into the bulge. Derine and Alicia watched. The bulge twisted, the leaves folding and flipping, and a tiny grey arthropod crawled down the log and over to the stick.
“Fuck fuck fuck fuck,” said Alicia, awed.
“That’s basically what I said yesterday,” laughed Derine.
Like its predecessor the day before, the pillbug burst on the other piece of wood and moss expanded out to blanket a patch, looking just like the moss that had abandoned the fallen tree.
“Did you get photos?” asked Derine.
“Fuck,” said Alicia. “No. Completely forgot.”
“S’ok,” said Derine, “we’ll find another bit ready to go.”
She looked down the log, searching for some other plant-animal that wanted a new home. There! There was… the same fungus that had sprayed her yesterday. She still hadn’t told Alicia or anyone. “Alicia—” she said, and then continued “—come over here, look at this.”
Alicia obligingly headed over and looked, and Derine saw the sporangia wet and full in the dappled forest light, and said “closer,” and Alicia leaned in closer, right close to the log and the fungus and the spores waiting there so ready, and Derine held her breath and Alicia knelt there for a long, long moment, and said “look at what, Derine?”
“Nothing,” said Derine, confused, and confused as to why she was confused. “I—I thought I saw another insect coming up.” Which had to have been what she was thinking, or why else would she have pointed it out to Alicia? “Let’s—let’s keep looking.”
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Alicia returned with Derine to camp for lunch, full of excited ideas of her own. They’d gotten a full roll of pictures of a different moss patch spawning or becoming a bug and then returning to moss; Derine had proved quite talented at finding them just before the moment of transition. The hadn’t been fast enough to catch a bug specimen, but had cut a section of branch with the moss-form on it and had jarred that—hopefully if it decided to become a pillbug again it wouldn’t be able to get out and leave them with nothing.
“These woods,” proclaimed Alicia triumphantly as they reached the cooking site, waving the jar in the air, “are full of godsdamned plantimals.”
The other scholars looked up at their entrance. “So you saw it too?” asked Will. He no longer sounded skeptical, now that there were two of them, but the jar of rotting stick was probably not super convincing.
“Yeah,” said Derine, sitting down to regale him with the tale of their dead log adventure. Alicia wasn’t quite listening. Escort Tekref was watching them across the circle, chewing on a ration bar and looking at her. She passed the jar back to Derine and walked over to escort Tekref, who led her out to the ring of tents before they stopped.
“You knew about the plant-animal things before we arrived here,” said Alicia, not quite accusing.
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you warn me!” She had meant to say ‘tell us’, but somehow it came out different.
Escort Tekref paused. “I am sorry for that. But we were contracted to protect you and I swear before you and before the wide sky that you were in no danger, nor would we have let you be.”
The orc’s aggressive sincerity took some of the wind out of her sails. “But why not tell us first?”
“You are here to learn, and what I could have told you would be… misleading, probably. We know less about this place than you seem to think we do, or maybe know different. I don’t know the sort of things human science is interested in here.”
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Derine sat in her tent, her wonderful little jar beside her, taking notes on what she had discovered.
Moss-form resembles standard bryophytic moss. No obvious alterations because of its woodlouse-form, not even centralization, although the growth pattern remains roughly circular. Woodlouse-form details wait for development of pictures, but again resembled normal woodlouse. Colour grey, changes from and to moss-green distinctly and visibly.
The moss and the pillbug are in a symbiotic relationship with each other. They possess the same being or material body as each other, as well as tightly intertwined spiritual essences, but not the same shape. When in one form, the other is contained within, and they trade possession of the exterior as necessary. The transformations are fueled partly by their shared vital force, and partly by tapping into the powerful ambient magical field of the Greensea.
She stopped and stared at what she had written. It was insane. It barely even made sense, and was absurd where it wasn’t incomprehensible. And she’d found nothing resembling evidence for it.
Yet. It was right, and the evidence would be there now that she knew to look. She shook her head and tried to get the certainty out. It wouldn’t leave. This was what was happening, and she could measure it and investigate the details of it. Why was she so damn sure suddenly, as if this was some self-evident fact she’d known all her life?
The spores. That was a self-evident fact too. Even as the thought came to her her mouth and nose tingled; and her lungs, and a steadily spreading zone that was already filling her head and torso. The spores had colonized her, and were linking her with their siblings across the Greensea. They were joining with her, intertwining with her being just like the moss and the pillbug, and like so many other of the organisms in the forest.
