Chapter 13: no cap
The air in the nursery chamber tasted of wet stone and waking life. Soft, blue-green light dripped from clusters of jellycap fungi clinging to the ceiling, painting the rounded room in shifting aquatic shadows. Five small myconids clustered in the soft mulch of the floor, their infantile caps—mere knobs yesterday—now unfurling into delicate, velvety saucers of ochre and russet. A collective, pleased hum vibrated through the shared spore-cloud, a song of becoming.
Beos watched, her large, iridescent eyes wide.
She sat apart, her own small body looking wrong. She saw it in the way the others turned their stalks, not with their eyes—they had none—but with the subtle reorientation of their caps towards one another, excluding her. Her skin was smooth and pale, glowing faintly like the moon-moss in the Sovereign’s chamber. It had no pleasing, rough texture. No cap.
A myconid named Glint, his new cap the color of tarnished copper, shuffled closer to her. He was always the loudest in the cloud, his mental voice sharp.
You are not changing, his thought-voice needled, not with malice, but with a simple, cold curiosity that cut deeper. Your top is flat. Wrong. You are a stone. A dead thing.
The other young myconids trilled in agreement, a series of clicks and whistles that carried the clear image of a smooth, useless pebble.
Beos blinked, her lower lip trembling. She pushed a feeling back through the spore-link, a feeling of soft moss and safety, the way the Sovereign made her feel. She wasn’t a stone. She was Beos.
I am Beos, she thought, her mental voice a faint, wispy thing compared to theirs.
Beos is no-shape, Glint returned, and he raised a delicate, fibrous hand. He didn’t strike her. Myconids rarely did. Instead, he gently tapped the top of her head, where his own cap was now proudly sprouting. The tap was a question, a confirmation of lack. It echoed in the silent chamber. See? No cap. You will not join the song. You will be silent.
The rejection was a physical chill. It seeped through her luminescent skin, colder than the deepest spring. She understood, then, the shape of her difference. It wasn’t just that she looked different. It meant something. It meant she was outside the song, the hum, the shared dream of the colony. A tear, hot and entirely human, tracked through the fine dust on her cheek. It felt alien. Another thing they did not do.
She scrambled to her feet, the soft mulch sticking to her bare legs, and ran.
Her small feet knew every turn, every dip in the tunnel floor. She passed glowing crystals that pulsed in time with her frantic heartbeat, past walls where the mycelial veins throbbed with gentle light. The beauty of it was lost on her now; it was their beauty, not hers. She was a flaw in the pattern.
She found him in the Heart Glade, where the largest bioluminescent fungi grew in great, shelf-like tiers, pulsing a slow, steady rhythm of violet and gold. The Sovereign was immense, a majestic figure of layered, fungal plates in deep umber and charcoal, his cap a broad canopy that seemed to hold the very weight of the cavern ceiling. He was communing with the oldest roots of the colony, a deep, subsonic drone emanating from him.
Her tiny sob, a wet, ragged human sound, fractured the quiet.
The deep drone ceased. The Sovereign turned, a slow, graceful movement of his entire form. His presence enveloped her, not in the cloud, but in the air itself—a warmth, a gravity of absolute attention.
She ran to him, burying her face against the cool, ridged surface of his base. She didn’t need the spore-cloud here; her misery was a tangible scent, a vibration he could feel.
“Why no cap?” she wailed, the words clumsy in Common, a language of hard edges that never fit in the soft, resonant tunnels. “Glint says… says I am a stone. A dead thing.”
The Sovereign’s great cap lowered. A fibrous, gentle hand, large enough to cradle her entire body, came to rest on her head. Not on the crown, where a cap should be, but cupping the side, his touch spanning from her temple to the curve of her jaw. A wave of pure, unadulterated concept washed over her, bypassing language.
It was not an answer, but a showing.
