Chapter 16: haha brain damage
people try upping their attempts to get beos to snap but still no luck. beos doesn’t understand what she’s doing to make people upset with her and funnily enough that’s the thing that finally makes her snap. although making the kindest person snap isn’t the best idea when her spores can send you on the worst acid trip of your life
The barracks of the Black Library always smelled of old ale, damp stone, and ambition gone slightly sour. Beos sat on the edge of her assigned bunk, polishing the haft of her double-ended glaive with a soft cloth. The faint, bioluminescent glow of her skin painted the wood grain in gentle blues and greens. Around her, the evening rituals of other Omiyojis and lower-rank Onimetsus unfolded in a familiar symphony of clanking gear and muttered complaints.
Rourke, a broad-shouldered man with a perpetual sneer, kicked the leg of her bunk. “Still talking to your imaginary mushroom friends, Freak?”
Beos looked up, her iridescent eyes wide. She offered a warm smile. “They aren’t imaginary. The Sovereign says hello. He thinks you seem… tangled. Like roots in hard soil.” She tilted her head, the large mushroom cap on the left side of her face brushing her shoulder. “Would you like me to ask him for a clarifying dream? He’s very good at those.”
This only deepened Rourke’s scowl. For months, he and his cohort had tried every insult they could conjure. They’d called her a walking compost heap, a poisoned puffball, a mindless rot-girl. They’d hidden her glaive, “accidentally” jostled her in the mess hall, and mocked the soft, clicking hums she used when thinking of home. Nothing worked. Her kindness was an impregnable fortress, its gates permanently open, inviting them inside where their malice simply evaporated in the face of her genuine concern.
Tonight, they’d decided to up the ante.
Rourke’s friend, Elara, a woman with sharp eyes and sharper nails, sauntered over. She held a small, cloth-wrapped bundle. “We brought you a gift, Beos. Since you love fungi so much.”
Beos’s face lit up. “A gift? Oh! Thank you!” She set her glaive down carefully and reached for it, her movements fluid and graceful.
Elara snatched it back. “Ah, ah. Open it here. So we can all admire it.”
Beos nodded eagerly. She unwrapped the cloth to reveal a putrid, rotting morel, writhing with tiny pale grubs. The stench hit immediately—a gagging perfume of decay. The men nearby coughed and turned away.
“It’s… very active,” Beos said, peering at it with scientific curiosity. She poked it gently with a finger. “The larvae are quite healthy. But this is a Phallus impudicus, in its final stage. It’s not a gift for receiving. It’s a gift for the soil. It’s turning death into new food! That’s wonderful.” She beamed at Elara. “Did you want me to help you bury it somewhere special? I know a spot near the east wall where the earth is very hungry.”
Rourke snatched the rotting fungus and hurled it against the far wall where it splattered with a wet slap. “You disgust me,” he hissed, stepping into her space. His breath was sour with cheap gin. “You’re not human. You’re a thing they dug up. A mistake. Why won’t you just react?”
Beos blinked, unfazed by his proximity. She was used to the myconids’ intimate, spore-borne communication. Personal space was a human concept she was still piecing together.
“React?” she asked, her tone genuinely puzzled. “To the Phallus impudicus? It’s already done its reacting. See?” She gestured to the vile smear on the stone.
A vein throbbed in Rourke’s temple. He shoved her.
It wasn’t a hard shove, but it was enough to knock her off balance from her perch. She stumbled back, her hip connecting with the edge of the next bunk. A soft “oof” escaped her lips, more surprise than pain. Her pale skin shimmered where he’d made contact.
Silence fell over the barracks. This was new. Physical aggression had been hinted at, but never so direct, so blatant in front of so many witnesses who now looked away, suddenly intent on their own business.
Beos righted herself. She smoothed the simple tunic she wore. Her expression was not one of anger, but of deep, profound confusion. Her brow furrowed beneath the rim of her living cap. This was a language she didn’t speak, a series of signals she could not decode.
“Why did you push me?” she asked. Her voice was quieter now, losing its musical lilt. “Did I block your path? I can move.” She took a step sideways.
“That’s not the point, you stupid sow!” Rourke roared, his frustration boiling over. He grabbed the front of her tunic, bunching the fabric in his fist. “The point is you don’t belong here! You’re a joke! A weak, forgetful, soft little joke that makes the rest of us look bad! Just show us you have a spine! Get angry! Fight back!”