She flopped back onto her sleeping bag and lay there. She could feel the spores spreading, only they weren’t spores anymore; they were growing fungal masses, she could feel individual hyphae snaking their way through her body to seed new regions. It should have been agonizing, but it wasn’t; the plantlife and Derine Mestuya were the same, now, and this readjustment was straightforward and natural. She watched her newly complexified body altering for a while, and then lay back and tried to think what she needed to do.
She couldn’t tell anyone, of course. The team could not find out about this. Even as she thought it, she could feel some of the hyphae retreat slightly from her skin. They couldn’t find out, she was here to study the forest, not be studied by her colleagues. She could definitely hide it, at least for a little while. She curled one arm, watched a bicep flex that wouldn’t have been visible the day before, human muscle now twining and strengthening with fungal thread. Hide some of it anyways.
But what to do then? She now knew what to look for in the forest, and where, as she’d already started subconsciously doing with the tree trunk that morning. But that could only be explained away as luck for so long. And, in a sense, it was unfair to have this gift that no one else in the expedition had. She’d tried to share it with Alicia, she was now realizing, and why shouldn’t she? This connection, this fusion, was beautiful and powerful and enlightening; it was a gift she would pass forward.
She was completely combined now, head to toe, and she sat up again (one swift motion, muscles pulsing in her abdomen) and tried to think what exactly she should do next. She could try for Alicia again, or someone else, even, but the second patch of mushroom hadn’t joined with her when she tried, for reasons still somehow out of reach of even her new knowledge. She’d have to do it herself, but how?
She emerged from the tent into near-dark, lit only by the glow of the big cooking burner keeping supper warm and the flashlights of the last few students still out here. “There you are, lazybones,” teased Vincent. She’d been her tent, transforming, for nearly the whole day.
“Are you all right? Is everything going ok?” asked escort Sullet.
“Yeah, everything’s fine, just great,” said Derine, evasively but also accurately. Escort Sullet looked her over and then nodded in understanding, but Derine didn’t notice, her attention suddenly caught by Kerry, still eating something across the circle.
Kerry, always horny and up for a lay. Kerry, who’d already hit on her a few nights ago, even, when she was just a scrawny human student and not pulsing with botanical vitality. Kerry, who was a godsdamned mycologist, the perfect person to gift full to bursting with spores.
She caught his eye across the circle and licked her lips. Kerry pantomimed exaggerated enthused suprise and she laughed a little. She could already feel her tongue changing, taste buds and sporangia becoming one and the same, and down below her sexual organs were likewise preparing to impregnate any partner with fruiting bodies and hyphae and spores, spores, spores.
She hadn’t felt so horny since she was a teenager. She was going to love this, almost as much as she knew Kerry was going to.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
“Two,” crackled offering Lyndistin’s voice on the radio.
Arbitrator Kevnay, already settling towards sleep, took a moment to wake back up, and another to realize what offering Lyndistin meant. “What the hell!?” they said.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Derine woke up full of anticipation and changes. She was taller than she’d gone to sleep, and stronger. The symbiotic fungus was still growing, urging her to burst from her human shape entirely and become something gorgeously alien. She fought the urge down without difficulty, not least because she knew it would be only a day or two at the outside before everyone had been joined and there was no need to hide anymore. The spores were adapting to human physiology quickly: Kerry had already unified with them, far faster than she had. She could feel him wake up beside her, and rolled over to kiss him. Their tongues grappled for a moment, his still human, hers now so much more.
She had explained what she had done to him last night, as the fungus took root in his body; and he had quickly agreed with her, as of course she knew he would. It only made sense. Now, in the morning, she didn’t need to confirm with him what they were going to do with the other members of the expedition: she knew it, the knowledge flowing into her without words or images as her body connected with his. It was so much better than merely human sex. She could feel herself, so much clearer than she’d ever felt as a human, and she could feel him, and the forest around them.
She broke away eventually, ready to go out and give this wonderful gift to her colleagues as well, and smiled a playfully wicked smile at him. He smiled back. His eyes were green—she didn’t think they had been before. She had to look at herself too, once her more important work was done, although if her eyes were changed they wouldn’t be the only thing changed by then. The fungus was still not insistent of anything, but it was ready to alter her more fully and she looked forward to it.
Instead she pulled some human clothes on—already they felt uncomfortable, but that was most likely just the centimeters of bust and hips and height she’d put on since the last time she’d worn clothes, eight hours ago—and headed out. She’d missed a meal again: her transformation had been fueled by a couple of ration bars in her tent, and by the generous vitality of the forest around them. The team already dispersing into the woods, but that was fine: if she could meet them one-on-one today, things would likely go much smoother. One of the orcs was still near the tents and she smiled at them until the orc looked away first. She didn’t want to deal with the orcs yet. She’d share with them too, eventually, but they were better prepared and organized and she wanted the rest of the humans on her side before she did that. Instead, she left the camp for where Meyhan was working alone.