He showed her the forest floor, high above, where a hundred different things grew—not just mushrooms, but flowers with petals, ferns with fronds, trees with leaves. All different. All belonging. He showed her the first spore that had found her, a tiny, desperate speck landing on her infant cheek, not to conquer, but to commune. It had not built a cap; it had woven itself into her, a bridge. A translator.
His thoughts were deep, resonant bells. You are not a stone. You are the bridge between root and sky. Your cap is not outside, it is within. It is your seeing, your feeling, your strange water-from-eyes. It is your question, ‘why?’
He smoothed her black hair. They are young. They see only sameness. You are our first difference. It frightens them. Do not let their fear become your mirror.
Beos hiccupped, the storm of her sadness receding. She looked up at his vast, silent face. “I want to belong to the song.”
You already do. He pulsed a soft, green-gold light through his veins, a private melody just for her. You sing in a different key. It is a key we did not know we were missing. Without it, the song is less.
He lifted her, placing her onto a broad, glowing shelf of fungus beside him. From a fold in his own form, he produced a handful of phosphorescent pollen, the color of starlight. Gently, he dusted it over the top of her head. It settled in her hair, shimmering. There. A crown of light. For now. Your own crown will grow in time, in its own shape. It will be yours.
Below, in the nursery chamber, Glint and the others felt the shift in the sovereign’s attention, a gentle but firm rebuke that echoed in their growing caps. Their bullying curiosity shriveled, replaced by a dim, shamefaced understanding.
Beos sat on the fungal shelf, her legs dangling. She watched the lights pulse, her tears drying into itchy tracks. The pollen on her head glimmered. She was still different. But the difference now felt less like an emptiness, and more like a space waiting to be filled. A silent promise, humming just beneath her skin.
just a couple months later beos does get a cap of her own, but not through the standard gentle means. beos gets caught in a cave in and suffers severe head trauma, the only way to save her was to graft mushrooms onto her to replace what was destroyed. beos’s memory suffers greatly from the trauma, she was already a little spacey before but now she’s a total space case
A silent promise, humming just beneath her skin.
It remained there, a faint, hopeful vibration, for precisely fifty-three cycles of the glow-mold’s dimming and brightening. Then the earth remembered it was stone, and weight, and motion.
Beos was in the western tunnel, the one that sang with the faintest draft of outside air. She was chasing a skittering jewel-beetle, its carapace flashing reflected fungus-light. The Sovereign had asked her not to go so far. The thought had entered her mind, a clear, complete idea, and then it had slipped away, replaced by the beetle’s iridescent shimmer. Her laughter, a bright, human sound, echoed off the narrow walls.
A deep groan answered it.
It was not a living sound. It was the voice of the mountain settling, a vast, granular sigh. A rain of fine grit sifted from the ceiling, peppering her shimmering hair and shoulders. She froze, looking up. The beetle vanished.
The groan deepened into a grind. A crack, thin as a hair, lightning-forked across the tunnel roof above her.
“Oh,” she said.
The world fell in.
There was no time for a scream, only a colossal, deafening roar of fracturing rock. A slab the size of the Sovereign’s plinth sheared free and dropped. It did not strike her cleanly. It clipped the left side of her head with a wet, crushing thud that resonated through her skeleton before pinning her torso beneath its impossible weight.
Darkness was instant and absolute, but pain was a slow, rising tide. It began as a distant ringing, then flooded in, a molten wave of agony radiating from the ruins of her skull. She couldn’t move. She couldn’t breathe. A warm, slick cascade poured down her face, tasting of metal and salt. Her vision, when it swam back, was a narrow, red-tinged tunnel.
Sovereign, she thought, but the thought had no shape, no direction. It was just a wordless keening against the crushing silence.
They found her because the colony felt the wound in the network. The mycelial threads in the walls trembled with the shock, and then screamed with her dying bio-rhythm. The Sovereign arrived with a work-team, moving with a speed she had never seen. His usual serene pulse was a strobing panic of white light.
