Chapter 6: flashback pt.2
The constant, gentle pulse of the colony was the rhythm of Beos’s world. It was the feeling of being held, of being woven into a living tapestry of soft light and softer thought. At six, she existed in a perpetual, blissful present. Yesterday was a vague feeling. Tomorrow was a concept as distant as the surface sun.
Today, there was a task. A beautiful, important task.
The message had come through the network not as words, but as a vivid, shared image: the Sovereign needed the Luminescent Lacquer for the new growth ceremony. The image showed the specific shelf in the Quiet Vaults, the jar of swirling, pearl-blue gel, and a deep sense of urgency that felt like a warm, pressing hand against Beos’s mind.
She loved being given jobs. It made her feel like her cap was sparkling. She bounced on the balls of her feet, a little hum escaping her lips that mimicked the colony’s resonance. “I can go! I know where!” she said aloud, her voice melodic but slightly slurred, the words feeling like smooth stones in her mouth.
The Sovereign, a still presence of stacked fungi and quiet power, pulsed a wave of warm affirmation toward her. It was tinged with a faint, familiar caution—a feather-light brush of ‘remember the turns.’ She felt the caution, smiled her lopsided smile that only moved the right side of her mouth, and skipped off, her bare feet whispering on the cool, damp stone.
The main cavern was a symphony of activity. Myconids drifted like ships in a slow current, tending glowing lichen gardens, polishing signal-crystals, their soft clicks and hums weaving a conversation she felt in her bones but could no longer understand in detail. She waved at Pfil, who was meticulously charting capillary flows on a wall with a luminescent paste. He pulsed a polite, distracted acknowledgment. She didn’t feel the slight. She just felt his presence, which was nice.
The entrance to the Quiet Vaults was a narrow fissure behind a curtain of dripping moss. She pushed through, the wet strands clinging for a moment to the broad, smooth dome of her mushroom cap before sliding off. The air changed. It was cooler, drier, smelling of dust and preserved things.
Her certainty lasted for three turns.
The vault network was a labyrinth of smaller caves, used for storage and deep contemplation. Shelves, carved directly into the rock, held clay pots of spores, bundles of rare mineral threads, and crystals sleeping in velvet moss.
She stood at a junction where four tunnels branched. The image in her mind was of the right shelf. But which tunnel led to the right shelf? The pressing urgency of the task buzzed in her chest, but the specific memory of the path had already dissolved, like a drop of color in water.
“Hmm,” she said to the empty air. She chose the tunnel that smelled faintly of lavender rot. That was a good smell.
This tunnel ended in a round chamber filled with nothing but giant, fuzzy moth cocoons suspended from the ceiling, pulsing with a slow, sleeping light. It was pretty. She watched them for a while, captivated by the rhythmic dimming and brightening. A moth within one twitched, and she gasped in delight.
Then the urgent feeling pushed back. The Lacquer!
She backtracked, her brow furrowed under the edge of her cap. At the junction, she tried the left-most path. This one sloped downward. The shelves here held broken things—a fractured geode, a myconid’s petrified finger, a helm of rusted surface-metal. She ran her fingers over the helm’s rough edge. It felt sad. She pulsed a soft feeling of comfort toward it.
“Beos.”
The call wasn’t a sound. It was her name as a vibration in the network, a clear, resonant chime from the Sovereign. It carried a question mark.
She jumped, guilt flashing through her. “Coming!” she trilled, though he couldn’t hear her voice from here. She abandoned the sad tunnel.
The third tunnel felt right. It looked right. The shelves were the right height. She walked with renewed purpose, her iridescent eyes scanning the contents. There were jars of waxy balms, tins of resonant powder… but no Lacquer.
The urgency from the network was now a warm, throbbing note of concern. It was mixed with something else—the faint, fizzy sensation of other myconids pausing their work, their collective attention subtly shifting toward the vaults, toward her delay.
Her lower lip trembled. She wanted to be good. She wanted to sparkle. She was trying so hard, but the map in her mind was just feelings, not pictures. A soft, distressed whimper escaped her, echoing slightly in the stone corridor.