Meyhan was digging soil samples out of a boggy patch near the creek. Derine squatted down beside her. “What are you looking for?”
“Worms,” Meyhan said. “Or whatever we have here instead of worms.”
“Independent roots, squirming through the dirt on their own,” suggested Derine.
Meyhan laughed and looked up from the mud. “What are you doing over here anyway?”
“Wanted to help you out,” said Derine, with just a little bit of smokiness to her voice.
Meyhan looked at Derine again and blinked. “Have you… been working out?”
“Sort of,” purred Derine. She definitely looked hotter than she had a few days ago, and her body was pumping out sex pheromones to take the edge off any confused skepticism Meyhan might have mustered. She wasn’t going to fuck Meyhan into union, like she had with Kerry; she didn’t know if Meyhan would be down, and with so many people in the camp she didn’t really have time to find out appropriately. But Meyhan’s eyes were roving her body, and her breathing was fast and shallow, and when Derine leaned in towards her Meyhan closed her eyes and leaned in too.
Derine kissed her, her tongue slipping warm and organic into Meyhan’s mouth, dazzling her with little sparks of pleasure even as her fungal gift puffed out. The kiss went on a long, long moment, before Derine pulled away. “Thank you,” she said, and meant it: Meyhan’s willingness had helped her in bringing her in greatly, and she had loved kissing her in and of itself too. “I promise you’ll figure out the worms very soon.”
Meyhan blinked at her, still not sure what had just happened, and Derine stood up with a smile and set off seemingly at random into the woods. Vincent was that direction, and she had something just for him.
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
“Eight now, going to be nine pretty soon,” said offering Lyndistin, in a tone of despairing resignation.
“What the fuck is happening,” snarled arbitrator Kevnay.
“Great one,” added escort Sullet.
“What the fuck is happening, great one,” repeated arbitrator Kevnay.
All of the orcs were here with offering Lyndistin and arbitrator Kevnay, except for the two on today’s lake expedition, and even they were surreptitiously listening on their radios. They had come partly to lend support to arbitrator Kevnay’s unusual protest against the actions of a being so much more powerful than the orcs, and partly to get away from Derine, who, though none of them would have admitted it out loud, was freaking all of them out.
“She doesn’t know!” snapped offering Lyndistin back. “The human is running amok for some damn reason, and understanding humans and keeping them safe is your job!”
“Our job? The agreement was that She could choose one human to learn from and understand Herself in the manner of human science, and the rest of them would be left uninvolved!”
“She left them uninvolved! She took one and then waited to learn, as agreed!”
“Well someone is running around consuming humans and it’s certainly fucking not us!”
“It’s fucking not Her either!” Offering Lyndistin took a moment to steady themself and repair the fraying emotional separation between them and the Greensea. “She agreed not to coerce the human, and will not and cannot hold her back.”
“She agreed not to coerce a sapient being because it was the right thing to—” began arbitrator Kevnay, and then stopped arguing. “Student Derine is doing this on her own.”
“Yes.”
“Then we need to stop her, now.”
“That is what She has been saying you need to do.”
“No, great one, we all need to stop her, You too, and quickly. Where is student Derine now?”
Offering Lyndistin did not even hesitate, knowing without thought exactly where their rampaging sister was. “She has finished with the last human at the camp, and she is heading towards those at the lake. So are the others who have understood what has been done to them.”
“Damnit, damnit, damnit,” cursed arbitrator Kevnay, and started running. “She’s trying to overrun them, isn’t she. Pilot Micksa, escort Vinmey,”—this last into their radio—”get the lake party back together with you two, we’re coming.”
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
Alicia’s good mood from the moss-arthropod discovery lasted well into the next day. She went to the lake with the others, curious about the strange fish they said they’d seen, especially in light of what the pillbugs implied about the lack of animals on land. Were the fish also partially plant? Then why difference from the predominantly-plant creatures on land? She worked cheerfully away at trying to study the fish until mid-afternoon, when the two orcs with them at the lake started casually but urgently trying to round them back up together into a group. The other scholars seemed almost annoyed by this, like they had already forgotten the hours of safety lectures on the trip up.
Alicia hadn’t, and Alicia did what guide Micksa said immediately, although with a cold feeling in her gut. She was keyed up for something bad and when a half-dozen of the others wandered out of the woods towards them, rather than getting up and asking what was going on, like academician McMasters did, she tensed up in anticipation of the other shoe dropping.
