Virea Mournroot's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Virea crouched beside the enclosure, watching the host's chest rise and fall. Day twelve would arrive at dawn. She'd mapped decay through living tissue for eleven days straight, longer than anyone had managed before, but the work wasn't finished yet. The sound reached her first — footsteps, plural. Her associate never brought company. Virea stood and moved toward the entrance, where a small cache sat waiting near the old stone marker. The frog statue squatted in murky water, mushrooms bright against its weathered back. Her associate stood beside it, hands empty, face tight. Behind them, a stranger in traveling clothes held a leather journal pressed against their chest, eyes locked on the enclosure. Virea's gut dropped. The stranger had already seen inside. The journal's cover was decorated with pressed flowers, the binding foreign work. The stranger's knuckles were white around it. They'd stopped at the marker, she realized. Close enough to see everything. Her associate stepped forward, voice low. "They followed me from the bog cottage. I didn't know until we were here." The stranger finally looked at Virea, and their grip on the journal loosened. They opened it, turned it around. The pages were filled with script she couldn't read, but the diagrams needed no translation — spore networks, rot signatures, living hosts. Someone else had been tracking the same work. Someone who now knew about her subject, her methods, and her eleven-day record. The experiment was no longer hers alone.