He assessed the scene in a silent instant. The rock could not be lifted without grinding her completely. She was fading, her human physiology too fragile, bleeding out inside a prison of stone. Her skull on the left side was a crater of pulped flesh and splintered bone.
Salvation would not be gentle. It would be a violation of her form to preserve her essence.
A sharp series of clicks, like snapping twigs, erupted from him. The workers scrambled. They returned with carefully kept nodules of living fungal flesh—the colony’s own regenerative matter, used for repairing severe wounds in the oldest myconids. This was not mere medicine. This was architecture.
The Sovereign placed his broad hands on either side of the rock. He did not lift it. He persuaded it. A soft, cracking sound, and the slab fractured along a new, precise line, freeing just the ruined portion of her head. The sight was grotesque. Where her temple, ear, and part of her forehead had been was now a ragged, bloody hollow.
Beos whimpered, a thin, animal sound.
Be still, little bridge, his thought-voice came, strained but impossibly calm. We build your crown now. Hold on.
He took the first nodule, a dense, fibrous mass of pale mycelium, and pressed it directly into the wreckage of her skull. It was not a placement. It was an integration. The living fungus reacted to the warmth, the moisture, the desperate chemical screams of her dying cells. It sent out microscopic hyphae, seeking, piercing, threading themselves into the raw edges of her flesh, anchoring to the very bone.
She convulsed. A raw, choked scream tore from her throat.
They worked quickly, layering the specialized flesh, shaping it as it bonded. It was a grisly sculpting. The mycelium woven into her from infancy catalyzed the process, acting as a guide, a template. The fungal matter swelled, differentiated, and began to form structures. It knitted over the hole, sealing it, then rose in a ridged, protective layer. From this base, a cap began to force its way into being.
It was not a slow unfurling. It was a traumatic extrusion, a sickly, damp growth that pushed out from the grafted tissue, pale and rubbery at first. It spread over the left side of her face, a living, breathing plate of fungus, its underside gilled and delicate. It was attached, irrevocably, a part of her now. Her iridescent eye, untouched, stared out from under its strange, sheltering edge.
The final graft took root. The bleeding stopped. Her breathing, which had hitched and faltered, eased into a shallow, steady rhythm.
The pain did not vanish. It mutated, becoming a deep, throbbing itch, a feeling of alien fullness. The Sovereign lifted the rest of the rubble from her body. Her physical injuries were severe but would mend. The true damage was elsewhere.
When her good eye focused, it held no recognition. Only a vast, clouded confusion.
“The… the beetle,” she slurred, her tongue thick. “It was shiny.”
The Sovereign cradled her. The beetle is gone.
“Oh.” She blinked slowly. “My head feels… fuzzy. Big.”
You have a cap now, Beos. He sent the thought with a wave of profound sorrow and hope. Your own crown.
Her hand, trembling, rose to touch the new, smooth-fleshed fungus that now covered half her skull. She traced the gills under its edge, her fingers coming away slightly damp with sterile spores. There was no delight. No understanding. Just the vacant acceptance of a new fact.
“It’s… soft,” she murmured. Then her gaze drifted past him to the glowing wall. “The light is pretty today. Is it today?”
It is today.
She nodded, and the motion seemed to disconnect her thoughts. “I’m thirsty. Are you thirsty?”
The Sovereign held her closer. The colony’s hum around them was a somber, protective blanket. They had saved her life. They had given her the cap she had wept for. In the process, they had shattered the delicate lattice of her memory. The curious, wistful child was buried under the rubble as surely as her old flesh. What remained floated in the present, untethered, adrift in her own mind, brushing her fingertips again and again against the strange, living hat that had grown from a nightmare.
beos is even more so the colony baby than before, after the accident beos now has less mental capacity and often needs to be watched over. doesn’t make her any less cute and the entire colony finds her adorable
The colony’s rhythm adapted to her new one. Time became a series of gentle, now moments, each requiring guidance. “Beos,” the Sovereign would pulse, his light a soft amber nudge at the edge of her awareness. “The sleeping shelf is this way.” She’d look up from where she’d been tracing the same mycelial vein on the wall for an hour, her iridescent eyes wide with fresh discovery. “Oh! I was wondering where that went.” She never remembered she’d been heading to sleep.