“Little sprout.” This pulse was closer. It was Korva, the healer. A moment later, the myconid herself rounded a bend, her bruise-colored cap nearly brushing the ceiling. Her presence was calm, a balm. She extended a long, slender hand, not to scold, but to offer a fingertip. Beos wrapped her own small, partially-fungal hand around it. The connection was instant—a direct, gentle flow of guidance.
Korva didn’t send a new image. She simply led, and with each step, Beos felt the rightness of the path resonate in her own feet, as if the colony’s memory was in the stone itself. They took the fourth tunnel, the one Beos had ignored. Twenty paces in, on the left, sat the jar of Luminescent Lacquer, its contents swirling with captured light.
“Oh!” Beos exclaimed, her distress vanishing like mist. She grabbed the jar, hugging it to her chest. It was cool and heavy. “Thank you, Korva!”
Korva pulsed a complex feeling: affection, patience, and a simple diagram of the vault junction with a glowing path. Beos felt the affection, soaked it in like sunlight, but the diagram slid away, unable to stick in the soft, mossy ground of her memory. She beamed up at the healer, her iridescent eye shimmering.
Back in the main chamber, the ceremony was waiting. The Sovereign accepted the jar, his massive hands enveloping hers for a moment. The pulse he sent her was pure, unfiltered pride. She had completed the task. The minor delay was irrelevant. She basked in it, forgetting the confusion, the wrong turns, the sad helmet.
Later, she was given another job: take this basket of trimmed glow-tendrils to the compost spire.
This was easier. The compost spire was a tall, open chimney of rock in a nearby cavern. You could smell it—a rich, earthy, alive smell—from three tunnels away. She couldn’t get lost.
She carried the woven fungal basket carefully, humming. The tendrils inside emitted a faint, greenish light, illuminating the pleased expression on the right side of her face.
She reached the spire chamber. The compost pile was a huge, steaming mound of processed waste, teeming with industrious beetles and slow, digesting molds. It was beautiful in its own way. A myconid cultivator was there, turning the outer layers with a long, hooked staff. He pulsed a greeting.
Beos walked right up to the edge. She needed to upend the basket. She hefted it, the glow-tendrils spilling over her forearm. She tipped it.
And forgot to let go.
The basket, now empty, followed the tendrils in a graceful arc, landing with a soft thump on the dark, rich compost.
She blinked. The cultivator paused his work. A slow, curious query reached her.
She looked at her empty hands. She looked at the basket, half-buried in the pile. The job was ‘take the tendrils to the compost.’ The basket wasn’t part of the job. But the basket was now in the compost. A problem. A small, tangled knot in the smooth weave of the day.
“Oops,” she said softly.
The cultivator’s reaction wasn’t anger. It was a series of rapid, analytical pulses, assessing retrieval methods, basket integrity, contamination risk. It felt like a buzz of static against Beos’s mind. She knew she had caused the buzz. Her shoulders slumped.
Before the cultivator could act, she stepped forward, onto the steaming mound, to retrieve the basket herself.
Her foot sank instantly past the ankle into the warm, decomposing mass. It wasn’t unpleasant—it was like stepping into warm, living pudding—but it was unexpected. She yelped, lost her balance, and sat down hard. The compost swallowed her to the waist. The basket was now out of reach. The glowing tendrils she had just delivered were stuck to her side and leg.
The cultivator emitted a sharp, clear pulse of alarm that shot through the network.
Within moments, the Sovereign was there, moving with that preternatural stillness that meant he was deeply concerned. He waded into the compost pile, which only came to his knee, and plucked Beos out as if she were a misplaced sprout. She dangled, dripping with rich, fragrant organic matter, tendrils clinging to her hair and the curve of her mushroom cap.
She stared at him, her wide, iridescent eyes filled not with fear, but with profound apology. “I was helping,” she whispered, a single glob of compost rolling down her pale cheek.