Derine came out of the woods. She was huge, two meters tall and a meter across at the shoulders, and as everyone turned to look at her the last of her shirt ripped apart with a dramatic flourish. Her whole body was an inhuman grey-white, and everything that would have been a bony extremity, shoulders, elbows, knees, feet, was a mass of thick sharp wedges emerging out of her increasingly-vague human outline. Her black hair was longer than it had ever been and glistened like it was wet, and swished and twisted behind her. With every breath, a thick cloud of golden dust plumed from her nose and mouth, and gleamed in the light in front of her face: her eyes were as green and bright as magnesium flares.
“I’ve discovered something wonderful,” said Derine, and Alicia was already running.
In the event of a total emergency—”you’ll know it if you see it,” and Alicia had seen it and knew it—the whatever-else-happens instructions were to regroup at the trucks with the doors locked. She didn’t have guide Micksa’s very impressive sense of direction, but she knew where the trucks were and she was going to get there and get out of this fucking forest.
Alicia was sprinting, as fast as she’d ever run in her life, but Derine was casually, almost indifferently faster. She was less than fifty meters from the lake when Derine caught her and spun her in a half-tackle, half-embrace and carried her roughly into the ground. Alicia’s pulse was still too high to even feel pain at the rough fall, instead focusing on Derine’s eyes blazing above her.
“There’s no need for that,” said Derine, sounding almost hurt. “What I have is wonderful, and I want to share it with you.”
“I don’t want it,” gasped Alicia. The blood was pounding in her temples and the air, so close to Derine’s steaming breath, smelled like honey and rot. It was becoming somehow hard to think. Only her fear kept her pushing forward.
“You should want it,” said Derine, throatily. “It helps in so many ways. I had—”
Something knocked Derine bodily off of her. Alicia rolled on her side to look and saw the stag, green and huge, snorting and stamping one foot as Derine stood back up, and then it lowered its head and charged again, slamming Derine into a tree with a half-tonne of unanimal vigor.
“What the hell?” shouted Derine, apparently unhurt but momentarily trapped in a cage of branching antlers.
Alicia started running again. It was harder now, the pain in her back trickling in, her windpipe burning with exertion. She wasn’t sure if she could make it all the way to the trucks now. When she saw the orc, she almost collapsed with relief.
“Found her. She’s still safe,” said escort Tekref into their radio. They helped hold Alicia up, their massive orcish arms enfolding her as she tried to catch her breath and keep her knees from locking.
“What is- what is-?” she panted, too tired to even finish the sentence properly.
“You were right, we should have explained to you,” said escort Tekref.
“Explained? —what?”
“Some things we didn’t tell you because we could not. Some things we didn’t tell you because it was not our place to. But some things we didn’t tell you because we thought it would make it easier for us if you just didn’t know them.” Escort Tekref sat down beside her. “We were wrong, and we were wrong to decide that.”
“What, didn’t you, tell us?” demanded Alicia, her breath slowly coming back to her. “About the, plant-animal things? That they would, fucking eat, us? Like they, ate poor Derine?”
“That’s… not quite what happened,” said escort Tekref, and sighed. “You came here to study the Greensea, and contracted us to keep you safe while you did so. To keep you safe, we spoke to Her.” They gestured vaguely and expansively at the forest around them. “She wanted to study you too, and wanted to learn about human science, and what it could tell Her about Herself. We didn’t tell you because… it was easier not to. We thought it would work out.”
“It clearly didn’t,” said Alicia, acidly.
“No. But it was the wrong choice, even if nothing had gone wrong. You deserved to be told. If you knew that one of you would be chosen to be studied, maybe you wouldn’t have come, but if you had come this whole mess wouldn’t have happened.”
“How, exactly, would knowing the plants wanted to study us have stopped them from trying to ‘study’ all of us?”
Escort Tekref laughed. “You think this was Her? She told that stag to help you. This whole thing is the act of your poor friend back there, who got a taste of something greater and thought it was all about her.”
Alicia looked at them. “You can’t be blaming Derine for this, she would have never—!”
“I do not blame her. I told you, I blame myself and arbitrator Kevnay and the rest of the cadre for this. But humans are… brittle. They do not bend like orcs. They stand tall, or break. I do not think student Derine is irreparably broken. But she needs to be guided back to safety soon, as we should have been guiding her from the beginning.”
