Karl lost touch with time. It might have been a moment, or it might have been an age, but he was there, again, this time, among a broad stretch of vitreous heathland beneath the darkling sky. It spread out before him, alien its splendor.

Or perhaps Nature had just lost her mind.

The life-forms that dotted the grassy landscape had no business looking as treelike as they did. Their darkly barked trunks soared up hundreds of feet tall. The gnarled roots fractured the ground where they broke through the earth. But the similarities to earthly plants ended there.

The trees' leafless boughs bore strange fruit; motionless fox-bodies hung from them like robbers from gibbets. The bodies' wings enclosed them like the petals of a flower. As Karl looked around, he realized with fascinated disgust that the fox bodies were growing from the branches. Golden shells littered the ground around the trees' roots.

Down in the pale glow of the underbrush, Karl saw little fox heads scurrying about on their insect limbs. They nipped and bit and growled and fucked.

The largest ones dug into the ground with their legs, and embedded themselves there, as if…

—They were taking root. That's what it was.

The heads were taking root.

Slithering around, Karl spied the pieces of these creatures' life-cycles. Every stage of their development was on display: the many-legged fox-heads, the saplings they grew into after taking root; the leafless trees with branches studded in wing-petaled flowers opening downward in luminous repose; the chrysalis fruits swelling between the wings as the flowers matured, furry tails dangling high over the ground where they budded from the fruits' tips. Fox-bodies formed within the fruits' translucent skins, shaped into being like babes in the womb. When ripe, the chrysalis skin cracked open, exposing the bodies to the air.

Karl even saw the completed imago⁠ itself: a body pried its head free from a branch with a push of its paws as it stretched its wings. Dropping loose, it drifted in the wind like a winged seed, and then made its first wingbeats and climbed into the air, roaring in the joy of new life, attracting the attention of its eager kin from the mountains in the sky.

— — —

"Karl?! Jonan yelled. "Karl?!"

Unfortunately, his borrowed body's owner was AWOL, stuck in an unwanted dream quest. Meanwhile—

"—Fuck," Jonan swore.

Ow.

Jonan—technically, Karl's body—was embedded in a gash in the street. His back stung as if it had burned away. There was nothing he could see, just colors, swirling outside his forcefield bubble: red and brown and black and green and gray.

Even though Jonan felt like shit, it was hard not to gawk at the feeling of wearing a wyrm's body as if it was his own.

His head hurt. Universes of knowledge filled his mind. It was big. Scary big.

Geoffrey's ghost appeared floating beside him, halberd in hand. "Is Karl alright?"

"How would I know?" Jonan replied, though he immediately realized he had bigger things to worry about.

Jonan decided that the worst part of this experience was the glut of information about wyrms' bodies and powers rushing into his awareness. It was the strangest fucking moment he'd ever lived. It was like he was experiencing everything twice over: once as himself—for the first time—the other, as Karl, complete with all the familiarity Karl had built up till now.

Karl's body was immensely powerful. It was like a creatine bro's wet dream. Everything was turned to excess: strength, size, perception. Jonan could have torn down the Imperial Palace with his bare claws, if he so chose.

Suddenly, a broken fibrous silhouette crossed Karl's wyrmsight.

Fuck, that was weird!

Jonan craned his neck back.

Jonan saw the outlines of a naked tail and missing wings, and three headless necks flailing in rage. High above, he could make out the levitation shells wrapped around Morgan and Bever.

Wait, what?

Those were Lopé and Nathan's bodies, but—

"—Oh, shit!" Jonan hissed.

Karl had sung his spirits into the other wyrms' bodies when they'd gotten ported off to dream world.

Suddenly, the smoke and debris straining against Karl's forcefields were torn away. Jonan could only watch in horror as matter and energy were sucked into the blotch of void burning in the fox-thing's chest, revealing the devastation the nuke had unleashed on the surrounding half-mile.

The last remnants of the wyrm tree spiraled into the fox. The creature was almost purely shadow now. Only strips of the backs of its heads remained, along with pieces of its eyes. Then, with a flicker, the darkness receded and the missing parts of the fox's body simply reappeared, completely regenerated.

It was the Larry Luxenderf fight all over again.

Then the fox took flight. It moved so quickly, passing through the buildings like a ghost. Whatever it touched simply stopped existing; there one moment, gone the next.

Just like what had happened when it had fled the palace.

A fungal structure came tumbling down as the fox deleted its core. Morgan flew Lopé's body up and managed to dodge, but Nathan's body didn't make it. Bever couldn't fly out of the way in time.

He was there one moment, gone the next.

"No…"

Jonan's snout holes flared. Another soul, lost forever—and all the more reason to fight this evil to the last, no matter what.

