Chapter 19: bd four
The silence that followed the collective event was not absolute. It was porous, leaking whispers. Whispers that crept up stone stairwells and slipped under the thick oak doors of the officers’ quarters. They carried on the steam of the baths and echoed in the clatter of the mess hall. They were no longer about a strange mushroom-girl or a curious defense mechanism. They were about the event horizon that had opened in a spare cell.
The stories mutated with each telling. Some said they’d achieved enlightenment. Others swore they’d glimpsed hell, and found it blissful. Hale and Anya moved through the halls like haunted prophets, their eyes still occasionally losing focus, their hands sometimes trembling with a phantom resonance. They didn’t speak of it, but their silence was louder than any boast.
It was only a matter of time before the sound reached the top of the pyramid.
Commander Lysander found her in the central archive, a vast, circular chamber where the ceiling vanished into darkness and the walls were endless shelves of case-scrolls and captured akuma fetishes. Beos was not reading. She was simply standing, one hand resting on the spine of a massive tome bound in what looked like tanned, tattooed skin, her head tilted as if listening to a distant hum. The cold, greenish light from the glow-globes made the iridescent caps on her shoulder gleam like wet slate.
“Beos.”
She turned, her movement fluid and unhurried. “Commander Lysander.”
He was a man carved from old grief and older discipline. His face was a topography of scars and grim decisions, his close-cropped hair the color of iron filings. He wore his authority not as a uniform, but as a second skeleton. He did not approach her with the fevered need of the supplicants or the shattered pride of Varric. He approached like a surgeon assessing a new, anomalous growth.
“Walk with me.”
It was not a request. He led her out of the archive and into a private observation gallery that overlooked one of the training yards far below. The sounds of clashing steel and shouted drills were a muted, rhythmic thrum through the thick glass.
“Your… extracurricular activities have become a disruption to the operational integrity of this outpost,” he began, his voice devoid of accusation, merely stating a logistical fact. “Four personnel remain in a non-combatant status due to neurological overload. Morale is polarized between those who see you as a hazard and those who view you as a vial of the divine. Discipline has eroded.”
“I have provided a resource upon request,” Beos said, watching two Onimetsu below spar with blinding speed. “The erosion originates in their own internal systems, not in the resource.”
Lysander’s gaze remained fixed on the yards. “Semantics. You are the catalyst. A commander cannot manage catalysts. He must understand them.” He finally turned to look at her, his grey eyes like chips of flint. “I have read the infirmary reports. I have interviewed Varric. He could not speak of the experience, only of his failure to withstand it. His will, which has stared down abyssal horrors without breaking, was shattered by something inside his own head.”
“The spores amplify what is present.”
“So you’ve said.” He clasped his hands behind his back. “I need to understand what my people are becoming addicted to. I need to comprehend the tactical risk, and any potential… utility.”
Beos processed this. A new kind of request. Not curiosity, not hunger, but strategic analysis. The commander wished to run a field test on himself. “You wish for a sample.”
“A controlled exposure. Under my terms. In a secure location. I will not become another babbling wreck in the barracks. I need to know what this phenomenon is, in its essence.”
“Your intent will shape the essence,” she warned, repeating her standard formula.
“My intent is comprehension. Nothing more.”
She studied him. His emotional spectrum was tightly leashed, but the spores reacted to biochemical substrates, not just conscious thought. His discipline was a deep, raging current. His hidden grief, a dull, permanent ache. His sense of duty, a cage of iron. It would all be fuel.
“I agree.”
He took her not to a cell, but to the secure wardroom adjacent to his office. It was a sterile, utilitarian space: a large map table, cabinets locked with warding seals, no windows. It smelled of old parchment, sealing wax, and ozone from residual defensive magics. He locked the door and activated a simple sound-dampening glyph on the threshold. The ambient noise of the library vanished, leaving a ringing silence.
“Here,” he stated. “Proceed.”
He did not disrobe. He stood beside the map table, his posture rigid, his hands at his sides. He was a fortress awaiting a siege.
Beos stood before him. She focused, drawing the latent energy from the mycelial networks within her. This emission would need to be precise, potent, but not overwhelming. A scout’s dose, not an artillery barrage. The gills beneath her cap flared, and a compact, intensely concentrated cloud of spores coalesced in the space between them. This cloud was different. It held less of the vivid magenta, more of the deep neural black and a new, mercury-like silver that seemed to pulse with a cold, analytical light. It reflected his intent back at itself.
