Chapter 22: buddies
The heat of the late afternoon sun pooled in the clearing like spilled honey. Beos hummed, a tuneless, buzzing thing that vibrated in her chest and made the tiny blue caps near her knees shiver in sympathy. She was threading luminescent runner-vine through a lattice of fallen twigs, her fingers stained with cool, phosphorescent sap. The Sovereign had asked for a new light-catcher for the lower gallery. Or was it the east tunnel? She couldn’t remember. It didn’t matter. The making was nice.
A twig snapped.
Not the soft, settling crack of the forest, but a sharp, deliberate break. Like a foot stepping wrong.
Beos looked up, her wide, iridescent eyes blinking slowly. A man stood at the tree line, backlit by the sun so he was just a tall, dark shape against the glare. He was perfectly still. Beos tilted her head, the heavy mushroom cap on her left side lifting slightly with the motion. A friend of the squirrels? They sometimes stood on two legs, but they were much furrier.
“Hello,” she called, her voice airy and bright. “You are blocking the light for the moss.”
The man jerked, as if her words were a physical thing that had startled him. He stepped forward, out of the shadows, and Beos saw him properly.
He was tall, with hair the colour of old charcoal and skin touched by sun. His eyes were a strange, bright orange, like the glow-worms in the deep caves. He wore a long coat, dusty and travel-stained, and on his hips hung metal and wood things she didn’t have names for. He looked… chewed on. A long, freshly healed scar pinked its way from his temple down his neck, disappearing under his collar. His knuckles were scabbed.
“Sorry,” he said, his voice a dry rasp. He moved aside mechanically, his orange eyes never leaving her. They flicked from her face to the mushroom cap fused to her skull, to her pale, glowing skin, down to her simple woven tunic and bare feet. He didn’t look afraid. He looked intensely, stupidly curious. “Didn’t see you there. Or, I did. Just wasn’t sure you were real.”
“I am Beos,” she said, smiling. She pointed a sap-gloved finger at the patch of moss now bathing in sunlight. “It thanks you.”
“Koen,” he said, tapping his own chest. “Koen D.”
“Cone,” Beos repeated, tasting the word. It felt round and simple in her mouth. Like a pebble. “That is a good name. It is a shape. I like shapes.”
“Close enough,” Koen muttered, but he took another step closer. His movements were easy, loose, like someone who had no concept that anything in the world could truly hurt him. He nodded at the lattice in her hands. “What’s that?”
“A light-catcher. For the dark places.” She held it up. The sap shimmered. “You are very tall, Cone. Are all people-from-above so tall?”
“People-from-above?” He scratched his head, his brow furrowing. The action was so plainly confused it made Beos giggle. “You mean… people? Yeah, I guess. I’m about average. You’re just… little.”
“I am perfectly sized,” she stated, not offended. She looked him over again. “You are hurt. Many times.” She pointed at his scar, then his knuckles.
“Huh? Oh, these.” He looked at his hands as if seeing them for the first time. “Nah. That’s just from last week. All healed. See?” He flexed a fist, the scabs pulling taut.
Beos leaned forward, peering intently. “It is still a hurt. A memory of a hurt. The colony remembers hurts in the rings of the cap. You remember them on your skin.” She looked at his face again, her head tilted. “Your eyes are on fire. Is that normal?”
Koen blinked. “Yeah. Demon thing. Half-demon. Doesn’t hurt.”
“Demon,” Beos echoed. The word meant nothing to her. She filed it away with ‘Cone’ and ‘tall’. “I live with mushrooms. They are better than people, I think. People are loud and far away. Mushrooms are quiet and close.” She set down her lattice and stood, brushing dirt from her knees. “Would you like to see?”
It was an innocent question, offered with the same openness as offering a berry. Koen D., bounty hunter, half-demon, survivor of a dozen fatal encounters, didn’t hesitate. Little to no self-preservation.
“Sure,” he said, shrugging. “I’m between jobs. Not like I got anywhere to be. Your hat ain’t gonna, like, spit spores at me or nothing, is it?” He pointed a blunt finger at her fungal cap.
Beos reached up and patted it gently. “This is not a hat. It is me. It does not spit. It listens.” She turned and began walking towards the jagged, tendril-fringed mouth of the cave. The air grew cooler, carrying the scent of wet stone and fertile decay. The faint, melodic hum of the myconid colony whispered from the darkness.
Koen followed without a second thought, his boots crunching on the gravel. He ducked under the low entrance, his orange eyes adjusting instantly to the gloom. The sight that unfolded made him stop dead.