Beos looked down at his hand on her clothes, then up into his furious, reddened face. The other bullies—Elara and a wiry man named Kael—closed in, forming a half-circle around her bunk, their faces eager.
The confusion in Beos’s large eyes deepened, swirling into something like distress. It wasn’t the threat of violence that caused it. It was the incomprehension.
“I do not understand,” she said, and her voice was flat, hollow. “I have brought you soothing teas when you coughed at night, Rourke. I told Kael where to find the soft moss for his blistered feet after the long march. I listened to Elara speak of her sister for three hours when she was sad.” She listed the facts slowly, as if checking them against some internal ledger. “I have shared my rations. I have taken the night watch you all disliked. I have tried to be… helpful.”
She looked from one hardened face to another, searching for a clue, a key to the cipher of their hatred. Her innocence wasn’t a shield now; it was a lens focusing their cruelty into a blinding, unbearable point.
“What is it I do,” she asked, the words dropping like stones into the sudden quiet, “that makes you so upset with me?”
There it was. The perfect, innocent question. The question that laid bare the absolute emptiness of their cruelty. It wasn’t anything she did. It was everything she was.
Rourke gaped, his anger momentarily stunned into silence by the sheer, unfiltered honesty of the query. Then he laughed, a harsh, brittle sound. “That’s it! That right there! That’s what you do! You pretend you don’t get it! You play the oblivious little mushroom queen!”
He shook her by the tunic. “Stop pretending!”
Beos went very still. The gentle, ever-present glow of her skin seemed to dim, then pulse once, slowly.
“I am not pretending,” she whispered.
And something in her broke.
It didn’t shatter with a scream. It didn’t erupt with fury. It simply… opened. Like a ripe, pressurized fruit hitting the forest floor.
A sigh left her lips, a long, whispering exhalation that was not quite breath. From the gills beneath the cap on her face, from the delicate fungal patterns that traced her neck and the backs of her hands, a cloud of spores erupted.
It was not the gentle, gold-tinged spore-dust of communication or healing she sometimes used. This was different. The cloud was a vibrant, hypnotic violet, laced with threads of electric blue. It poured out in a silent, billowing wave, carrying a scent like ozone, damp earth, and the inside of a lightning-struck tree.
It enveloped Rourke first. He released her tunic, his sneer freezing into a mask of sudden, vacant awe. Then it washed over Elara and Kael, who stopped their mocking laughter mid-breath.
The spores didn’t hurt. They didn’t choke. They simply… connected.
Rourke’s eyes dilated. He saw the stone floor of the barracks melt into a churning, living mycelial network, glowing with a trillion pinpricks of consciousness. He felt his own mind unraveling, his thoughts becoming hyphal threads, tangling with the memories of the colony—the soft, patient love of the Sovereign for a hairless, wounded pink thing; the profound, wordless peace of sharing nutrients in the dark; the visceral, crushing loneliness of being the only one of your kind in a world of shouting, sharp-edged people who made no sense. He was drowning in the serene, alien ocean of Beos’s psyche, an ocean where his hatred was a shrill, insignificant noise, utterly meaningless against the vast, quiet hum of symbiotic life. He started to scream, but the sound was swallowed by the visions—his own face, twisted in rage, seen through Beos’s eyes as a puzzling, sad geometric pattern of red energy.
Elara crumpled to her knees, clawing at her arms. She was feeling the gentle, inexorable process of fungal integration—the tickle of mycelia weaving through skin, the harmless, pervasive spread of caps across her own flesh. She felt Beos’s childhood head trauma, the terrifying crack, the soothing, organic graft that saved her, the price paid in fleeting memories and a permanent, gentle distance from the linear world. It wasn’t painful. It was the most terrifying thing Elara had ever experienced: becoming something other, and understanding it was a blessing.
Kael stood rigid, tears streaming down his face as he witnessed, in relentless, looping detail, every kind act he had ever mocked. He saw Beos gathering the moss for him, not with subservience, but with the focused joy of a creature perfectly aligned with its purpose. He felt the pure, uncomplicated satisfaction she felt when he’d taken it with a grunt, a satisfaction undiminished by his lack of thanks. The goodness was reflexive, absolute, and experiencing it from the inside made his own soul feel small, desiccated, and sharp as a nail.
