He dreams of alien, geometric landscapes. Endlessly repeating fractal shapes shimmering white like clouded glass, or gold like woven gilded thread, or crimson like veins just beneath skin.

It's disorienting. It's beautiful. It's all that there is.

And then his dreams shatter and give way to loamy soil beneath his palms and damp, earthy jungle air. He spends a long moment on his hands and knees, hacking fluid from his lungs while he tries to remember how he got here. Through the muddled-brain haze of sleep, it's hard to tell anything is wrong.

But.

He remembers that painful and terrifying death at the claws of an enemy he was an idiot to ever face head on. And secondhand warnings about the dangers of the mold infesting certain caves. And his chrysalis, it didn't look like that last time, did it? That spiderweb of clear, glassy gemstone through the blue spinel. Like frost- or mold.

And this brainfog isn't just from waking up after a long sleep. It's something smothering, almost predatory. An encroaching presence every time he thinks too hard about the fight, or the warnings, or his chrysalis. Something that wills him to calm down, to not think so hard. That everything's alright.

But it isn't alright. Something is wrong. Something is very very wrong. Something is very very wrong with HIM.

MOTHER

The presence was there, and one might call it 'lurking' but it wasn't--not exactly. It was more like... a word at the tip of the tongue; a song one could not quite remember. It was present, and it was at the very edges of Cyneweard's mind, not yet fully realized.

Now and then, a sensation--possibly unsettling--would brush past: thoughts not Cyneweard's own, though not fully realized either, brushing past the edge of his consciousness. It was like hearing distant snippets of conversation: words passing, too muffled to quite make out, but heard with his magic rather than his ears.

It would take time--a cycle or two--for the link to strengthen enough for Cyneweard to hold a true conversation. But for now, something else had been prepared: a greeting from Mother herself. It came in the form of a battered Hallowed Caller: one of the creatures capable of mimicking speech. This one looked a little sickly, though not dying; it fluttered down, black wings settling across its back, the red eye in its forehead peering to Cyneweard.

"You... are..." the creature said, its voice a croak as it fought to produce Mother's words for her. "...protected. You... are... family. Ursa... family." It had to pause to breathe, heavily, and in the wake of this speech came the slightest touch of reassurance to Cyneweard's mind: a strange flicker of...

...love?

@Cyneweard

He watches the hallowed caller warily as it approaches. His first thought is Aren't these only found in Cetus? and his second is how it looks.. ill. Dull feathers and eyes, somewhat withered and emaciated. And he swears he can see tufts of white poking from between its feathers. He stares the bird in it's huge, creepy eye.

And it begins to speak. And he knows that it is whatever lives in the fungus, and that it is lying. And he is just about to open his mouth to tell it exactly that when he is hit by a feeling.

And he is reminded, suddenly of how lonely he is. Because that flickering hint of a feeling, however faint and fake, reminds him of how Ruvaen used to make him feel. And he realizes, even if he's met nice gembound and had nice conversations since then, he hasn't felt that way ever since Ruvaen went missing. Part of him had gone missing, too. But just for a moment, he had felt whole.

But it's fake. It's fake.

He stands suddenly, wobbling for an embarrassing moment before steadying himself. "I don't want to join your family. I'm not going to Ursa." He takes a couple steps towards the bird, trying to shoo it away. "I don't want this. Leave me alone. Please."

@Rift

The place of the battleground was some ways from the Arborspire, but Rift considered himself more a guardian of the cave as a whole, and had come across the bloodstained ground some days ago, horrified by the dried gore and the chrysalis webbed with white infection. He did not know what had happened here, but he had checked on it every so often, determined to be there when the one within woke up.

Why? Ah...he didn't have much of a good reason besides curiosity. His feelings towards the Hive were mixed. On one hand, their tenacious fungus had infested his home cave for all he could remember, staining its beauty, choking life to replace it instead with its sickly decay. But...Mother had helped reunite him with a piece of his past. She had allowed him to speak to one of their Hosts without any interference. She had given them mercy. And, because they had been granted that mercy, Sebastian had been reborn. The chrysoberyl was still buried deep within his tree, but it was a part of him. It was his previous life. That was important to him.

Still, he could not deny his disapproval for the Hive as a concept. Oliver had told him enough about it - infection, the loss of autonomy, removal of free will to become part of a whole. It was disturbing and a part of him feared it and wanted it out of his cave.

So, lets just stay on curiosity for the situation.

This time, as he was bounding through the canopies of the trees to check on the spot, he found it to be shattered, and the creature that was within standing, speaking. He didn't initially see what it was they were speaking to, and thought maybe it was speaking to itself. He paused in a tree above, considering his next action for a moment, and then carefully began to climb down from the branches and down the trunk of a tree, landing a few feet away from Cyneweard. "Hey, are you okay? I saw the aftermath a few days after - were you in a fight with someone?" His eyes were serious and curious - if there was someone dangerous around, too, he wanted to know.