The tunnel walls were alive. Bioluminescent fungi in cascading fans and delicate shelves painted the stone in pulses of soft blue and green light. Crystal formations glittered in the ceilings, reflecting the glow. The air thrummed with a sound like distant, resonant chanting. Shapes moved in the periphery—tall, slender, humanoid figures with fruiting bodies for heads and limbs that seemed to flow rather than step.
“Whoa,” Koen breathed, his voice full of genuine, uncomplicated awe. He wasn’t scared. He was impressed. “This is… this is something else.”
A tall myconid, its cap streaked with luminous gold, approached. It made a series of soft clicks and whistles.
Beos responded in kind, her own clicks fluent and musical. She turned to Koen. “This is a Keeper. It asks if you are food.”
Koen’s hand didn’t go for the gun at his hip. He just grinned, showing sharp canines. “Tell ‘em I’m tough and stringy. Not worth the trouble.”
Beos relayed this with a series of hums. The Keeper tilted its head, then emitted a puff of shimmering spores that danced in the air. It reached out a long, fibrous finger and poked Koen in the bicep.
“Hey,” Koen said, but he let it happen.
The Keeper retracted its limb, chittering to Beos.
“It says you are not food. You are… interesting stone. It asks why you are here.” Beos looked at Koen, waiting.
“I met Beos,” Koen said simply, as if that explained everything. Maybe, for him, it did. “She invited me. Seemed rude to say no.”
Beos translated. The Keeper pulsed with light, then gestured for them to follow deeper into the wondrous, glowing earth.
Koen fell into step beside Beos, his orange eyes wide, taking in every impossible detail. He was, Beos decided, the most interesting stone she had ever met.
beos continues showing koen around the colony. then they walk through an area filled with spores, beos is perfectly fine and believes koen will be too. that is not the case, he gets high as a kite. it makes him very cuddly, needing to touch to anchor himself in the sensations, his words slur and eventually he gives up on words, content to communicate non-verbally. beos sees nothing wrong with this and thinks he’s cute. they end up on the ground, made up of soft moss, with koen’s head in beos’s lap.
She led him deeper, past towering shelves of fungus that trembled as they passed, releasing drifts of harmless, silver dust. Koen sneezed, a loud, sharp sound that echoed down the crystalline passages. “Everything’s so… soft down here,” he remarked, his voice hushed not from reverence but from simple observation. He trailed a hand along a wall of sponge-moss, and it compressed then sighed back into shape behind his fingers.
“It is all alive,” Beos explained, pausing by a rivulet of water that glowed with its own faint blue light. “Even the stones listen. They are just slow.” She knelt and cupped the water, letting it drip from her pale fingers. “You are very fast. Your words, your eyes. Everything is quick.”
“Gotta be, in my line of work,” Koen said, crouching beside her. He watched the glowing water. “Monsters don’t wait for you to think.”
“What is a monster?” Beos asked, turning her iridescent gaze on him.
Koen opened his mouth, then closed it. He scratched his head, dislodging a bit of dust from his ashen hair. “Uh. Things that hurt people, I guess. Things that are… wrong.”
Beos considered this, her mushroom cap tilting. “The Sovereign says nothing is wrong if it is being itself. Only if it chooses to bite when a hand is offered.” She stood, offering her own hand to help him up. He took it, his own calloused and warm, and she pulled him effortlessly to his feet despite his size. His orange eyes widened slightly in surprise. “This way, Cone. The best light is ahead.”
They turned into a broader gallery, its ceiling lost in a fog of perpetual, gentle mist. Here, the air was thick with a sweet, almost fruity scent. Millions of tiny spores, each one a minuscule lantern, floated in the still air, creating a haze that shimmered like suspended gold dust. It was breathtakingly beautiful. Beos inhaled deeply, a smile spreading across her half-fungal face. “The Breath Room. It remembers everything. Every story the colony has ever heard sleeps in these spores.”
She walked forward, the particles swirling around her like a respectful entourage. They coated her black hair in gilt and settled on the curve of her mushroom cap without effect. She was home.
Koen followed, his boots sinking into the soft, velvet moss. “It’s like walking through soup,” he chuckled, waving a hand through the dense, glowing air. He took a few more steps, breathing in. “Smells like… apricots and old wood.”
Then he blinked, slowly. He shook his head, a faint, bemused grin on his face. “Whoa. Lights got brighter.”
