Six forced herself to breathe, circulating her breath technique.
In. Out. In. Out.
Fenric's footsteps had faded—circling the ruins, searching for another entrance. That bought them time. How much, she didn't know.
"We need to find another way out," she whispered.
Gorm nodded, his small eyes wide in the darkness. "Gorm agrees. Very much agrees."
Six pushed herself up on shaking legs. The Crow's Eye effect had faded, but her natural night vision was decent enough, and she still had blood scent. The labyrinth stretched before them—branching corridors, collapsed passages, shadows upon shadows.
"Stay close. Stay quiet."
They moved.
The ancient ruins was a maze in the truest sense.
Corridors looped back on themselves. Stairways led down only to climb back up. Chambers opened into other chambers that somehow connected to hallways they'd already passed. The architecture made no sense—doorways at odd angles, ceilings that sloped when they should have been flat, walls curved in odd ways.
And everywhere, those symbols.
Six paused at one junction, studying the carvings. They weren't random—she could see patterns now, repetitions, something that might have been a language if she knew how to read it.
"Gorm, do you recognize any of this?"
The ogre squinted at the wall. "Looks like... mushrooms?"
Six looked again.
He was right. The symbols weren't abstract—they were stylized depictions of fungi. Toadstools, shelf mushrooms, puffballs, things with long stalks and broad caps. They covered every surface, carved with obsessive detail.
"A mushroom cult," Six muttered. "Great. That's not ominous at all."
They pressed deeper.
The air changed.
Six noticed it first—a thickness to the atmosphere, a heaviness that settled in her lungs. The cold of the deep places gave way to something warmer. Humid. Alive.
And the smell.
Earth and rot and something sweet beneath it all. Cloying. Organic.
"Gorm smells it too," the ogre whispered. "Smells like... forest floor. After rain."
The corridor widened ahead, opening into something larger. Six slowed, pressing herself against the wall, peering around the corner—
And froze.
Gorm bumped into her from behind. She threw a hand back, pressing against his chest, shaking her head frantically.
Voices.
Someone was already here.
The chamber was massive.
It stretched upward into darkness—fifty feet, maybe more, the ceiling lost in shadow. Bioluminescent moss clung to the walls in patches, casting everything in a sickly blue-green glow. Mushrooms carpeted every surface—thousands of them, tens of thousands, pale white and sickly yellow and deep arterial red.
But Six's attention wasn't on the fungi.
It was on the two figures at the chamber's center.
The first was the Spore Lord.
It sat upon a throne of petrified wood and calcite growths—a massive fly agaric mushroom easily thirty feet tall. Its cap was broad and domed, the surface a deep arterial red spotted with irregular patches of bone-white arranged in spiral patterns. A face grew from the stalk beneath the cap—deep-set eyes that glowed with dim phosphorescence, a broad flat nose, and a wide lipless mouth filled with rows of rounded teeth like puffball mushrooms.
The Spore Lord was awake.
And it was talking to someone.
The second figure stood before the throne—a human, or something shaped like one. Tall, thin, dressed in fine clothes that looked absurdly out of place in the fungal chamber. A long coat of deep purple velvet, trimmed with silver thread. Polished boots that had somehow remained immaculate despite the trek through the labyrinth. A wide-brimmed hat that shadowed the face beneath.
The figure held a leather satchel in one gloved hand.
"—the seventh refinement is complete," the figure was saying. Its voice was cultured, aristocratic, dripping with false courtesy. "Lord Farquat is most pleased with the results."
The Spore Lord's voice was wet, resonant, like words bubbling up through mud.
"Pleased." A rumbling sound that might have been laughter. "Your master is always pleased when he receives my gifts. Yet his payments grow... smaller."
"The treasury has been strained by recent... expenditures." The figure's tone remained smooth. "The arena requires constant restocking. The fairy creatures have become increasingly difficult to acquire since word spread of their fate."
Six's blood chilled.
Fairy creatures.
"That is not my concern." The Spore Lord leaned forward on its throne, those glowing eyes narrowing. "Our arrangement was clear. I provide the Red Spores. Your master provides... compensation. If the compensation falters..."
"It won't." The figure reached into the satchel and withdrew something—a small chest, ornately carved, that clinked with the sound of coins when moved. "A gesture of good faith. And Lord Farquat wishes to discuss... expanding the operation."
