Mycroft Sporin's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Mycroft Sporin found the gray fuzz at dawn, and it was already killing the star-capped mushroom outside their lab. Mycroft was a tall, slender mushroom person with a yellow cap and four sharp eyes. They wanted one thing above all: to record every plant and fungus in the realm before it vanished. Now a blight had reached Backwash, and it was erasing specimens faster than Mycroft could name them. The giant mushroom with the starfish cap had stood healthy yesterday. Its purple ribs had gleamed. Now the edges curled black. Mycroft touched a rib and pulled back fingers coated in spores. The fuzz spread as they watched. Two ferns nearby had already collapsed into paste. Mycroft ran up into the lab, a workshop grown inside a living tree. Green energy pulsed through the trunk and lit the shelves. Mycroft set a spore sample under the brass field microscope and turned the focus wheel. The spores were not plant spores at all. They were animal cells, hooked and barbed, built to latch onto living tissue. No fungicide would touch them. "You're not a blight," Mycroft said. "You're a parasite." A parasite needed a host. Mycroft thought of the creatures that fed near the dying flora. One answer glided past the window on rainbow feathers. The long serpent-bird coiled its scaled body around a branch and preened. Its bite carried venom, and healers used that venom in medicine. Mycroft knew one more fact: that same venom dissolved barbed cells like these. Getting it was the problem. The serpent-bird did not share. Mycroft filled a jar with soft floating puffballs, the round creatures the bird loved to eat. They drifted up on their spidery legs. Mycroft climbed the branch, jar held out, heart pounding. The serpent-bird struck at a puffball. Mycroft caught one drop of venom on a glass slide before the beak snapped shut inches from their hand. Back at the bench, Mycroft mixed the venom with water and painted it across the infected star-mushroom. The barbed cells shriveled. The black edges stopped spreading. Within an hour the purple ribs firmed again. Mycroft had a cure. Then Mycroft looked out the window and understood the real cost. Dozens of serpent-birds nested across Backwash. To save every plant, Mycroft would need venom from all of them. Worse, the parasite had already spread on the wind. Mycroft found gray fuzz on three new specimens by the door, plants Mycroft had never even recorded. Mycroft grabbed an empty log book and a collecting bag. The archive could not wait for safety now. Every unrecorded plant in Backwash was already dying, and the only cure lived inside the jaws of a creature that wanted to bite.