He just wished he knew how he was gonna break the news to Karl.

— — —

Brand had been barreling toward the nuke stash to get a nuke or two for himself when the blast wave hit. It came at him so bright, so fast, hitting him so hard, it knocked him straight past yesterday and into another world altogether, but not before he ceded control to one Dr. Heggy Marteneiss.

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Heggy's first taste of wyrmhood came at her somewhere north of a million miles a minute as Brand's body—and she with it—hurtled through the air. She pierced through a burnt-out skyscraper, in one way, out the other.

It gave her a newfound appreciation for wrecking balls. Thankfully, Heggy's Brand had left very clear instructions on how to use his body, so Heggy knew what to do as she stabilized her borrowed body's flight path.

It helped that she had a second copy of herself feeding her the directions from elsewhere in her mind.

It was weird as fuck, but it worked well enough. She pulled up and back around the collapsing skyscraper, recovering control of her flight.

Then the fox-thing roared. It soared into the air like a phoenix reborn.

Heggy cursed. "Shit!"

She flew away from the damn thing as fast as she could.

"Dr. Nowston?"

Heggy looked up to see Merritt Elbock flying beside her. Granted, the woman looked nothing like who'd she'd been a couple weeks ago, but Dr. Nowston's memory told Heggy that it was her.

Fricken weird.

Heggy just hoped she'd survive this long enough to rub it in Vernon's face. Her little brother would have killed to do something as cool as this.

It was hard not to flinch her head when the squads of flower ships pelted their death rays on the scampering wyrm trees. She could feel—and see—the waves of heat radiating off the damn things.

"Dr. Nowston?!" Merritt cried.

Heggy shook out her head.

Those horns of Brand's certainly weighed more than they looked!

"Sorry, Mrs. Elbock," Heggy said, "Dr. Nowston's not in the office at the moment. I can take a message, though."

"Oh, Heggy! Well… did you see that?" Merritt asked.

"Yeah, I'd say the explosion was pretty hard to miss."

Mr. Elbock appeared atop his wife's neck, along with a nice lookin' saddle. "No!" he said. "It was right before the explosion. The fox was absorbing the infected wyrms! At least, that's what it looked like!"

Heggy rifled through Brand's memories until she found the image he was talking about, and then sang it to Merritt.

"You think that's what it is?" she asked.

"What else could it be?" Storn replied. "That's how it regenerated."

"Why didn't Mr. Luxenderf need to absorb an infected wyrm to regenerate?" Merritt asked.

Then, an accented voice spoke from behind Heggy's head. "Technically, he did, Marteneiss Heggy."

"Well, howdy, Dr. Skorbinka."

"Yes yes," the Odenskaya mycologist said, from where he rode on her back, "nice and greetings, but listen: perhaps Luxenderf Larry needn't absorb infected wyrm to regenerate because Mr. Larry was wyrm. Scary Fox needs wyrm as fuel; Mr. Larry was his own fuel. You catch my meaning?"

Heggy soared upward to dodge one of the fox's third eye beam attacks.

No shit, she knew what it meant! With all those infected wyrms around, the fox would be able to keep regenerating itself, no matter how many nukes they threw at it!

Heggy trumpeted through Brand's snout.

"Keep the infected wyrms away from the beast! It uses them to regenerate!"

"Wait, what!?"

Heggy looked up to see Kurt Clawless flying by. He was dodging a wave of buildings collapsing in the wake of the most recent explosion.

"You heard me, didn't you?" she said.

Making a loop-de-loop, Kurt turned around and zoomed off toward the explosion's epicenter.

He was probably going to get a bomb or two.

"Wait for me!" Heggy yelled. She sent Brand's body rocketing after him.

It also helped that one of those damn melting wyrm trees was clambering up a ruined building like an old-timey movie monster.

Heggy added it to the ever-lengthening things-to-nuke list.

As she flew after Kurt, though, an idea came to her.

"Quick! Quick! Bomb the shit out of the freakin' fox! Then nuke the infected wyrms when the beast gets close to them to regenerate—otherwise, this will never fucking end!"

"Brilliant!" Mr. Twist roared. The formerly insane mascot-suiter launched a force blast at an infected wyrm pursuing them. Crazily enough, when the pataphysics' charged threads hit the corrupted wyrm, it blew apart in a rip-roarin' burst of fungus and prismatic flame. The explosion tore through a cluster of sporestacks, downing them like trees, sending spores raining onto the ruined streets.

Kurt bellowed. "Comin' through!"

The wyrm came racing back with three nukes in orbit around him. He passed one to Heggy and another to Mr. Twist, and then flew after the fox.

"Don't get too close!" Merritt yelled.

Shit! The thing was dynamiting Codman's Wharf with its damn eye-beams!