The Spore Lord's horrible mouth curved into something like a smile.
"Expanding?"
"The current supply affects individual creatures. Useful for the arena—it makes them violent, unpredictable, entertaining for the crowds." The figure set the chest on the ground and straightened. "But Lord Farquat has grander ambitions. He wishes to know if the Red Spores could be... weaponized. On a larger scale."
Six felt Gorm tense beside her. She pressed harder against his chest, willing him to stay silent.
"Ah." The Spore Lord settled back, spores puffing from its gills with each breath. "Your master wishes to destabilize the entire fairy population. Not just individuals. All of them."
"Can it be done?"
"The Red Spores, when refined and purified seven times, produce hostile and destabilizing effects in fairy creatures. You have seen this yourself—the madness, the violence, the breaking of their essential nature." The Spore Lord's eyes gleamed. "But that is merely the beginning. With sufficient quantity, introduced to the water supply, the food sources, the very air of the fairy territories..."
"Mass insanity," the figure breathed. "An entire population driven to madness."
"More than madness. Corruption. The fairy creatures would turn on each other. Turn on themselves. Violent perversions of what they once were."
Six's mind raced. Mad fairy tale creatures. The twisted versions of familiar stories. The wrongness that permeated this entire world.
It wasn't natural.
It wasn't some curse or ancient evil.
It was manufactured.
Lord Farquat was doing this. Deliberately. Using the Spore Lord's Red Spores to corrupt the fairy creatures, to break them, to turn them into monsters for his arena and—what? Entertainment? Control? Some larger scheme she couldn't yet see?
"Lord Farquat will require a substantial quantity," the figure was saying. "Enough to affect the Black Forest territories. The Grimm Hollows. The Ever-After Reaches."
The Black Forest.
Six's home. Her cabin. The place she'd been trying to return to.
Farquat was planning to corrupt everything.
"Such a quantity will require time. Resources. And compensation far beyond what your master has offered thus far."
"Name your price."
The Spore Lord smiled that horrible puffball smile.
"I want subjects. Human children, delivered to my domain. Their innocent essence... feeds my growth. Accelerates spore production." Those glowing eyes flickered with hunger. "One hundred human children. Delivered over the next moon cycle. In exchange, I will provide enough refined Red Spores to poison the Black Forest's water table."
The figure considered this.
"That can be arranged....Hightown has surplus stock."
"Then we have an accord."
The figure bowed—a shallow, perfunctory thing—and retrieved the chest of coins. "I will relay your terms to Lord Farquat. Expect the first delivery within the week."
"I will be waiting."
The figure turned and began walking toward one of the far corridors—a different path than the one Six and Gorm had taken.
The Spore Lord settled back on its throne, those horrible eyes closing in apparent satisfaction.
Six and Gorm remained frozen in the shadows, barely breathing, until the figure's footsteps faded completely.
Then Six grabbed Gorm's arm and pulled him back, away from the chamber, into the relative safety of the labyrinth's twisting corridors.
They didn't speak until they were three turns away.
"My Queen," Gorm whispered, his voice shaking. "Did Gorm hear correctly? Farquat is... is making the creatures mad?"
Six's jaw was clenched so tight it hurt.
"Yeah." She thought of the Mosquito Queen. The crawdads. The twisted fairy tale horrors she'd encountered since arriving in this nightmare world. "He's been poisoning them. Breaking them. Turning them into monsters for his fucking entertainment."
"Gorm's wife..." The ogre's voice cracked. "She was not... she was gentle, before they took her. But in the arena, Gorm heard she fought like demon. Like she did not recognize herself."
Six closed her eyes.
They drugged her. They corrupted her. They made her into something she wasn't, and then they made her fight until she died.
"Gorm."
"Yes, my Queen?"
Six opened her eyes. They burned with cold fury.
"We're not just going to make Farquat pay for what he did to your wife." She touched Inky at her hip, felt the choker pulse against her throat, thought of every drop she'd collected, every power she'd gained. "We're going to burn his entire operation to the ground. The arena. The Spore Lord. All of it."
Gorm stared at her for a long moment.
Then his face split into that brutal, tusk-filled grin.
"Gorm likes this plan even more."
"Good." Six turned back toward the towering mushroom lord, We've got a tyrant to kill."