The Sovereign looked at her—this strange, wonderful, impossible creature, covered in the muck of the colony’s own life cycle. He felt the network’s reaction: not annoyance, but a unified, gentle amusement, a sense of fond exasperation. This was Beos. This was their sprout.
He pulsed a single, deep, resonant note that swept through the chambers. It contained no words. It was a feeling of complete and total acceptance. It was the sound of a family forgiving its most accident-prone member before the accident is even over.
Then, carefully, he began to pick the glow-tendrils from her hair.
Beos, feeling the wave of love and the simple, physical fact of being cleaned, relaxed. She reached up and patted the side of his large, woody hand with her own small, dirty one. The forgetfulness, the mistakes, the confusion—they were all just weather. This, the steady presence, the connection, was the ground. And she was rooted in it. For now, that was all that mattered. She leaned her head against his arm, leaving a smudge of dark, fertile compost on his polished cap, and hummed back, perfectly in tune.
beos messes up big, completely by accident and she had the most pure intentions, and learns the feeling of actual anger and frustration from the others
She leaned her head against his arm, leaving a smudge of dark, fertile compost on his polished cap, and hummed back, perfectly in tune. The colony’s gentle amusement washed over her, a familiar tide that erased the little stumble. Days unfolded in their soft, predictable rhythm after that. She carried light things. She smiled at glow-beetles. The memory of the compost spire was just a faint, warm smell on her skin.
Then the Spire-Minder fell ill.
It wasn’t a human sickness. It was a creeping, gray dullness that spread across its once-vibrant yellow cap, a silence in its part of the network that felt like a dead spot in a otherwise humming garden. The healers, Korva at their forefront, worked in a tight, focused cluster around it in the grotto, their usual soothing pulses replaced by a tense, complex symphony of corrective energies.
Beos felt the worry. It was a cold, prickly sensation at the edges of the warm communal hum. She watched from a respectful distance, wringing her hands. She wanted the warm, friendly pulses of the Spire-Minder back. She wanted to help.
Korva eventually detached from the group, her posture slumped with a fatigue Beos could feel. The healer pulsed a clear, tired directive to the surrounding myconids: The substrate is poisoned. It requires the Void Lichen from the deep fissure. The drawing must be precise. Only a thread.
The image was sharp—a black, fibrous lichen growing in a single, airless crack in the deepest, most stable chamber. A precise length. A specific tool: a silver sickle with a blade no longer than a child’s finger.
Beos understood. The Void Lichen was a cure. She remembered the Lacquer, the happy feeling of completing a task. A powerful, sparkling need filled her. She could fix the cold, prickly worry. She could make the Spire-Minder’s cap bright again.
She saw the silver sickle left on a nearby bench as Korva turned back to the patient. It glinted under the crystal light. No one was using it right now. They were all so busy with their humming and their focused silence.
Her fingers closed around the cool metal handle. It felt important. Right. She slipped away, her heart beating a quick, happy rhythm in her chest. She would get the lichen. She would be so helpful.
The deep fissure chamber was silent and still, far from the anxious energy of the grotto. The air was cold and smelled of old stone. There it was: a jagged split in the floor, and deep within, a fragile-looking puff of lichen as black as a hole in the world. She knelt, the silver sickle small in her grip.
Only a thread. The thought was there, but it was slippery, competing with her overwhelming desire to help, to bring back a whole lot of cure. A thread seemed so small. The Spire-Minder was big. If a thread was good, a handful was better, wasn’t it? She could bring them a whole bunch, and they could use what they needed, and they’d be so pleased.
She reached down with the sickle, her tongue peeking out from the corner of her mouth in concentration. She hooked the black fibers. She pulled.
The lichen did not cut cleanly. It was ancient, tightly anchored. She tugged, sawing the delicate blade. A satisfying clump came free, then another. She gathered the inky handful, her fingers stained black. It was light, like cobwebs. She beamed, stuffing the priceless lichen into the small pouch at her waist. She’d done it. She practically floated back to the grotto, her iridescent eyes shining with pride.
