15. Wisps and Mushrooms

Catching wisps was as easy as Silane remembered. All she had to do was wait for clouds to cover the moon, then leave her possessed body and skewer the wisp between jaws of mist. However, catching a wisp intact, in fit state to be put into the mist-binding jar, turned out to be much more difficult. Silane accidentally ate the first wisp she caught. The second one dissolved into nothingness, bleeding out essence from multiple puncture wounds before she even pried it out of her mouth. The third wisp got one whiff of her Mistforged aura and fled farther than she was willing to chase it while her mortal body laid as insensate bait upon the forest floor.

Abandoning the hunt, she slipped back into that familiar flesh shell. Her right hand stung, still oozing from its earlier wound. She licked it, then spat it out. Human blood tasted wrong to a human tongue. She curled up against a tree stump and rested her head on her knees. This strategy wasn’t working. As mist, she could hunt but not detain; as a human, she could lure but nothing else.

A faraway bird chirped. Silane squinted up at the sky. Was that a hint of azure filtering through the clouds to the east? It was hard to tell whether the faint pallor there was moonlight or the rising sun. She remembered her first dawn in the mortal realm; how bright and horrible it had burned then! Yet now, viewed through mortal eyes, how dim and—dare she think it—how welcoming the light seemed, heralding an end to this farce of an assignment. With two wisps acquired through charity, she met the minimum requirement for this task. Two wisps were enough to stave off failure, no matter how much accepting another’s pity rankled. She refused to go the way of Brother Jerry.

Enough fumbling around in the dark. She stored the mist-binding jar in her backpack and took out the lantern. The forest around her was dense and overgrown, but general directions were clear: the ground had a slope to it. Silane and Aaron had climbed diagonally upward from the road to search for wisps amid the forest, and Silane’s solo movements had been level along the hillside. Thus, traveling back down the slope should return her to the road. She hiked downhill, using the lantern to identify a clear path. The trees parted to a segment of road laid flat beside the plunging cliffside.

A groan trailed from the underbrush between her and the road. Silane turned, lamp held aloft. Shadows raced around her, fleeing from the light. She noticed life first and the owner later: a man slumped in the rain-gully off to the forested side of the road. Lamplight revealed him to be an adult, middle-aged perhaps, humble of stature and clad in simple garb. A basket of mushrooms was scattered around his feet. Three wisps coiled around his collapsed form, fangs buried deep in his flesh, bodies writhing like great bloated leeches.

Drunken with the richness of mortal essence, the wisps had not yet fled from the threat of impending dawn. Nor did they react to Silane’s approach as she climbed down into the gully, pitching lamplight across and through their translucent smoky coils. However, Mushroom Man noticed. Eyes that had been screwed shut in pain fluttered open for a moment, and he turned to Silane with a dazed expression. He reached out with a trembling hand, dragging along the wisp latched into his wrist. There was a shovel just beyond his reach.

“Help... meeeee,” he gasped.

Lamplight fell across his face. He wasn’t anyone Silane knew. She turned away.

A foolish wisp interpreted her retreat as a sign of weakness and lunged for her neck. It was clumsy from the recent feeding. Silane tilted her head to the side, dodging the wisp’s ill-aimed mouthparts, and crunched its body between her own flat human teeth. A double row of real Mistforged teeth spawned inside her mouth, piercing the wisp’s immaterial body and draining its energy. The wisp poofed out of existence.

“Huh,” Mushroom Man croaked.

Silane climbed up the side of the gully toward the road.

“You... help... come back,” Mushroom Man continued to mutter as Silane moved away. “Help... hey!” He flung his shovel at Silane. It stuck upright in the ground several paces away. “I’m talking to you, demon-eater!”

Silane froze, one foot on the road. “What did you call me?”

“Demon-eater,” he said again, “because I saw you eat that demon. Now would you please hurry and scrape these demons off me? I can’t feel my legs.”

“Don’t call me that,” Silane said over her shoulder. “There was no demon. You’re seeing things that aren’t real.”

“Why you little... I know what you are,” he snarled.

“I’m human, just like you. A perfectly normal human,” Silane insisted, stepping back onto the road. “Except I’m not pathetic enough to lose to wisps.”

“No, wait—please don’t leave. Help me, and I won’t tell anyone what I saw.”

That made Silane pause. Indeed, Mushroom Man had seen more than he ought to know. She could not let that pass unaddressed. Dawn inched over the road, brilliant even to her human eyes. The light hadn’t reached the gully yet, but it would scatter the remaining wisps within minutes. Silane placed the lamp on the side of the road, where it cast a dim flickering glow over the gully, and climbed back down.

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The two feeding wisps fled before Silane could grab them. Mushroom Man gasped in relief.

“It’s cold, it’s so cold. Why does it still feel cold?” he whimpered, curling up around the oozing bite wounds on his wrist, leg, and opposite shoulder.

The wounds still pulsed darkly with mist; the wisps had left behind Marks of their essence in the shape of their respective mouthparts. Even though Silane had eaten one wisp and chased off the other two, their Marks lingered like ink beneath Mushroom Man’s skin, slowly siphoning his energy and inverting it into mist.

