Selected Scenes from the Ecologies of the Labyrinth

IX

“Deliver them to HELL!” yells Akayla Sethrys, brandishing her sword at some manner of crouching thing, some denizen of darkness, some nameless and unidentifiable monstrosity. To be fair, it’s probably quite identifiable, but this is their twenty-sixth room for the day and they’re having far too much fun to pay scholarly attention. Felix prays fervently for the power to sustain them, Gorandal laughs as they pour a healing potion directly into a fresh hole in their neck, and Morladi blazes magical wrath as the blood of other creatures slowly dries brown on her former best set of robes.

Sethrys stands in the ruin of another shattered door, unaware of the faint gray stain threading the warped and rotted grain of the ancient wood, unable to even be aware of the faint puffs of spores drifting up from the soles of her own boots, the underside of her adventuring pack, and the soiled hem of her long leather coat. The organism responsible, which is actually a tight-knit colony of highly specialized organisms, has been with her for some time (most relevantly in her throat and lungs and spine, and in the throats and lungs and spines of her closest friends). Each day in the warm months of the year, Sethrys and her little company have woken up with a fervent eagerness to head back to the low, dark places of the earth, where fortune and glory await, as well as the comfort of low ceilings and moist earth and limited sunlight. These once meant very little to them, emotionally speaking, but have of late begun to seem like markers of home. None of them feel quite so good as they do when they’re on their way, armed and armored, to investigate some new pit full of danger. Never do they seem to have as much furious energy as they do when they’re deep in the dark.

As the present fight within the present subterranean enclosure goes on, a seemingly incidental transfer takes place, with fresh spores drifting into microscopic networks of filaments within the indigenous colonies of gray symbionts-the mycological equivalent of news and visitors from distant lands. Invigorated, the native goop generates exciting new spores for the imported goop to take with it if it should be lucky enough to leave again. Bit by bit the vigor and diversity of the gray stuff in each of its sunless colonies is improving, although it has nothing like a human consciousness, merely a set of tools that has served it well.

“YEAH!” Sethrys screams. Her blade cuts into something not like skin, splashing something not like blood. The weird, crouching things are summoning reinforcements. The odds against the adventurers are growing. Still, Sethrys’s self-confidence feels like an inner sunlight that refuses to dim. Her friends are equally optimistic, bright-eyed in the exhilaration of combat. It’s wild, she thinks as they form a wall against the coming onslaught. She ought to be exhausted, but as usual she feels like she could do this all day. Couldn’t they all just do this all day?