“Inhale,” she said.
Lysander took a deep, measured breath, drawing the entire cloud into his lungs. His eyes remained open, locked on hers.
For a long moment, nothing happened. His breathing remained steady. His expression did not change. He was a man of immense will, and he was marshaling all of it, building an internal bastion against the incursion.
The spores, however, did not attack bastions. They infiltrated them.
The first sign was a flicker in his left eye, a tiny, involuntary tremor. He clenched his jaw. The biochemical reaction was beginning, a surge of dopamine and oxytocin and adrenaline that his body had not sanctioned. His disciplined mind labeled it an enemy to be suppressed. The spores took that suppression and amplified it, turning the act of denial into a source of profound, perverse sensation.
A low, heatless fire began to spread from his core. It was not pleasure. It was the feeling of his own control being felt, each reinforced bar of his mental cage becoming a live wire of awareness. His heartbeat, a thing he had mastered decades ago, became a thunderous, erotic drum in his ears. The slight constriction of his uniform trousers against his groin transformed from an irrelevance into an agonizing point of focus.
He refused to touch himself. His hands remained fists at his sides, knuckles white. This was the battle. His cock, thick and insistent, hardened completely against the rough fabric of his trousers, a traitorous flag of surrender his mind would not acknowledge. The physical need was immense, a building, painful pressure, but it was merely a symptom. The real effect was in his psyche.
The spores, mirroring his desire for comprehension, began to show him.
Images, not of fantasy, but of memory, fractured and recast through the lens of amplified sensation. The first time he’d taken a life, not as a violent flash, but as a slow, sensual penetration of his blade into flesh, the resistance giving way with a hot, shocking intimacy that echoed now in his groin. The grief for his lost wife, not a hollow ache, but a deep, throbbing want that attached itself to the base of his spine, demanding a physical release he could never have from her again. Every harsh command he’d ever given, every moment of cruel necessity, replayed not with guilt, but with the visceral, pounding thrill of dominance.
It was the anatomy of his own power, sexualized. It was horrifying. It was revelatory.
A single drop of sweat traced a path from his temple to his jawline. He was losing. Not to pleasure, but to understanding. The comprehension he sought was eviscerating him. To understand the spores was to feel every repressed impulse, every submerged passion, every shadow of his authority as a raw, fucking need.
A harsh, grated sound escaped his throat. His rigid posture finally broke. One hand slammed down on the map table for support. The other, betraying him utterly, moved to his trousers. He fumbled with the fastenings, his movements jerky, animalistic. The sound of the button and fly giving way was obscenely loud in the silent room.
He freed his cock. It was heavy, erect, the tip already glistening with pre-ejaculate. He did not stroke it. He gripped the hard, aching shaft at the base, his grip punishing, as if trying to strangle the sensation out of it.
It was useless. The climax, when it came, was not an explosion he could fight. It was a total systemic acquiescence.
He did not cry out. He uttered a low, devastated groan that seemed to be torn from the foundations of his being. His body bowed over the map table. The orgasm was silent, violent, and profound. A hot, thick rush of semen shot from him, painting a long, white stripe across a map of the northern wards. Another pulse followed, then another, a sustained, relentless evacuation that had less to do with physical pleasure than with a psychic purge. He saw, in that moment, the entire Black Library not as a fortress against chaos, but as an elaborate, shared fetish. Every ritual, every seal, every act of violent purification was just another way to cum. The understanding was absolute. And it shattered him.
He convulsed through the endless-seeming release, his mind atomized by the brutal insight. When the final, weaker pulses subsided, he remained hunched over the table, his forehead resting on the cool parchment beside the mess he’d made, his breathing a ragged, shattered thing. His cock, still half-hard, twitched in the aftermath.
The silence rushed back in. The sound-dampening glyph hummed.
Beos watched. She noted the precision of his collapse, the way his discipline had channeled the experience into a single, devastating metaphysical realization rather than a prolonged sensory barrage. The data was unique.
After a long time, Lysander slowly, painfully, straightened. He did not look at her. He methodically tucked himself away, fastened his trousers, his movements those of an automaton. He stared at the map, at the streaks of his own spend slowly soaking into the parchment, blurring the ink of cities and ley lines.