The violet cloud dissipated, leaving a haze in the air that smelled like a forest after a profound rain.
The three bullies were catatonic. Rourke was curled on the floor, whispering apologies to the stones. Elara rocked back and forth, staring at her hands as if expecting them to sprout caps. Kael just wept silently, great heaving sobs of shattering shame.
Beos looked at them. Her expression was empty, clean. The confusion was gone. In its place was a quiet, distant sorrow. She picked up her glaive, the movement effortless.
She walked past the stunned, silent onlookers who had pressed themselves against the far walls. She paused at the barracks door, not looking back.
“I understand now,” she said softly, to no one in particular. “You are upset… because I am not like you.”
She pulled the heavy oak door open and stepped out into the torch-lit corridor of the Black Library, leaving behind a perfect, aching silence, and three people who would never quite find their way back from the trip inside the kindest mind they had ever tried to break.
beos isn’t actively kind anymore, she doesn’t even really smile anymore, she’s closed off and doesn’t talk unless necessary. she’s still polite but only the bare minimum. the others find it unnerving. beos is still kind at heart she just now believes it’s not worth being kind towards humans
The corridor air was cool and still, smelling of tallow smoke and the mildew that grew between the stones. Beos walked, her soft boots making no sound. The faint shimmer of her skin was the only movement in the still torchlight.
Ahead, the clatter of armored footsteps echoed. Two Onimetsu, their dark lacquer plate polished to a dull gleam, rounded the corner. They were laughing about something, their voices too loud in the confined space. They saw her and fell silent.
Their eyes went immediately to her mushroom cap, then darted away, focusing on the wall just past her shoulder. They knew. Word traveled through the barracks faster than sporefall. They edged to the far side of the passage to let her pass, a wider berth than they’d ever given her before.
“Omiyoj,” one muttered, the formal title a tense acknowledgment.
Beos said nothing. She didn’t look at them. She simply passed, her gaze fixed on some middle distance only she could see, where the shadows looked like the comforting embrace of root and rock. Their relieved exhalations followed her down the hall.
She found herself at the low archway that led to the provisioning alcove. She needed oil for her glaive’s pivot joint. Inside, the quartermaster, a grizzled old man named Hobb, was tallying scrolls. He glanced up.
“Beos,” he said, his voice its usual gravel. “Heard there was a bit of a stir.” He studied her, looking for the cheerful, forgetful girl who’d always thanked him profusely for the most mundane supplies.
“Oil,” she said. The word was flat, clean. A statement of need.
Hobb blinked, his pen hovering. “Right. For the glaive.” He turned to the shelves, rummaging. “That… business with Rourke and them. They’re saying you put a psychic whammy on ‘em. That true?”
“They are upset,” Beos replied, watching his back. “The spores were a reaction. Not an attack.” There was no warmth in the clarification, no attempt to soothe his curiosity. It was just data.
He turned, placing a small clay jar on the counter. “They’re screaming in the infirmary. Seeing things. Elara won’t let anyone touch her.” He leaned in slightly, a nervous habit. “What’d they see?”
Beos picked up the jar. She met his eyes, her iridescent gaze empty of malice, but also empty of the gentle light he was used to. It was like looking into a deep, still pool in a cave where no life swam.
“They saw me,” she said. She turned and walked out, leaving the payment of two copper bits already on the counter where she’d placed them silently.
Hobb stared after her, a cold feeling unfurling in his gut. It wasn’t fear of what she’d done. It was the silence where her kindness had been. That was far worse.
Her path took her through the central rotunda, a vast space where the library’s heart beat. Apprentices scurried like beetles, and senior scholars argued in hushed, vehement tones over open codices. The air hummed with a low-grade human energy that now felt like a physical abrasion against her senses.
“Beos.”
The voice was calm, authoritative. It cut through the murmur. Commander Lysander stood near a pillar of black basalt, his hands clasped behind his back. He was a tall man, his face a landscape of careful discipline and deep scars. He observed her the way one might observe a quiet, unexpected weather pattern.
She stopped. She did not bow. She simply waited, her glaive held vertical at her side.
“Three of my people are incapacitated,” he stated. His eyes were on her fungal cap, the pale glow of her cheek where the flesh met the gills. He was assessing, not accusing.
“Yes,” Beos said.
