We warned the inn, when we requested rooms, that we’d be leaving very early, and made sure everything was settled in advance. Logan had his own and the rest of us piled into two, three to a bed. Since the town around us was still very much awake and active, we closed the windows tightly to shut out sounds and smells.
The light peeking around the curtains barely showed at all when Logan thumped on the doors of our rooms to wake us up.
“You look twitchy,” I told him, through a jaw-cracking yawn. “What’s wrong?”
He hesitated, then shook his head. “It just feels too quiet.” I winced, halfway braced for a sudden arm to go off, paging all hands for a sudden flood of calls. “But hardly anyone is up at this hour. There isn’t even anyone at the inn desk by now, just someone on call in a room behind it. She doesn’t have to travel in person, all she needs is mosslings she can move into pce, but we moved really fucking fast with the ornithians, and she lost a lot of her Grassnds mosslings in Whisperwillow, so that should buy us a little time. I’m probably just paranoid.”
“Fortunately, since there isn’t even the temptation to stop and order breakfast, we should all be able to get out of here in no time. You can expect me to circle until I know that you’re all out of the town. I don’t know if I’ll even be able to see the road before then anyway. And I’m taking a communicator, even if I’ll be out of range most of the time. There are two left, you might think about taking one, too.”
He shrugged. “Fine. Whatever. Give me one on the way out of the inn. Get your stuff and let’s move.”
His nerves turned out to be contagious. Then again, none of my friends were used to being on the run and trying to pn for their safety beyond the normal background level of this world.
Actually, neither was I.
Serru distributed recharged communicators, keeping an extra one over her arm to give to Logan, and we made a final brief check that we had everything in our respective personal bags and had house and mecha.
We slipped out through the quiet lobby of the inn, to the equally quiet street. Serru passed the extra communicator to Logan without comment. I stole hugs all around. Except Logan, obviously.
Heket, cradling Myu, raised her head and sniffed at the air, ears fttened halfway. It wasn’t the first time this morning I’d seen her do that.
“Heket?” I said. “What’s wrong?”
“The air smells odd. But possibly I’m just not used to the normal dawn smells of the Grassnds.”
“What?” Logan took a deep breath, mouth partly open and nose wrinkled. “No, you’re right. Something doesn’t smell normal. But I have no idea what it is.”
“We can’t waste time on it,” Serru said briskly. “We need to move.”
“Anything in particur I should know about how to handle this?” I asked Logan. “I figured out what was going on with the first four.”
“This one’ll be different. Just... be honest.”
“Gotcha.”
Serru caught my hand for a squeeze. “Find us when you’re done.”
“Believe it.”
I went the other way only with mixed feelings, certain of necessity but reluctant to let my friends out of my sight. I followed the street that would take me towards the high part of the town while they took the one that led out to the Grassnds as directly as possible.
It really did feel quiet, but I had never been awake in a settlement at this hour before outside of an inn room.
The brightening sky let me see more.
Curtains drew back on either side and doors opened, all within heartbeats of each other. That registered as unnatural before I even saw anyone in person.
People stepped into sight in doorways and in windows.
Every one of them had visible green moss obscuring some part of their skin—most prominently across lower faces and spreading up onto cheeks.
While I was still trying to grasp that, I heard Logan, over the communicator, “Need some help, here, bro!”
It cut across panicked screams from multiple directions.
How she had managed to infect the town, even people in their own homes, I had no idea and right then, it didn’t matter.
If I switched to centaur, I could run faster and use Purification Rain but I couldn’t use Find Person; I needed to hold off on that for as long as I could. I spped the button on the communicator said, “Coming!” and did Find Person on Serru.
I might only have two legs in dragon form, but they were long legs and I had a lot of strength and didn’t get out of breath easily. I followed that red dot at a ft-out run, trying not to see the mosslings everywhere who were watching me. If they moved, they could overwhelm me, but it would be a race to see if they could before I could change and Rain on them.
My dot led me through the neatly-gridded streets to an intersection, where my friends were standing back-to-back in a tight circle, watching all directions. Heket had her mecha beside her, but it was still expanding; Zanshe was holding Myu.