“They are happy to have a visitor,” Beos said, her voice echoing softly in the vast chamber. She turned to see him standing still, his head lolling back as he stared at the spore-lit ceiling. His orange eyes were hazy, the pupils wide.
“Yeah,” he drawled, the word long and syrupy. “Super happy. Everything’s… fizzing.” He took another step and stumbled, not from weakness but from a profound lack of coordination. He caught himself on a low, rounded fungus that released a comforting puff of lilac scent. “Oh. That’s nice.”
Beos watched, her head tilted. “Cone? Your walking is broken.”
“Nuh-uh.” He pushed off the fungus and meandered toward her, his movements loose and drifting. He reached out, his fingers gently brushing a strand of her hair where spores had collected. “You’re all… sparkly. Like a constellation fell on you.” His touch was hesitant, curious. “Is that okay?”
“Your hand is warm,” Beos said, not moving away. She did not perceive danger, only a change in his rhythm. The colony’s rhythms changed all the time with the deep earth’s moods. “Are you unwell?”
“‘M fantastic,” he slurred, his grin goofy and unfocused. The spores were in his system, his half-demon metabolism processing them not as a toxin but as a potent, overwhelming psychoactive. He needed tactile feedback, something solid in the swirling, sensory soup. His hand slid from her hair to her shoulder, a clumsy, anchoring pat. “You’re solid. Good. ‘Anchor.’ That’s the word.”
He leaned into her, not with weight, but with a sudden, simple need for contact. His forehead bumped gently against her mushroom cap. “You’re like a tree. A nice, soft tree.”
Beos laughed, a light, chiming sound. “I am not a tree. Trees are upstairs.” She guided his wandering hands, placing one on her own shoulder so he could steady himself. “The spores are talking to you. They are very chatty.”
“They’re singing,” he whispered, his breath warm against her neck. “It’s all colors. Can you see the colors, Beos?” His words were blending together, losing their edges.
“I hear them as humming. You see colors?” She led him, step by shambling step, away from the center of the mist toward the gallery’s edge where the moss was thick and soft as down.
“Yeah. Lots. ‘S loud.” He was leaning more heavily now, his coordination entirely devoted to the act of putting one foot vaguely in front of the other. Communication became an effort. “Too many… words. Words are hard.” He made a low, contented sound in his throat, a purr-like rumble that was pure, non-verbal satisfaction.
At the edge of the chamber, Beos gently urged him to sit. He folded downwards, collapsing into a cross-legged heap, then slowly, gracefully, tipped onto his side on the deep moss. He looked up at her, his expression one of beatific, simple wonder. He reached up, a request without language.
Beos settled beside him, folding her legs. His head, heavy and warm, found her lap without prompting. He nuzzled into the soft fabric of her tunic, released a long, shuddering sigh of pure contentment, and went still. His eyes closed. One of his hands rested on her knee, his fingers occasionally flexing, as if to confirm her reality.
She looked down at his face, the sharp freckles and the healed scar, now relaxed in utter peace. The violent, fast “stone” was quiet. The spore-hum filled the air, a lullaby of memories. Beos began to hum along, her fingers tentatively, carefully, smoothing his tangled black hair. He was, she thought, much less like a stone now. He was like a sun-warmed rock in a stream, holding onto heat even in the cool, deep earth.
He was cute.
koen is like a giant cat, curled up and purring, burying his face into beos softness. beos giggles she finds it adorable. eventually the sovereign finds them, he was looking for beos, and he knows what koen truly is (basically a killer). the sovereign is surprised to see something with so much blood on its soul be so stupidly trusting. the sovereign has a telepathic conversation with koen (kind of, it’s mainly just feelings from koen) and he learns that koen is genuinely so lonely and has been shunned by peers for his whole life
A deep, rhythmic vibration started in his chest, a steady purr that resonated through her legs and into the moss. He shifted, curling his large frame tighter, his face pressing firmly into the softness of her stomach. His nose wrinkled, and he inhaled deeply, as if memorizing her scent—damp earth, sweet sap, and something uniquely her own. Beos giggled, the sound bouncing off the crystalline walls. His hair was surprisingly soft against her palms.
"Your noises are funny, Cone," she whispered, her fingers still moving through his hair. His only response was to nuzzle deeper, his purr intensifying. He seemed utterly unaware of his own size, or strength, seeking only the comfort of contact like a sun-drunk creature finally finding shade.
A shift in the gallery’s hum preceded the Sovereign’s arrival.