She was their perpetual toddler, a beloved, luminous fact. Her curiosity remained, but it was a shallow, darting thing, easily distracted. A worker might spend painstaking hours aligning phosphorescent crystals on a growth-node, only to have Beos wander over and pluck one up with a delighted gasp. “It’s so cold!” she’d whisper, holding it to her cheek. Instead of frustration, a wave of fond amusement would ripple through the spore-cloud. They’d wait, patiently, until her wonder moved on and she placed it back, sometimes in the wrong spot. They’d fix it later.
Her new cap needed care. It would grow dry and brittle if not tended, a fact she could never hold in her mind. Every few days, the Sovereign would sit her down on a cushion of moss. “Crown time, little bridge,” he’d hum. She’d fidget. “But I just did it.” “You watched a glow-fly hatch instead,” he’d correct gently, his fibrous hands already applying the rich, oily spore-paste that kept the fungal flesh supple. Her cap, a creamy beige with undertones of the faintest blue, would soak it up, the gills underneath flushing a healthy pink.
She’d giggle when he brushed the underside. “That tickles the quiet place.” She meant the sealed-off part of her skull, the silent bone where the memory of the rock lived. The colony understood her phrases.
Glint, now with a full, impressive cap of his own, became her most vigilant shadow. His earlier cruelty had transmuted into a fierce, penitent protectiveness. He’d click sharply if she strayed near an unstable tunnel, steering her back with a gentle nudge of his stalk. “Beos goes here,” he’d project, the thought firm. She’d smile, patting his cap. “Okay, Glint. You have a nice hat.” He’d glow, just a little.
She forgot words, then remembered them in bursts. She’d point at the dripping aquifer. “The… the wet that falls.” A moment later, she’d nestle against the Sovereign and say, perfectly clear, “Your light is the best light.” It was. He pulsed a soft, warm gold, wrapping her in a feeling of here, you are safe, you belong.
One day, she was watching the spore-dusters, their aerial dance a chaotic ballet, when she went very still. Her hand rose to her fungal cheek. “Sovereign?” Her voice was small. “Did I have a different face before?”
The entire glade seemed to hold its breath. The workers paused in their tasks; the hum dipped to a whisper. He moved closer, the great plates of him shifting. You have always had your face.
“But the rock,” she said, not as a question, but as a stated, difficult fact. It was the furthest back she’d ever reached.
Yes. The rock came. We gave you a new piece. From us. He sent an image of the grafts, clinical and swift, but imbued with an overwhelming sense of necessity, of love as a desperate, physical action.
She processed this, her fingers exploring the seam where her human skin met the resilient fungus. A slow smile bloomed on the uncovered half of her face. “So I’m more colony now.”
You always were. Now it shows.
She laughed then, a sound like clear water, and the tension broke. The colony’s hum swelled around her, a chorus of affirmation. She was their baby, their bridge, their beautiful, broken thing held together by shared love and living threads. She got up, her mission forgotten, and skipped towards the aroma of fresh loam being turned. “It smells like dinner!”
The Sovereign watched her go, Glint already trotting to intercept her before she could step into the soft, tilled earth. Her understanding was fleeting, but its depth, when it surfaced, could still the world. He stored the moment, this tiny return, in his own ancient memory. For her. He would keep all her moments now, the forgotten and the fleeting, a living archive of a mind that now lived almost entirely in the soft, forgiving present. And in that present, she was happy, trailing bioluminescent pollen from her hair and her new, necessary cap, utterly adored, forever needing to be found, and forever, effortlessly, found.
years have passed. beos is older now, about 18, and she’s grown mentally too but she’s still very forgetful and spacey. one day while planting flowers just outside the cave entrance humans find beos and try to take advantage of her. unfortunately for them beos believes they just need to calm down and releases spores. these spores happen to be extremely potent to humans due to beos being human herself
And in that present, she was happy, trailing bioluminescent pollen from her hair and her new, necessary cap, utterly adored, forever needing to be found, and forever, effortlessly, found.