@Cyneweard

The sound of a stranger's voice makes him jump, whipping around to face the green mountain lion. His gaze flicker, ever so briefly, to his battleaxe, still lodged in the dirt near the center of the clearing. He half expected them to be another one of Mother's messengers but... no. They seemed normal, and he didn't feel any sort of pull or connected like he assumed he would with someone actually infected by the fungus.

"I'm... uh. Yeah. There was a fight, I guess." Comes a hesitant reply, "I was looking for anyone who might've been injured in the wildfire and I encountered this massive crab-like drone from The Hive. It was trying to regrow the fungus. I...probably should've ran, but I attacked it anyways. And, uh-" He kicks at a stray chrysalis shard. "It won."

Suddenly, he feels a pit of nervous doubt deep in his stomach. Should he really tell this around gembound everything? They're a complete stranger! He has no idea what their actual intentions or morals are! What if they're just trying to lure him into a false sense of security? What if he tells them that he's infected, and they decided the best way to 'cure' him is to just rip him to shreds so the fungus has nowhere to hide?

Maybe he should just go back to Cepheus. Of course, he'd have to pass through Ursa-

"Something's wrong." He blurts. "Something's wrong with my brain."

@Rift

Eyes widened minutely, perhaps not too visible beneath the mask, at the description of the drone. Alarm bells immediately began ringing in his mind and he whipped his head around, as if expecting a gigantic white tank to come rolling in any second. He cast his magic out into the grass beneath his feet, extending out through the entire network of the cave, but with all the remaining black-spots in his senses due to the hive's influence, it was hard to get a read. He didn't notice any kind of gigantic force barrelling their way through the trees at the moment, which was a relief.

The sense retracted and he glanced at the chrysalis too. And then he stared. Throughout the blue, he could see strands of white, not unlike the infectious mycelium that currently dominated the caves. An alarmed glance between that and back at the humanoid, and he understood. "You're infected," was, perhaps, the obvious realization he came too. He took a step forward, thinking of the late stages of the infection that he'd seen - the lessers with dead white eyes, threading of white overtaking their body, hollow vessels for the Hive to fill. Even Yellow, that Greater that he had met, hadn't seemed quite right. This one didn't look too bad at the moment...but he knew it would probably get worse.

"I can try and help you. I can try to force it out of you. It might be painful." He hadn't done it before, but Oliver told him it worked. It wasn't pleasant but it was a surefire wire to rid a gembound of the fungal infection. He paused, realizing that they were still strangers to each other - why would he trust him to help? "I'm Rift, by the way - a guardian of Eridanus. I want this infestation removed too."

@Cyneweard

Content Warning
This post contains potentially sensitive material:

anxiety

Minor panic attack

The green wildcat began to visibly panic, and he threw his hands up in an appeasing gesture, "I don't think it's coming back!" How did he know that? "I don't think it's coming back." He repeated. Some vague sensation of.. guilt? Something heavy yet illusive. Another one of the disorienting alien sensations now infiltrating his mind. It wouldn't be a very pleasant welcome. He thought, but wisely kept to himself. He wanted to seem as normal as possible, even if something was very much wrong and he was very much panicking for no reason.

"You're Infected." He said it so plainly, like Cyneweard's mind hadn't constantly circling the issue while refusing to put a name to it. Calling it an infection, like it was some kind of disease, felt wrong in some sort of wordless guttural way. It would've been so easy to pretend nothing was wrong, except he knew better than that.

"Yeah." He exhaled. He could still feel the panicked thrum of Can't let them know can't let them close Can't let them know run away run away racing through his mind and creating a lump of dread in his gut. He had half a mind to know that these feelings probably came from the same place the not-love and the snatches of not-quite-words did. But that didn't meant the feelings didn't feel any less real or nauseating.

"I can try and help you-" OKAY great! Great, just what he- "-I can try to force it out of you." -Wait that didn't- "It might be painful." Oh no. He's going to rip it out of you. He's going to rip it out and it's going to hurt. His hackles raised in alarm, his heart beating too-loud and too-clear in his ears. he's going to rip you open to get to the fungus. His claws unsheathed into his palm, sharp pricks he could barely feel. it's going to hurt more than claws. more than stingers. But it's what he wanted, right? What he needed? its going to hurt A couple deep breaths as he tried to gain enough composure to speak, "Please- just- make it quick." Keep breathing. Calm down. You're fine. you're going to die Breathe. "Please don't kill me." It's for your own good.

He'd barely caught Rift's greeting through his own panic. Belatedly, he'd return it "...I'm Cyneweard. I'm, uh, a knight." A minuscule laugh that crumbled in his throat, "...usually I'm a lot braver than this."