His voice, when it came, was hoarse and ground flat. “It strips away the narrative. The justification. It reduces everything to the… engine.”
He turned his head to look at her. The man who had faced her was gone. In his place was something older, wearier, and terrifyingly clear. “It is not a weapon. It is a truth. A corrosive, fucking truth.” He paused, his flinty eyes holding hers. “You will emit for no one else. This ends.”
He was not banning it out of morality. He was containing a bio-psychological hazard. He had comprehended, and in comprehension, found a terror that went deeper than any demon.
Beos nodded. “I understand.”
He gestured to the door, a dismissal that was also an admission of profound defeat. As she turned to leave, his final words, spoken to the ruined map, followed her out.
“We tell ourselves we fight for order. For light. For meaning.” A bitter, hollow sound that was almost a laugh. “We fight for the right to tell ourselves that story. Your… resource… burns the story away. All that’s left is the hunger. No army can hold a line knowing that.”
She closed the door behind her, leaving the commander alone with the visceral, drying proof of his own foundational truth. The chain of requests was now severed at its source. But the understanding was loose in the world. And she knew, with the calm certainty of a mycelial network feeling a shift in the dark, that a truth so visceral would not stay contained for long. It would find other ways to grow.
eventually beos gets tired. like really tired. she just sleeps, sleeping in later, going to bed earlier, taking naps during the day. the constant attention is exhausting for her, especially the drain of having to tell people no multiple times
The commander’s order changed nothing and everything. It did not stop the requests. It only forced them into whispers in shadowed corners, into notes slipped under her door, into the desperate, lingering looks across the training yard. The official line was quarantine. The underground current was a frenzied black market for a hit that no longer existed.
“Beos. Hey. Just a talk, okay?” Hale intercepted her by the armory, his eyes bloodshot, his smile too wide. “No sample. I get it. Lysander’s orders. But maybe you could just… describe it? In detail? The exact sensory progression?”
“The data is non-transferable through language,” she said, trying to sidestep. Her head felt thick, fuzzy.
“Humor me. Start with the initial olfactory input. Did it smell like copper, or more like burnt sugar?”
She told him no. It was the first no of that day. It would not be the last.
Anya found her in the mess hall, sliding into the bench opposite with a scribe’s intensity. “I’ve drafted a comparative analysis of my experience versus Hale’s. The variance in synesthetic feedback suggests a personalization algorithm. I need to corroborate the variables. A verbal walk-through of your emission process, the somatic components—”
“I cannot,” Beos said, pushing her gruel around the bowl. The noise of the hall, the clatter of tin, the laughter, it all pressed against her skull. “The Commander has forbidden discussion.”
“Discussion isn’t emission,” Anya pressed, leaning forward. “It’s academic. It’s safe.”
Beos said no again. The word felt heavy, a stone she had to lift each time.
The exhaustion didn't arrive like a wave. It seeped in. It was in the extra moment it took her brain to translate Common speech into meaning. It was in the way her feet dragged on the stone floors, her usually silent tread becoming a shuffle. It was in the irresistible pull of her bunk, even in the middle of the day.
She began sleeping in. The dawn bell, which usually found her already meditating or polishing her glaive, now rang into a deep, viscous sleep that clung to her. She’d wake with a start, the morning half gone, her mycelial networks humming with a strange lethargy.
“You look like shit, mushroom,” Elara grunted at her one afternoon in the yard. “They finally wear you out?”
Beos just blinked, the sunlight too bright. “I am fatigued.”
“Join the club,” Elara snorted, but her eyes were still that hungering, calculating kind of eager. “Listen. About that group event. The… feedback resonance. If we could simulate the conditions without the spores, maybe through a shared harmonic ritual, do you think—”
“No,” Beos said, the syllable flat and final. She walked away, leaving Elara mid-sentence. The effort of forming the refusal left her breathless.
She started going to bed earlier, retreating from the common room’s flickering firelight and the tense, watching faces. In her cell, the silence was a relief, but even there, the attention found her. A faint scratching at her door late at night. A muffled voice pleading, “Just one more. I need to understand. I need to feel it again.”
She stopped answering. She just lay in the dark, her wide iridescent eyes open, listening to the desperation seep through the wood grain. It was a different kind of drain, constant, psychic. In the colony, a need was broadcast and met, a quiet exchange of resources. Here, need was a siege weapon, battering, repetitive, utterly human.