Time, in the colony, was not years but the gradual thickening of the Sovereign’s plates and the deepening of the light-veins in the walls. The world above cycled through sun and snow, unseen. Beos, too, thickened, her child’s softness settling into the round, sturdy shape of a young woman. Her hair grew longer, a black waterfall that she often forgot to tie back, and the fungal cap on the left side of her face matured into a permanent, elegant shelter, its color a fixed, creamy porcelain with those subtle blue undertones. She was, in many ways, more colony than ever; she breathed so slowly it seemed she didn’t need to, and her pale skin held its own soft luminescence in the dark.
Her mind, however, remained a realm of gentle, immediate wonders. The memory of the rock was a blank page. The yearning for a cap was a forgotten ghost. She knew how to tend the luminous tubers and harmonize the resonance of the singing crystals, tasks her muscle memory performed flawlessly. But she could start for the spore-press and end up following a trail of glowing snails for an hour, sitting cross-legged to ask them about their journeys.
“You carry your houses,” she’d murmur, touching a shell. “That’s very clever.” The Sovereign would find her there. “The press, little bridge.” “Oh!” she’d say, bouncing up, scattering snails. “Right. The squishy one.”
She wasn’t a child to them anymore. She was Beos. A fixed, beloved star in their constellation, orbiting her own serene pace.
The Sovereign felt the outside world shifting. Pressures in the stone. Different vibrations. He’d reinforced the warnings about the entrance tunnel, the one that led to the dizzying, dry world of air and blazing light. “That place is Not-For-Us,” he pulsed, the concept firm. “The air is thin and sharp. The light cuts. Things there are… hard.”
Beos absorbed this. Not-For-Us. It made sense. The colony was For-Us. But the edge of the Not-For-Us had interesting colors sometimes. She’d seen them from the tunnel’s mouth: flashes of green, specks of yellow. She’d mentioned it once. “The Not-For-Us has pretty bits.”
Today, the pretty bits called to her. A cache of sleeper-shrooms needed planting to extend the colony’s sensory network. The designated plot was just at the cave’s threshold, where the soil was moist and the colony’s influence still held. It was a sanctioned task. She took the basket of fibrous bulbs and ambled up the sloping tunnel, the light shifting from cool blue to a warm, hazy gold.
The outside air hit her skin, and she giggled. It was sharp. It tickled. She knelt at the border, where rock met soil and moss, and began to dig with her hands. Her world narrowed to the rich smell of dirt, the weight of a bulb, the press of soil over it. A beam of real sunlight, filtered through the forest canopy, fell on her back. It was a sensation so different from the colony’s glow—heavy and insistent. She liked it.
She didn’t hear their approach. Sound traveled differently in the open, a jumble of crackles and birdsong.
“Well, would you look at this.” The voice was a new kind of sound. Gritty. Dry.
Beos looked up, blinking her large, iridescent eyes against the light. Two figures stood there, blocking the sun. They were tall. Their tops were not smooth like stone or furred like moss, but covered in rough, stained cloth. Their faces were strange: knotted and mobile, with eyes that darted.
She smiled. New things were always interesting. “Hello,” she said, her voice soft from disuse in Common. “The air is sharp here.”
The men glanced at each other. One had a face like a hatchet; the other was thicker, with a beard that crawled up his cheeks. Hatchet-Face smirked. “Sharp, is it? Sounds like you’re from deep in the holler, girl. What’s with the… hat?” He gestured vaguely at his own head.
Beos touched her cap. “This is my crown. It grew.” She returned to planting another bulb. “I am putting the sleepers in. They help listen.”