@Rift

He flinched at the panic, a little surprised at the sudden need for appeasement, surprise immediately replaced by sadness. Eyes roamed over the humanoid thing and he stepped forward slowly. "Hey, it's okay. He's not coming back. We're okay here." He forced himself to calm - obviously his own anxieties were affecting it, so he needed to stay collected through this.

He could visibly see the alarm, the raised fur, the clenched fists, he could see it sparkling in their eyes. He didn't blame them, but it alarmed him to see such fear directed towards the infestation of Order. He had not realized how frightening it was, but thinking about it now, seeing someone directly faced with it, it made sense. The loss of autonomy could not be pretty or pleasant to go through. He understood the fear and it gave him a determination to help them, and then wipe out the remaining fungus from this cave.

He stepped forward. "I'll make it quick. I won't kill you, I promise." He nodded as he prepared his magic, further saddened as Cyneweard laughed. "That's okay. You don't always have to be brave. Especially when there is something very reasonable to fear. Now, just, hold on. I'm doing it now." And with the same method he used to rid trees with threads of fungus deep within their bark, he sent the magic into Cyneweard and forced what fungal spores within them to pull out through the skin and bloom, trying to do it fast so that it didn't hurt too much.

...But nothing happened. He stared for a moment, waiting for something to happen, but the magic he sent out found nothing. It wasn't that it didn't work - it did - but as he attempted to pull fungal spores out of the humanoid, it found nothing to catch on.

He stared, confused. He had not been expecting that. "You...aren't infected? Not with the fungus at least. I...I'm sorry I thought..." He shook his head and then looked Cyneweard in the eyes, worry etched through his masked expression. "What happened to you?" It wasn't a demand for answers or an angry inquiry, but something sad and distressed - he wanted to help but he didn't know how.

@Cyneweard

Hes not going to kill you. You're not going to die. Its fine. It might hurt a little bit, but that was necessary. Sometimes necessary things were uncomfortable or painful. Its fine. He focused on breathing evenly and deeply, trying not to imagine how much it might hurt. He squeezed his eyes shut, his whole body tensing with horrible dread as he waited for the mold to be forced out of him, along with whatever pain that'd bring.

But...

...Nothing happened...?

"D-did you cast the spell right?" He asked, the anxiety in his stomach pooling into a deeper sort of dread, "I'm- I'm definitely infected. I know it." His gaze snapped to the clear-veined shards of blue spinel scattered across the forest floor. He'd thought it was just mold, but.. that was definitely stuck in the gemstone, right? Was it stuck in his gemstone, lodged in too deep for the spell to reach?

"I don't know what happened. I just woke up like this." His arms hugged across his chest, rubbing at his upper arms as though chilled. It wasn't the kind of hug he wanted, but it was almost, almost enough.

(He could feel the barest impression of love pricking in the back of his mind, like someone silently waiting for permission to speak. He pushed it away just like before and was left with a cold hollowness in his chest, like opening the door to a room that shouldn't be empty.)

"...Can you try again?" He'd ask, in the barest whisper, "....Please?"

@Rift

He didn't know what to do. He thought back on the last few moments, remembering the feeling of the spell, tossing it over and over in his mind to make sure that he wasn't wrong. There was nothing in Cyneweard to pull out, there were no spores under the skin that could bloom. He pressed a paw against the ground, and did the same thing, pulled from spores to bloom - and they did, latent white fungus trapped within the grasses coalesced and bloomed in front of him. He felt it there as he pulled it out. Just as how he didn't feel it from Cyneweard.

He stared at the knight, the smallest shake of his head betraying his distress. "There's nothing to pull from you. The spell worked - I felt it work, but from you there is nothing. The fungus is not in you." His eyes followed Cyneweard's gaze, towards the white-streaked chrysalis shards and something hollow dropped in his stomach. He didn't know what it meant, but it had to mean something. A paw reached forward carefully, picking at a piece nearby that was blue, yes, but something clear and white and different wove through it like...infection. Of the stone? Rift glanced to Cyneweard, eyes roaming over his body, but found no gemstone - he couldn't confirm his theory, but the chrysalis shards told enough.

"I don't....know enough about how the Hive works. The infection, at least. I though it was just mold. Is it more?" He was growing more distressed and scared by the moment. This was not a good revelation - not for the forest, not for the gembounds fighting against the Hive. He cast his mind out for ideas and the only one that really stuck was the one he voice. "I don't know if it will do any good but...would you want to come to the Arborspire with me? Order should be weaker there. I don't know what good it will do you but...maybe it will slow it. Or give you respite. I don't know." He shook his head. "I'm sorry, I just don't know."

@Cyneweard