The naps started accidentally. She would sit down to clean her glaive and wake an hour later, her cheek against the cool metal of the blade, a line of drool on its surface. She’d be in the archive, pulling a scroll for a mission briefing, and find herself slumped between the shelves, lulled by the dust and the distant, subconscious murmur of the Library’s protective wards.
“You’re missing drills,” Kellen, the scout, said, not unkindly. He found her in a dusty nook, curled on a pile of old tapestries. “Sergeant’s pissed. You okay?”
“I am tired,” she whispered. It was becoming her only truth.
“Yeah. I get that.” He shifted his weight, and for a second she thought he was just being kind. Then his voice dropped. “That thing with Tessa and me… it’s all I think about. It’s like we unlocked a door in each other’s heads and now the rooms are empty. We need the key again. Just to fill them back up. You don’t have to give us spores. Maybe you could just… be in the room with us? Your presence might trigger a—”
“No.” This time, she didn’t even look at him. She closed her eyes, hoping he would become a hallucination and fade.
The fatigue was a mycelial bloom in reverse, consuming her from the inside. It was the cumulative weight of every hungry stare, every calculated “friendly” question, every shattered person who saw her not as Beos, but as the key to a room where their own minds had broken. She was not a person to them. She was an artifact. A puzzle box. A well they could neither drink from nor leave.
One afternoon, tasked with simple supply inventory in a lower vault, she simply sat down on the cold floor between two crates of salted meat. The ledger slid from her fingers. The weak glow-globe light swam in her vision. She folded forward, her forehead resting on her knees, the large mushroom cap on her head tilting like a wilted flower.
She slept.
She didn’t dream of the soft, silent hum of the colony. She dreamt of hands, thousands of them, reaching out from the dark, plucking at her caps, scraping her for spores, their mouths open in silent, wanting screams.
She woke to a boot nudging her foot. Lysander stood over her, his expression unreadable. The map-room hollowness was still in his eyes, but it was overlaid now with a commander’s pragmatic scrutiny. “You are unfit for duty.”
“I am resting,” she said, the words slurred with sleep.
“You have been ‘resting’ for fourteen minutes according to the warden’s log. You missed two assigned patrols and a strategic assessment.” He crossed his arms. “The fatigue. Is it a result of the emissions? A resource depletion?”
She considered. It was a resource depletion, but not the way he meant. “It is the result of the requests. The denial of them. The constant… negotiation. It is very loud.”
He was silent for a long moment, observing her the way he might observe a cracked foundation. “The requests are orders to cease. They should have stopped.”
“They did not stop. They changed shape.” She pushed herself up, a deep, uncharacteristic ache in her joints. “Your people are ingenious in their hunger.”
Lysander’s jaw tightened. He saw the truth of it. An order could not cage a compulsion this fundamental. He had given them a world without light, and now they were all just straining to see in the dark, blaming the sun for going out. “You are confined to quarters. Not as punishment. For recalibration. Until further notice.”
It was a relief. A profound, physical unclenching of something in her chest. No more hallways. No more intercepting glances. Just a small, quiet stone room.
She slept for almost nineteen hours straight.
When she woke, the fatigue was still there, a weighted blanket on her spirit, but the sharpest edge of the noise was gone. She lay in the silence, listening to the slow, vegetative processes of her own body. The gentle pulse of the bioluminescence in her skin. The faint, almost imperceptible exchange of nutrients through the mycelial filaments in her fingertips where they touched the straw pallet.
A new note had been slipped under her door. It was on fine parchment. The handwriting was elegant, desperate.
‘The understanding is a ghost. It haunts the space behind my eyes. I need to see it again, to know it was real. Not a sample. A conversation. Please.’
It was unsigned, but the mercury-silver syntax and the reference to ‘the understanding’ marked it as Varric’s. The proud Onimetsu, broken not by pleasure but by truth, was now begging for a conversation with the architect of his ruin.
Beos stared at the note. Then she rolled over, facing the wall. She pulled the thin blanket over her head, creating a dark, quiet cave. The drain of having to say no, even to a piece of paper, was too much. She let the silence swallow her again. Outside, the hungering world of the Black Library pressed on, but for now, in the quiet dark, she let the tiredness win. It was the only offer she had left to give, and she gave it all to herself.