The bearded man snorted. “Simple,” he muttered under his breath. Then, louder, his voice adopting a false, soothing tone. “Listenin’, huh? That’s real good. You live around here? All by yourself?”
“I live with the colony.” She pointed a muddy finger toward the cave mouth, a dark maw in the rock behind her. “In there. It’s For-Us.”
Hatchet-Face took a step closer, his boots crushing a fern. “A cave. Could be all sorts of things in a cave. Treasures. You show us, maybe? We’re friendly.”
His closeness felt wrong. It wasn’t the gentle, spaced presence of the myconids. It was an invasion of the air, a pushing. The Sovereign’s old warning echoed in a feeling, not words: Hard things.
Beos stood, wiping her hands on her simple wrap. She took a step back toward the entrance. “It is Not-For-You. The Sovereign says. You should go to your own place.”
“The Sovereign, is it?” Hatchet-Face laughed, a short, barking sound. “Fancy. Look, girl, we’re going in that cave. You can lead us nice, or…” He reached out, his hand closing around her wrist.
The touch was a bolt of pure, shocking wrongness. His skin was hot, calloused, and it gripped. It wasn’t a nudge or a guide. It was a taking.
Beos froze. Her mind, always struggling to chain thoughts together, made a simple, empathetic leap. He was vibrating with a fierce, hot energy. His eyes were narrow. The bearded man was moving to her other side, blocking the path. They weren’t calm. The colony needed calm to communicate, to think. These creatures were the opposite of calm. They were shattered, noisy things.
“You,” she said, her head tilting, her voice filled with genuine, concerned confusion. “You are not calm at all.”
“You’re damn right we’re not,” the bearded man grunted, reaching for her other arm.
Beos focused. When a mycelial thread was frayed, the colony soothed it. When Glint’s cap was brittle, they moistened it. These two were brittle, frayed, and screaming on some invisible level. The principle was the same. She exhaled, a long, slow breath she didn’t truly need, and willed a release from the delicate, fleshy gills beneath her fungal cap.
A visible cloud, a mist of fine, opalescent powder, puffed from the sheltered underside of her crown. It smelled, faintly, of damp earth and honey. It enveloped the two men instantly.
“What the hell—” Hatchet-Face coughed, waving a hand. Then his wave slowed. His grip on her wrist loosened, then fell away.
Their aggressive postures melted. The bearded man’s furrowed brow smoothed out, his eyes going wide and dreamy. Hatchet-Face blinked slowly. “Oh,” he sighed, his voice slurred. “The air is… sharp.”
They didn’t fall. They simply sat down in the moss, heavy as settling stones. Beos knelt beside them, inspecting their faces. The hard lines were gone. Their expressions were soft, open, and empty. One began to smile vaguely at a butterfly. The other reached out to touch a blade of grass with profound reverence.
“There,” Beos said, satisfied. “You just needed to calm down.” She picked up her basket, glancing at her half-planted bulbs. She’d finish later. The Sovereign liked completion. She turned and walked back into the cool, familiar darkness of the tunnel, leaving the two men sitting peacefully in the sun, their minds adrift on a chemical sea of perfect, placid stupor.
Deep in the Heart Glade, the Sovereign felt the subtle, alien shift in the spore-cloud near the entrance. He felt Beos’s momentary spike of distress, now smoothed over. He felt the release of her unique spore-signature, a signature he knew was intertwined with her human biology. And then he felt two new, brutish consciousnesses not extinguish, but soften, blur, and unravel at the edges until they were little more than vegetative pulses.
A deep, troubled tremor passed through his massive form. The hard things from the Not-For-Us had found their bridge. And she, in her infinite, forgetful innocence, had simply shown them a new way to be quiet. He pulsed a urgent, summoning frequency through the mycelial network. The protective protocols, dormant for cycles, now thrummed to life. The world had reached in. The response could not be planting bulbs.