“Their minds are… unspooled. The healers say it’s a psychic feedback loop, self-sustaining. They’re trapped in it.” He took a single step forward. “Can you undo it?”
She considered this. In the colony, a distressing spore-dream could be soothed by the Sovereign’s focused resonance. It was a gentle process, a hum that realigned the mycelial networks of thought. She could probably do it. It would require touching them, sharing breath and space again, opening herself to their chaotic, sharp-edged minds.
“I could,” she said finally.
Lysander waited for more. The single word hung there, a closed door. “Will you?” he asked, his voice lowering.
Beos looked past him, at the chaotic, striving mass of humanity in the rotunda. She remembered Rourke’s sour breath, the joyful malice in Elara’s eyes as she presented the rotten gift, the collective wall of their hatred that had, for one crystalline moment, made her understand. The understanding had been a cold, clean cut.
“No,” she said.
The simplicity of the refusal was absolute. It wasn’t vindictive. It was a final, weary conclusion. She had offered her native kindness, her helpfulness, her very self, and it had been used as a whetstone for their cruelty. The Sovereign had taught that energy was sacred; to pour more of hers into those hollow vessels would be a profound waste.
Lysander’s discipline held, but a flicker of something passed behind his eyes—not anger, but a sharp recognition. He was seeing the new shape of her. The soft, curious creature was gone, recessed beneath a carapace of remote, polite finality. This was far more dangerous than a smiling girl with a strange weapon.
“They are assets to the Library,” he tried, a pragmatic tack.
“They are broken tools,” she replied, her voice still quiet, almost conversational. “You break a spade digging in hard soil, you do not ask the soil to fix it.” She adjusted her grip on her glaive. “Is my patrol schedule changed?”
Lysander was silent for a long moment, the sounds of the rotunda washing around them. He gave a single, shallow shake of his head. “The Duskwatch. Eastern rim. As assigned.”
Beos nodded once. She walked past him, toward the stairs that led to the surface, to the clean, uncomplicated darkness where akuma were straightforward monsters you could simply cut down. Her glow faded into the shadows of the stairwell.
Lysander did not watch her go. He stared at the spot where she had stood, unnerved by the perfect, hollow politeness she now wore, a mask that had grown seamlessly from her own skin. The barracks incident wasn’t contained. It was a beginning. He had just met the thing their cruelty had forged, and he knew, with a commander’s cold certainty, that they would all miss the girl they had destroyed.
The Duskwatch was a four-hour silence punctuated by the sounds of the forest night. Beos moved through the bracken and shadow of the eastern rim, her glaive a passive weight in her hand. Her assigned partner, a nervous man named Kael who hadn’t been part of Rourke’s circle but had always laughed along, tried twice to make conversation.
“Heard the myconids can predict unseasonable frosts,” he started, his voice too loud in the dark.
Beos scanned the treeline, her iridescent eyes catching slivers of moonlight. “They can.”
She offered nothing else. The silence stretched, thick and uncomfortable. Kael cleared his throat an hour later, pointing at a peculiar knot of shadows with his short sword. “That look like an akuma coalescence point to you?”
Beos didn’t even turn her head. “No. It is a rot-fallen oak. Common here.” Her tone was flat, informative, and utterly final. It was the verbal equivalent of a closed door. Kael shoved his hands in his pockets and didn’t speak again, his own breathing suddenly too loud in his ears. Her politeness was a sheet of ice over a deep, dark well.
When their shift ended, they returned to the Black Library’s postern gate. The guard on duty, a woman named Selva, gave the all-clear signal. “Quiet night?” she asked, looking at Beos with unconcealed curiosity.
“Yes,” Beos said, and walked past her into the courtyard.
Selva glanced at Kael, who just shook his head quickly and hurried after Beos, as if unwilling to be left alone in the gatekeeper’s company. The story of the violet spores was mutating with each retelling, growing barbs and feathers, but the core truth was enough: Beos was not to be provoked. The confusion was gone. What remained was quiet, glacial, and unpredictable.
Weeks dissolved into a month. The pattern held.
Beos performed her duties with flawless, mechanical efficiency. She appeared for patrols exactly on time. She filed her akuma sighting reports in precise, minimalist script. She maintained her gear with a reverence that was now devoid of joy, just silent necessity. She ate in the mess hall alone, at the end of a table that slowly emptied around her, her fungal cap grazing the wood as she bent over her bowl. If someone absolutely had to address her—to confirm a roster or pass an order—she would respond. “Understood.” “Yes.” “No.” The words were clean, stripped of all padding.