The healers were in a state of deep, meditative synchrony when she arrived. Korva’s hand was extended toward the Spire-Minder, a single, gossamer-thin strand of Void Lichen held in her fingertips, ready for the precise application. The other healers hummed a stabilizing tone.
“I brought more!” Beos announced, her voice bright and clear in the silent room.
She stepped forward, triumphantly yanking the overstuffed pouch from her belt. The motion was sudden. The pouch’s drawstring, caught on a protruding crystal on her belt, tore open.
A cloud of Void Lichen, a brittle, black snowstorm of it, erupted into the air of the grotto.
It floated on the still, damp air. It settled on the patient’s gray-tinged cap. It dusted the heads and shoulders of the kneeling healers. It drifted onto their exposed fungal flesh and into their open gills.
The stabilizing hum stopped dead.
For one second, there was absolute, vacuum silence. Then the network screamed.
It was not a sound. It was a psychic detonation of pure, unadulterated agony. The Void Lichen wasn’t a cure in quantity—it was a corrosive, a magical neutralizer that dissolved delicate energetic connections on contact. Where a thread could cleanse a poison, a cloud acted like acid on the myconids’ psychic link.
Beos was shoved backward by the shockwave of pain—not physically, but mentally. It was a white-hot nail driven into the center of her forehead. She stumbled, the empty pouch falling from her fingers.
The healers recoiled, scraping at their caps, their forms shuddering. The Spire-Minder let out a low, grinding moan. But worse, infinitely worse, was what came from them next. It wasn’t the gentle static of the compost cultivator. It wasn’t the warm caution of the Sovereign.
It was a crackling, jagged bolt of raw frustration. It was a blast of pure, red-hot anger. It came from Korva, from the other healers, a searing, unified signal that hit Beos with the force of a physical blow.
DESTRUCTION! it screamed. RECKLESS! it scorched. FOOL!
The emotions were alien, monstrous. They burned. They had edges like broken glass. This wasn’t the soft, forgiving tapestry of her world. This was being flayed alive by disapproval.
Her own breath hitched in her throat. Her iridescent eyes widened, filling with a confusion that curdled into horror. The happy, helpful feeling inside her shattered. She looked at the black dust settling everywhere, at the shuddering forms of the only family she had ever known, and she understood, viscerally and for the first time, the consequence of a mistake.
She had broken something. Not a basket. Something inside them. And they were angry. At her.
A low, wounded sound, like a stranded animal, escaped her lips. She turned and ran, her feet slapping against the wet stone, fleeing the terrifying cold silence and the echoing, searing anger that chased her down the tunnel.
beos hides, crying softly, she can’t fully remember what she did wrong only that she did something very bad and people are angry at her. anytime she feels someone getting close to her hiding spot she runs away deeper into the caves
She ran until the burning pulses of anger faded into a dull, distant throb, like a rotten tooth in the mind. Her lungs didn’t burn—she didn’t need air the same way—but a frantic, fluttering panic beat behind her mushroom cap. She took turns at random, driven by a single need: away.
The familiar, guiding glow of the colony’s lichen faded behind her. The tunnels here were dark, sculpted only by the occasional ghost-light of pale mineral veins in the walls. The ground sloped unevenly. She stubbed her toe on a rock, cried out, and limped forward, the physical pain a sharp anchor in the storm of her confusion.
What had she done? The images were shattered. A black cloud. Pain. The Healer’s face, not with its usual calm, but contorted, broadcasting that cutting, jagged feeling. She had caused the pain. That much she knew. The why was a formless, terrifying hole.
She found a crevice, a shallow scrape in the wall hidden by a fold of thick, cold rock. She wedged herself into it, pulling her knees to her chest. The stone drank the warmth from her skin. She was shaking.
A sob broke loose, then another. They were quiet, hitching things that echoed miserably in the empty passage. Tears, warm and entirely human, welled in her iridescent eyes and traced clean paths through the faint, leftover dust of the Void Lichen on her right cheek. She didn’t try to stop them. The colony’s network was a silent hum here, a distant murmur. She felt utterly alone for the first time in her life.