Kurt fired his nuke up at it. "Everyone scatter," he said, "I'm gonna to detonate it!"

Everyone nearby fled, flattening their flight paths toward the street as they zoomed away as fast as they could.

Heggy counted the seconds, bracing for impact.

But… nothing happened. A moment later, the explosion came, but from a spot on the ground, sending up geysers of molten streetstuff where the earth had absorbed the brunt of the explosion. Meanwhile, the fox soared in a wide, banking curve, completely unharmed.

"What the fuck just happened!?" Jonan screamed, fending off an attacking wyrm as he rose up from the city's depths.

"I—I can't use my powers against it!" Kurt yelled. "It… negates them when they get too close!"

Case in point: the bomb that had just failed to burst.

"What?" Jonan said. "But… I was able to detonate my nuke. What changed?"

Suddenly, Karl's body hovered motionlessly in the air.

"The power-down…" Jonan said. "The shadows on its body receded after it blew up the mothership! But now—"

"—It's back again," Heggy said. She could see swatches of shadow creeping across the beast's body.

"When it was powered down," Jonan said, "it had to destroy stuff manually. But when it's powered up, it just erases whatever it touches!"

"It's too dangerous to get near!" Morgan yelled, from Lopé's body. "Either it erases you, or the wyrms infect you and then you'll wish you'd been erased!"

Charles Twist screamed. "Shit! Shit!"

Everyone looked up.

Once more, a beam of blinding light shot out from the fox, this time aimed at the clusters of flower-ships racing toward the city. The ships stood no chance against that awesome power, and neither did their mothership. They blossomed, one and all; fires upon the deep.

— — —

Deep in a mountain cave, brightly lit by anti-shadow, the foxes were hard at work building a marvel. They'd dug a room into the cavern, one so tall that the anti-shade lit up the distant ceiling like a sea of floating sunlight. Several raised daises rested in the center of the chamber, supporting the weight of a great, stone-hewn Ring. Even though it was only half-finished— looking like a pair of arms gently curving toward the ceiling—Brand recognized it from the vision Mrs. Elbock had shared with him and the others.

Foxes walked along the walls, using the third eyes' fiery lasers to dig crevices into the rock. Brand noticed that none of the miners had more than two heads—though what, if anything, that meant, he couldn't tell. With a soft rustling sound, fur crept along one of the miners' bodies and then shot out in ropy, nimble arms whose hair glistened in the darkless cave. They worked in teams, one blasting the stone apart and the other grappling the carved edges to pull the stones out. Larger foxes with three or more heads came forward and tucked in their heads to push the blocks to the middle of the chamber. There were foxes seated there, waiting for them, and they had the most heads of all.

One had a bouquet of seven.

With their fur-arms' fingers, they etched flowing, branching patterns onto the stone with then they smeared over with golden, syrupy paint drawn from the broad bowls on the ground beside them. Then they brought their heads close and whispered breaths of shadow and spirit onto the stones, to make the magic live. Teaming up with their neighbors, they grabbed the stones firmly with their fur-arms and hoisted them up to the Ring. Others then walked up to the Ring and breathed spirit in between the gaps.

The foxes spoke excitedly as they worked.

"Nuruk ih'vusherrad Droost perjx."

"Enger'et xili njubon ih'lisiitexrats."

"Venxish gle'geg rjx d'la, po poov!"

Brand wished he could have understood what they were saying. If there was even the slightest possibility that knowledge of their language might help them dissuade the fox-monster rampaging through Elpeck from doing whatever it was doing, it would be worth it.

Unfortunately, it wasn't meant to be.

Still, he got something out of the experience: a clue, even if he didn't have much of an idea of what it meant.

An altar-like block of stone stood off to the side, against the cavern wall. It was out in the open, in clear view of nearly everyone. It looked important, as did the object sitting atop the altar. It was about the size of a console, perhaps a little larger, though Brand found it difficult to make any more detailed pronouncement, on account of the way the thing vibrated in place like an old fashioned alarm bell. The minute oscillations were uncanny; it was like the object wasn't entirely there. Light—true light—streamed out from its surface, projecting images onto the cavern's ceiling.

It was a reach just to find words for what he saw.

Node-rich stalks crisscrossed the rocky curvature. Information streamed in particulate flows like the dance of birds. Every once in a while, one of the foxes would look up, and then the particles rearranged, churning through sky-high geometry and then coalescing into design schematics of some sort. And, unlike the vibrating device, these images didn't jitter in the slightest.

If there was any kind of language to it, and kind of words or writing, Brand couldn't tell. But he was certain of one thing, it didn't belong there, and it made him wonder: was that why they were hiding this away in the cave?

And what would have happened if what they were doing was brought out into the open?

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