She heard the whispers, of course. Human hearing was a blunt, limited thing, but the Library’s stone halls carried echoes like mycelial networks carried chemical signals.
“...like she’s not even here anymore...”
“...Rourke still can’t look at a mushroom without weeping...”
“...Lysander’s letting it slide because she’s effective. But it’s creepy. It’s like serving with a ghost that knows how to kill.”
Beos registered these comments the way she registered the direction of the wind. Data. Not a dialogue. She slept in her bunk, on her side, facing the wall. Her dreams were not dreams, but a low, resonant hum, a constant telepathic pull toward the deep, quiet dark of the colony. The Sovereign’s presence was a gentle pressure against her mind, a question she had no human words to answer.
The change was most obvious in the small things that no longer happened.
Nobody found unexpectedly mended gear on their cot. No one was offered a cup of pain-numbing tea after a hard fight. The little patches of luminous, soothing moss that used to appear near chronic coughs or sprains in the barracks did not grow. The kindness had been a subtle, ambient humidity in the air of the Library. Its absence made the emotional climate feel arid, brittle.
One afternoon, in the weapons drill yard, the new reality crystalized. A young Omiyoj, a boy no more than sixteen, was struggling with a weighted spear, his form collapsing under its heft. He stumbled, the spear-butt slipping from his sweat-slick grip, and the heavy head cracked against his own shin with a sickening thud. He cried out, collapsing to the dusty ground, clutching his leg.
A hush fell over the yard. Dozens of eyes flicked, almost instinctively, to Beos. She was standing at the water barrel, methodically wiping down her glaive. She had seen the fall. She stopped her work, her hands stilling on the oiled cloth.
She looked at the boy. She looked at his pain-contorted face. Her head tilted slightly, the mushroom cap casting a wedge of shadow across her human eye. There was a moment, a breath, where the old Beos seemed to flutter behind her eyes—the one who would have been across the yard in a heartbeat, her hands already glowing with a gentle, numbing sporeshine, her voice soft with reassurance.
The moment passed.
She turned back to her glaive. She inspected the edge for nicks, found none, and began wrapping the haft with a fresh grip-band. Her movements were smooth, untroubled. The boy’s friends rushed to help him, shooting her looks of pure, bewildered betrayal as they hauled him toward the infirmary.
She felt their stares. They were just another form of pressure, like atmospheric humidity. It meant nothing. The boy’s pain was a human problem, with human healers and human remedies. Her intervention was no longer required, or welcomed, or safe. To offer it would be to misunderstand the fundamental nature of the ecosystem she was in. Predators and prey. Sharp edges and soft targets. She would not be a target again.
That night, seated on the edge of her bunk, she pressed her palm flat against the cold stone floor. She closed her eyes, and for the first time since the barracks, she actively reached out. Not with words, but with a pulse of longing, a slow, rooting signal sent down through the foundations, through layers of old earth, seeking the vast, silent network below.
An answer came, not as a voice, but as a feeling. A profound, vegetative welcome. An image of a sheltered grotto, lit by soft crystal light, where a place was still kept warm for her. It was accompanied by a gentle, puzzling sorrow—the Sovereign’s confusion at her prolonged isolation in the harsh, dry world above.
A single, clear tear welled in Beos’s human eye, traced a path through the faint, glowing patterns on her cheek, and dropped, soaking silently into the wool of her stocking. It contained no self-pity. It was simply a secretion of the quiet, irreducible ache of being a hybrid creature, a bridge between two worlds that had decided, for now, that one side of the chasm was not worth crossing.
She opened her eyes. The tear was already gone, absorbed. She lay back, staring at the bunk above her, listening to the sounds of the human barracks—the snores, the rustling, the muted coughs. She did not hate them. That would require an energy she refused to spend. She was just… done. Finished. The transaction was complete. They had shown her the rules of their world, and she had finally learned them.
Tomorrow’s patrol would begin at dawn. She would be there, silent, capable, and perfectly, unsettlingly polite. The girl who wanted to help was buried deep, wrapped in protective hyphae, sleeping in the soft dark. What walked in her place was something the Black Library had built for itself, and it would have to live with the construction.