Around them was a two-deep ring of mosslings, still with that oddly-consistent pattern of lower faces showing heavy infection.
I skidded to a stop, switched forms, and threw a Purification Rain at them, bumping up the power to get the entire ring. That gave me an opening to reach the others. It didn’t st long: mosslings left buildings, rebuilding the circle around us, but not closing in. I had the sick feeling that I’d been permitted to get to my friends, and the mosslings were holding back, behind the circle of fallen ones, for some reason.
“How did she do this?” I asked Logan, whose ears were back ft, his fur on end and tail shing and hands hooked into cws.
“I wish I knew! This makes no sense! She can’t even get animals inside houses! I don’t know why she’s waiting, either! And this is too many in one pce, I can’t figure out how she’s still keeping control! None of this makes sense! And I don’t know how she’s getting away with it!”
When the world’s second-pce terror was looking scared and confused by what the first-pce terror was doing, something had gone very, very wrong. “Out of the town?”
“I... we’d be easier to surround. We need somewhere defensible. Inside a building, even.”
“Stone, I think,” Serru said tightly. “There are jotuns and centaurs and generally a great many hands. Keeping felids and saurids out will be difficult.”
“There’s a media shop there,” Terenei said. “It’s stone. Can we reach that?”
“We can try,” I said, calling up my dispy to do another Purification Rain in the direction he’d indicated. “We aren’t going to have long before they close in from either side.”
“Oh no.” The deep dread in Logan’s voice stopped all pns.
The mosslings, now several rows deep on all sides, parted to let the rgest deer I’d ever seen through—and I’d seen moose up close a memorable time or two. This one didn’t have a moose’s distinctive head, though, but looked more like an elk; it cked antlers entirely, but under the moss I was sure I saw pale fur with dark markings and a hump on the shoulders, which were probably as high as my head in human form.
On its back was a woman wearing a skirt and halter of highly-textured brown and a long dramatic cloak that might be living pnts all ced together with their own climbing tendrils; her skin was a symmetrical pattern of green shades and soft brown that reminded me of sunlight and shadow through leaves, and her hair had vertical soft-edged stripes of greens that shaded towards browns.
“What the fuck are you doing, you crazy bitch?” Logan bellowed at her, now in his jotun form. “Are you trying to see how many rules you can break?”
“I’m doing my job,” she said coolly. “I was chosen to protect this world. Now there’s a new threat trying to undermine my authority and power to do that. It is my responsibility to remove that threat. I’ve been saddened for some time by how readily people are swayed into rebelling against me when I’m acting in their best interests. Their reaction to this new source of corruption proves once and for all that they are entirely too gullible.” Her voice hardened. “You two are the reason for this and the bme for what I have to do is entirely on your shoulders, not mine.”
“Well, that’s cssic abuser reasoning,” I said. “Can’t tell you how often I’ve had to help a woman who was told by her husband that she’d made him beat her within an inch of her life and he did it because he loves her.”
She gave me a look that was more poisonous than any weird non-native spider in the woodpile. “That is not the same thing!”
“Just what is it you’ve decided to bme us for?” Logan asked.
She sighed. I wondered who the theatrical show of sorrow was for, since there was no one to see except mosslings who didn’t need it and my friends and I who weren’t going to fall for it. Maybe it was just for herself. “I understand the pain of the old gods from our birth world now, and the tragic necessities that can arise.”
“Get to the point.”
Why was she talking instead of closing in? That worried me. Was it just that trolls couldn’t help themselves and couldn’t resist having an audience? Should I try to get my friends to the stone building in hopes they’d be safer?
“You two have pushed the corruption of the people of this world over the edge. My only option for cleansing the world of it is to cleanse the world of people carrying it, which is everyone. I’ve been breeding my moss towards airborne spores, and this town turned out to be an excellent and completely successful test for it. I’ll just make sure that everyone is infected, at all times, until age removes them permanently, and allow a few carefully-chosen children of each species to start over. It’s not a flood, but then, I’m not a sky god throwing a petty tantrum. Just a guardian forced into drastic action by rampant disobedience.”