The resonant chanting of the myconids softened into a tone of deference. The golden-streaked Sovereign moved into the clearing of moss, its tall, graceful form pausing at the edge of the spore haze. Its perception was not sight, but a deep, empathetic sensing of life threads and intention. It had been looking for its wayward daughter, following the thread of her unique, hybrid spirit. It found her cradling a wildfire.
Beos looked up and whistled a bright, welcoming greeting. "He followed me home," she hummed, by way of explanation.
The Sovereign stood perfectly still. Its awareness unfolded, brushing against the sleeping form in Beos’s lap. It sensed the dense, metallic tang of old blood first—not a recent stain, but something ground deep into the soul’s fabric, a patina of violence. This being had ended countless threads. It was a killer, a thing of sharp edges and gunpowder echoes. The Sovereign prepared for threat, for guile, for the coiled tension of a predator playing docile.
It found only a profound, baffling emptiness where that tension should live.
The man was deeply, genuinely asleep. His soul, laid bare by the spores and his own unnatural trust, radiated a simple, sun-warm contentment. There was no plot here. No calculation. The killer was not pretending. He was just… resting. The disconnect was staggering. The Sovereign’s cap pulsed with slow, confused light. It extended a finer thread of consciousness, a delicate psychic probe not of words, but of emotional resonance.
It touched the surface of Koen’s dreaming mind.
A jumble of sensation flooded back—the comforting pressure of Beos’s hand, the soft murmur of her voice, the safe, enclosed darkness of the earth. Beneath that, the Sovereign sought the killer’s core. It was not hard to find.
It was a wasteland of loneliness.
The sensation was crushing in its totality. It wasn’t the sharp grief of a recent loss, but a chronic, hollow ache that had been there for decades. The Sovereign saw flickers: orange eyes watched with fear and disgust by human villagers, a flinch away from a offered hand, the cold bedroll under endless stars with only weapons for company. It saw the bewildered pain of a child shunned for his fire-eyed gaze, the resigned slump of a man who had learned his only value was in the violence he could enact. There were no peers. There had never been peers. Only contracts, targets, and the vast, stretching silence between them.
This being, marinated in blood, was fundamentally, desperately lonely. And so stupidly trusting that he would follow a strange fungal girl into the deep dark and then surrender his consciousness completely, hoping for nothing more than not to be alone.
The Sovereign retracted its awareness. It stood over them, a silent, towering figure. The protective urge it felt for Beos warred with a sudden, unfamiliar pang of empathy. This dangerous thing was, in its own broken way, harmless to them. Its violence was a surface trait, a learned language. Its core was just a forgotten, sun-warmed rock, grateful for any contact.
for the first time beos actually feels aroused. the sight of this powerful hunter turned into this cuddly mess by spores that she was completely immune to was doing something to her. it makes her feel powerful, almost dominant. koen, so far gone, can’t really move or make words. beos however is a virgin and knows nothing and sex
The Sovereign lingered a moment longer, then retreated with a soft susurration of its fibrous limbs against stone, leaving them in the private, spore-lit haze. Its comprehension was a silent weight in the air, soon absorbed by the colony’s hum.
Beos looked down. Her fingers had stilled in his hair. A new, unfamiliar heat was spreading from her core, a low pulse that echoed the purr still vibrating through his body and into her thighs. His complete vulnerability, the total trust in the way his large hand lay slack on her knee, was a sudden, intoxicating pressure in her chest. This thing that could kill monsters was melted because of her home, her air. It wasn’t the moss or the light. It was the spores she breathed every day without a second thought. They had felled him, and she stood untouched in the center of his undoing.
The power of it was thick and sweet on her tongue, like rare cave-nectar.
A sharp, curious ache tightened low in her belly. She felt a slick warmth bloom between her legs, a physical response that had no context, only sensation. Her iridescent eyes traced the line of his jaw, the pulse in his throat. He was hers right now. Utterly.
“Cone?” she whispered.
A muffled, wordless sound of contentment was his only reply. His nose pressed deeper into the softness of her stomach, and his breath, hot through the fabric of her tunic, sent a jolt straight to that new, aching place. She gasped quietly. The sound made his purr stutter, then deepen.
Hesitantly, her heart pounding in a strange, frantic rhythm, she moved her hand from his hair. She let her fingertips trail down the side of his neck, over the ridge of his collarbone, learning the landscape of him. His skin was so warm. He sighed, a ragged, happy sound, and tilted his head, offering more. The submission was absolute. It made her head swim.