In any case, it wasn’t something Silane could help with. She got up and fetched Mushroom Man’s shovel. When she knocked it against a nearby tree, it made a satisfying thwack.

“What are you doing? Hurry, get me something to bind these wounds. I’m bleeding out here,” Mushroom Man said.

“Nothing I can do,” Silane explained. “The only fix is to cut off all the Marks, and I doubt you’d survive losing both arms and a leg. I’ll save us both the trouble and put you out of your misery.”

“What? You, you monster—someone HELP ME! There’s a DEMON—”

“Be quiet!” Silane swung the sharp end of the shovel at his head.

Impossibly, he rolled out of the way and caught the shaft. He was twice Silane’s size; despite his injuries, he managed to wrest away the shovel and toss it aside Silane hissed and lunged for his throat with her bare hands. Just then, sunlight spilled over the lip of the gully, and daytime bound her within the limitations of this pitiful possessed body. She howled in rage.

Aaron arrived some time later, drawn by the sounds of their fight.

“Silane! Hold on, I’m coming,” Aaron shouted, running toward the gully where Silane was wrestling a hysterical Mushroom Man.

Silane bashed Mushroom Man’s head against a tree before Aaron got close enough to hear his accusations. He collapsed, and Silane scuttled away.

“He’s crazy,” Silane said, gasping for breath. “I was trying to help, and he attacked me.”

Aaron crouched beside the unconscious Mushroom Man. “He’s badly hurt from a wisp attack. Who knows what he was thinking. We have to get him to a doctor.”

“The others are too far away,” Silane argued, but Aaron wouldn’t hear it.

“We can’t leave him here,” Aaron insisted. “I’ll bind his wounds. You gather his stuff.”

Too tired to argue further, Silane went to pick up Mushroom Man’s shovel and basket. The latter felt heavier than it looked. She turned it over, digging through the contents. Buried amid more mushroom stalks than any person had reason to collect, there was a clay pot covered in glyphs: a homemade mist-binding jar. Captured wisps fluttered within, agitated by her proximity even through the jar.

The Order hadn’t been the only ones hunting wisps tonight.

Silane hid the mist-binding jar in her own backpack before Aaron saw it. It wouldn’t do for him to start asking questions of someone who had already seen too much.

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By mutual agreement of the instructors, Mushroom Man was brought back to Lumivale Academy for treatment. A doctor ushered him to the infirmary. The class gathered around as the doctor inspected Mushroom Man’s wounds. The doctor cleaned away the blood and grime on one wrist, revealing a spreading black stain left over from the wisp attack. The Mark placed there had grown in the time it took to return to the Academy.

“Stand back. Cleansing a demonic Mark is a delicate process,” the doctor warned in a double voice, pupils alight with the green fire of guardian Unification. The class retreated to form a loose circle around the doctor and patient. Curious faces peered in from all directions.

The doctor uttered a long prayer, hands twisting into complex shapes as she channeled mana into the Mark. It writhed beneath Mushroom Man’s flesh, resisting the spell. His skin began to redden and steam around the black rot. A tiny, agonized screaming noise emanated from the area. With a sizzle of electricity, a cloud of smoke burst out of the wound—a wisp, unwillingly dragged out through its Mark. The doctor trapped the wisp in a glass mist-binding jar.

“There’s the culprit,” the doctor said, beckoning the class closer again. She held up the jar, now filled with writhing black smoke. “We are fortunate it was only a small wisp. Now that the corruption has been expelled, the wound will heal in its own time.”

A blistered red area like a severe burn had appeared on Mushroom Man’s arm, spanning from the crook of his elbow to mid-palm.

“He looks worse than before,” Silane commented.

“It’s better than the alternative,” the doctor said. “Any village apothecary can provide medicine for a burn, but there’s no way for ordinary citizens to treat mana corruption. A Mark left intact will grow until it has consumed the entire body.”

The initiates murmured in fear. One student said, “Then he’ll turn into one of them, right? And go mad like that rogue in the woods?”

“Of course not,” the doctor said. “He would die. Mana is our life force; people can’t survive long with corrupted mana. Any power the rogue gained from his Mark was certainly repaid in ill health and the brevity of his life.”

The doctor moved to the second wound on Mushroom Man’s leg. She repeated the Mark removal process, trapping the smoke that emerged in another jar. The final Mark on Mushroom Man’s shoulder broke much faster than the others. The smoke dissipated into the air, too thin to fill a mist-binding jar; the associated wisp had been eaten by Silane in the forest. The doctor seemed puzzled by the empty jar.

“Strange. This wisp must’ve already been destroyed,” the doctor said. “Regardless, our task is done. The patient will survive.”

The inhuman green glow faded from the doctor’s eyes; the unification spell had ended, and the possessing guardian exited her body. The doctor slumped into a chair for a moment, then straightened with the dazed look of one waking from a dream. Once she regained her bearings, she proceeded to clean and bandage the fresh burn wounds.

After the class was dismissed, Silane volunteered for chores around the infirmary. If Mushroom Man awoke and let slip that she had attacked him, she wanted to find out sooner rather than later. She begged the doctor for the privilege of scrubbing the recovery ward windows, setting aside her dignity in the name of information-gathering.