⁂ ⁂ ⁂
“Get away from me, you stupid animal!” shouted Derine. The fight was going nowhere: the fungus regrew instantly and helped her human tissues heal nearly as fast, but the stag clearly had something similar going on. She’d actually managed to snap one of its antlers clean in half, and a fresh green sapling was already growing and thickening back into place from the stump. She could feel it—her rage and frustration connecting her nearly as strongly, if less intimately, as with Kerry—but it wouldn’t obey her. “Just fuck off!”
The stag stayed in front of her, gazing baleful and green at her, and then suddenly it turned and walked off, past an orc walking towards her.
The orc was completely naked, except for a pouch strapped around one upper arm, and tattoos Derine couldn’t read traced up and down their impressive musculature. Their eyes glowed green, even fiercer than stag’s had.
“The stag was yours, then,” said Derine, understanding. “But these are my friends, and I’m not going to let someone else enjoin them.”
“The stag is not mine. The stag is part of the Greensea. I offered myself to Her four days ago, and two days ago She chose you.”
The words struck Derine with the same sort of odd certainty as the pillbug had, back when she was just starting out. The Greensea was a person, or not really that but an entity at any rate, and the fungus was just an avenue of connection. Insignificant, until Derine had tried to use it like she was in charge, and not simply a lesser partner of a being that was within the forest but far larger than it.
“Awwww, shit,” said Derine, and sat down suddenly. She felt tired, and hungry, and very, very foolish. She wanted to cry. “I’m sorry, fuck, I’m sorry—”
The orc laid a comforting hand on her shoulder. She could actually feel the compassionate sympathy flowing through down the arm into her. “It was new to you and you did not understand. It was new to Her, too, in a way, and She did not realize what would come of taking a human thus. I am offering Lyndistin, and it was once new to me, long ago, but no longer. I will help you.”
“What is going to happen, then?”
Offering Lyndistin pulled a radio out of their pouch, weirdly prosaic and concrete under the circumstances, and flicked it on for a moment. Arbitrator Kevnay, shouting something, but calmly, like they already had the situation in hand. “The other orcs can restore your friends. She will help: She is eager to be clean of this. It will be tedious and labourious and probably unpleasant, but nothing has been done to them that cannot eventually be reversed. They will be safe.”
“And me?”
“Oh,” said offering Lyndistin, “there is no safety on my path, or on yours, now. But what you touched was real, and what you are feeling is real, and I can help you be more than you were or were once ever capable of being. If you choose it.”
Derine looked down at her hand. It wasn’t human anymore: it had grown longer and stronger, the joints and knuckles sharp and carapaced with fungal growth, the nails sharper still. The flesh was grey, a fusion of mammalian and fungal that was no longer either. It had seemed so beautiful when she had done it, an hour ago. Now it was just strange.
But it could be beautiful again.
She put her hand in offering Lyndistin’s, and let them pull her back to her feet. “All right. What next, then?” she said.
Author’s Note: This story, like all my stories set in Azuras, was based around ideas me and Devi had batted around for a bit. (It would feel weird to just set up shop in her sandbox without talking to her a bunch first.) It also has a bit of a debt to Annihilation, the book, above and beyond the way that the setting of that book heavily influenced my ideas of the Greensea’s ecology in general: the spores in particular are a pretty direct homage. Presumably the Greensea also likes Jeff Vandermeer.
This particular story was originally going to be way darker, or at least more fucked up, with everyone getting enspored, even Alicia, and in general being less of an adventure-with-transformations-and-sex, and more of a vaguely sexy body horror story. But, like many of my supposed-to-be-dark stories, it twisted in my hands until everyone made it through ok, or in this case at least not dead/brainwashed. Derine’s slightly ambiguous ending is about 1/10th as messed up as I originally planned everyone to be: I am beginning to suspect I just can’t write dark in practice. I like a lot of my stories that failed as horror, including this one, so maybe I shouldn’t stop aiming there as much as I should stop expecting to reach it.
Even in the original horror idea, through, there was a scene where the orcs and the Greensea shout angrily at each other about whose fault this was.
Editor’s Note: Zyzzyva has been one of my truest writing friends for years, and I am just as honored to host this story as I was the first, two-and-a-half years ago. He has been immensely supportive of my work, eager to listen to my odd ideas, brainstorm, and come back with something even better and more creative. In most respects, the conceit of the Greensea—this eldritch hive-mind-forest-thing that exists across multiple stories—is his creation more than mine; unfailingly, his use of tone and his eye for the eldritch far surpass anything I can create. Thank you for again playing in my setting, Zyz, and creating a story as grand and unsettling as its subject matter.