Her other hand, the one he wasn’t lying on, drifted to her own stomach, then lower, pressing against the ache through her clothes. The pressure was good, but it wasn’t enough. It was outside where the heat was inside. A confused, needy frustration rose in her. She looked at his parted lips, his slack expression. He was a tool she didn’t know how to use, a instrument of pleasure she couldn’t play.
“You are so quiet,” she murmured, more to herself. “I want… I want to hear you.”
She tugged at the simple knot of her woven belt. It came loose. She pushed the rough fabric of her tunic and undershift up, baring her lower stomach and the soft, pale curve of her abdomen to the cool, spore-filled air. His face was right there. His next breath washed directly over her skin, and she shuddered, a full-body convulsion that made her thighs clamp together.
“Here,” she said, guiding his head with trembling hands. “Breathe here.”
He needed no further prompting. He nuzzled into the bare skin of her belly, his stubble a delicious, scratching friction. His purr became a guttural growl of pleasure, and he opened his mouth, not to bite, but to press a wet, hot, open-mouthed kiss against her. The sensation was electric. Beos cried out, a sharp, surprised sound. Her fingers fisted in his hair.
“Yes,” she hissed, the word foreign and fierce. “Like that.”
He was lost to the spores, a creature of pure tactile need. Her approval was a catalyst. His large hands, clumsy and heavy, came up to grasp her hips, holding her steady as he mouthed at her soft flesh. He licked a broad, wet stripe over her navel. She bucked against him, the slickness between her legs becoming a undeniable flood. The rough fabric of her leggings was suddenly an intolerable barrier.
She needed it gone.
With clumsy, urgent fingers, she untied the cord at her waist and shoved the leggings down over her hips, just enough. The air touched her, and she felt exposed, utterly new. She guided his head lower, past the gentle swell of her stomach, into the dark, neat thatch of hair and the slick, swollen flesh beneath.
His breath hitched. The scent of her, musky and sweet and entirely new, cut through even the spore-haze. His orange eyes, glazed and huge, flickered up to meet hers for a shattered second. There was a question in them, a wild confusion, before they slipped shut again with a helpless groan.
“Please,” Beos whispered, though she didn’t know what she was asking for. She pressed his face against her.
He made a shattered sound against her cunt. Then his tongue, hot and blunt and seeking, found her.
It was a clumsy, desperate lap, more a licking of nectar from a stone than any skilled act. It didn’t matter. The direct, wet contact was a lightning strike. Beos arched off the moss with a choked scream, her mushroom cap trembling. He held her hips down, his strength absolute even in his stupor, and did it again. And again.
His tongue dragged through her folds, circling the hard, aching nub of her clit without understanding its purpose, just following the scent, the taste, the desperate little noises she made. Each raw, wet stroke built a terrifying pressure in her core. She was clawing at the moss, at his shoulders, her world narrowing to the hot, rough suction of his mouth and the filthy, perfect sounds he made as he ate her out.
“Fuck, Cone, oh, fuck,” she babbled, the obscenity feeling right, feeling true, ripped from some place she never knew she had.
He grunted in response, a sound of pure animal effort, and doubled down. One of his big hands slid from her hip, his fingers pushing against her soaked, trembling inner thigh. He pried her legs wider, his grip firm, and his tongue plunged deeper, fucking into her with short, eager thrusts.
The coiling tension snapped.
Beos came with a raw, screaming gasp, her body seizing, back bowing off the ground. White light flashed behind her eyes, not the colony’s glow, but something internal and devastating. He kept licking, slower now, gentler, drinking her down as she pulsed and shuddered, his purr returning, vibrating against her sensitive, spent flesh.
She collapsed back onto the moss, panting, staring at the glowing, misty ceiling. Her body felt liquid, unmade. The powerful hunter was still between her thighs, nuzzling softly, his face glistening with her. The dominance she felt was a calm, deep river now. She had taken something. She had used him.
And he had liked it.
She looked down at his dazed, blissful face. A strange, possessive tenderness swelled alongside the satiated heat. She carefully tugged her clothes back into some semblance of order, her movements slow and heavy. He made a noise of protest, a lost puppy whine, and blindly sought her hand, intertwining his thick, calloused fingers with her pale, slender ones.
He brought their joined hands to his lips and kissed her knuckles, a drowsy, tender gesture that felt more intimate than anything that had just happened. Then his breathing evened out, and he slipped fully into sleep, still holding on to her as if she were the only real thing in the universe.
Beos sat in the humming dark, feeling the new, profound quiet within her own body, and watched him sleep. The spores drifted around them, remembering this, too.