Bad. You are bad. The thought wasn’t in words. It was the echo of that searing frustration, now turned inward. It settled in her bones as truth.
A soft, probing touch brushed the edge of her awareness. It was a search-pulse, faint with distance but unmistakable. It carried a signature—Korva. It wasn’t anger now. It was concern, a tendril of regret, a clear “where are you?”
It felt like a lie. The memory of the psychic scream was too fresh, too raw. That was the real feeling. This soft pulse was a trick to draw her out so the anger could find her again. She clamped her hands over her mouth, stifling her crying breaths, and pushed back mentally with a frantic, formless “no.”
The search-pulse withdrew. For several minutes, there was only the drip of distant water and her own trembling. Then, a new presence. This one was vast and deep, a resonant frequency that vibrated in the stone itself. The Sovereign. His pulse was a wave of profound calm, an image of the main chamber, of safety, of a blanket of warm moss.
It should have comforted her. Instead, it terrified her. She had broken the Healers, had poisoned the quiet music of the grotto. She did not deserve the warm moss. She did not deserve his calm. She had ruined it.
She felt him drawing closer, his slow, deliberate movement transmitted through the subtle vibrations in the floor. He was following her trail, a patient, inevitable force.
The moment his presence felt one turn away, she scrambled from the crevice. Her tears still flowed, but she made no sound. She fled deeper into the descending darkness, away from the father she was certain she had now disappointed beyond repair.
The tunnels grew stranger. The walls transitioned from worked stone to raw, gnashed rock, as if the mountain had been torn apart here long ago. The air smelled metallic, of old water and something sharp, like the rusted surface-box that had held the thunder-stick. She didn’t remember that event, but the scent pattern triggered a primal, full-body recoil.
Another pulse found her, not from behind, but from a side tunnel ahead. Pfil. It was a query, crisp and logical, tinged with an uncharacteristic urgency. Location? Structural stability unsafe ahead.
She skidded to a halt, whirling. She saw a flicker of soft bioluminescence around the corner—not Pfil himself, but a carried light. They were coordinating, surrounding her. Her heart hammered against her ribs. Their collective mind, the very thing that had always been her cradle, was now a net closing around her.
With a choked gasp, she plunged off the main path, dropping to her hands and knees to crawl through a low, jagged opening barely wider than her shoulders. The rock tore at her woven fungal tunic. The broad dome of her mushroom cap scraped against the ceiling with a gritty, shuddering sound.
She emerged into a cavern she had never seen.
It was massive. A cathedral space whose ceiling was lost in absolute blackness. Below, a still, black lake reflected nothing. The only light came from huge, sickly-yellow crystals that grew in jagged clusters from the walls and floor, emitting a feeble, phosphorescent glow that seemed to eat the shadows rather than dispel them. The air was dead and cold.
At the lake’s edge, half-submerged, were the bones of a machine. It was all decayed gears and colossal, fractured iron plates, a skeleton of some forgotten surface ambition that had drilled too deep and died here. The silence was total, a thick blanket that smothered even the drip of water.
This was a place outside the colony. A place beyond the network. The gentle pulse of her family was gone, replaced by this hollow, absolute quiet.
Beos sank to her knees at the mouth of the crawl space, her breath coming in ragged, silent draws. She was alone. Truly alone. The tears fell faster, hot and desperate on the cold stone. She had wanted to help. She had only ever wanted to help. And now she was here, in the dead place, because the anger she had caused was too immense to face.
A faint, familiar vibration trembled up through the rock beneath her knees. They were still searching. They were in the torn-rock tunnels now. She could feel the distant, worried murmur of them, like a song played in another room.
She wiped her face with a dirty sleeve, smearing lichen dust and tears. She couldn’t go back. She couldn’t. But the void in front of her was immense and chilling. She curled into a tight ball against the cold wall, her iridescent eyes fixed on the ghost-light of the dead crystals, and waited, paralyzed, for the net to find her or for the darkness to swallow her whole.