Mortigus had his intuitions about what the ritual would entail, but he was nonetheless speechless at the brightly sorrowful display that engulfed the evening sky. As Arbero remained transfixed on the empty grass patch of remnants of the hut sprouting from the middle like a misplaced memento, Mortigus had already finished his preparations. Mortigus walked back to Arbero; he extended the satchel in his outstretched hand, a quiet gesture for it was time for both of them to move on. Arbero reacted slowly to Mortigus’ presence, simply nodding in acceptance and picking up half of the provisions in their tentacle. Yet they could barely make any steps forward, stopping to stare at the sky and the last embers of Essence, and in turn, Mortigus did not push them, letting this moment conclude on Arbero’s terms. 

    Mortigus moved forward, taking on the lead, but after walking for a few minutes, Arbero showed no signs of following him. Mortigus stopped to send a signal to Arbero, but his senses began to prickle, immediately followed by a fraught feeling overcoming with frightening force. From the north-east, a set of fungi alarms rattled the ground. Mortigus and Arbero sensed it—a trembling uproar in the mycelium, dozens of messy steps trampling the grass and pushing away low-hanging branches, piercing the forest in a disorganised, careless march. <<The humans were already here>>, nature would shout.

 A rushed signal from Arbero reached Mortigus, and he felt their rising panic. Before they could even reunite, more worrying news travelled through the ground: the horde was spreading out, encircling the forest. The chances of escape grew thinner and thinner, and the two needed to act fast. 

  “A group is coming from behind us as well. What are we supposed to do?“ asked Mortigus through the mycelium.

 “... We go forward. Their group is spread thin; our safest bet is to use the night to sneak between them and get away. Otherwise, we might get caged in,“ decided Arbero. “ Wait for me and keep a safe distance.“

 Mortigus gave a reluctant nod but followed their plan, and Arbero began leading the way north through the darkness. Mortigus’ steps were tense; he couldn’t shake off the feeling of being caged, as the only thing planting his feet into the ground was Arbero’s approaching presence. All the noises of the forest grew muffled by the distant voices of the horde, and the weak flickering lights in the distance were no longer the ever-common fireflies. As Arbero got closer, sneaking in the darkness of the foliage, Mortigus saw figures revealed by torches. 

  Suddenly, a deafening soundburst shook the mycolians to the core, its reverberations creeping through the forest. A thin line of smoke was rising from a bizarre flintlocke gun model, held in the leather gloves of a man with a solid build, standing out in his vermillion garbs among the many common folk forming the horde. All eyes, be it mycolian or human, were now on him, as he ordered for all others to be vigilant of the “monsters“ lurking around and to keep the torches alight. Mortigus and Arbero stepped a bit forward, Arbero especially, still too far for the loud leader of the horde to see them. Fear glued their eyes onto him. 

  Unexpectedly, a broken branch was heard from behind the tree in front of Mortigus, as a torch was swiftly ignited, the face of a young farmer popping out of the shadows, and the fire bringing the mycolian out of the darkness’ protection. The farmer screamed in shock, and before Mortigus could snatch away the torch from him, the farmer dropped it, erecting a sudden wall of flame between Mortigus and Arbero. The horde suddenly hurried in the fire’s direction as the farmer repeatedly shouted, “The monsters! They’re real!“ while running away to the others. Arbero and Mortigus attempted to bring out a fungi wall for cover, but the violently expanding fire burnt away most of the spores. Their Essence levels were still low. Skewering the ground with a deadly abruptness, a pitchfork landed right beside Mortigus, making Mortigus stumble backwards and even further from Abrero, who was still quite a few feet away. Knowing the horde was getting closer and more weapons were to be thrown, Arbero signalled Mortigus to run away. Despite hesitating for a second. Mortigus understood and headed back to the forest’s heart. Arbero channelled their Essence and shot a ball of spores towards the horde, hitting a few and setting them to sleep. A shriek passed Arbero’s neck as the leader fired a wild shot from their flintlock, sending a sharp spike flying past. Arbero had to keep running and leading them away from Mortigus. Unfortunately, the horde caught on to the presence of two Mycolians, splitting up to hunt them both down.

   Storming through the forest, Mortigus was leaving more and more ground between him and the pursuers, his elastic limbs trained for this environment. He took a path to the right, slowly going on course to meet Arbero, only for torchlights to pop up in front of him. What about the left? No, only more humans were awaiting him there too, their torches and tools giving them away. Trapped in by steel and fire, Mortigus frantically held onto the trunks around him, looking for salvation. His hand glowed with Essence, and he began breathing life into a formation of fungi, with no particular aim in mind. He grasped his face anxiously; the feeling of his skull-like face sprung out an idea. A shape, an object he could create, a diversion, and a blunder. His hands started forming it like a clay vase, a body with a prominent head just like Mortigus, a replica made of inert fungi. Quite a rough self-portrait, but Mortigus had no time to practice, as he quickly rested the formation onto a trunk and climbed the tree up to its crown, preparing to jump to the nearest tree. Tension built up in his ankles as the humans were encroaching on his tree. A fork whizzed past, just missing the fake Mortigus’ head, followed by rushed shouts and more spear throws until they were close enough to directly pierce it. In the noise of the horde “killing“ his fake, Mortigus made the jump to the next tree, and then to the next, and the next, until the light of their torches no longer could reach him. He watched over his shoulder the unaware crowd, consumed by their fear and bloodlust, before he ran deeper into the forest.   

   A lifeless husk on the ground, spears syphoning out its last remnants of life under the cruel light of torches. A tall being came into frame from behind the darkness, meters away from the horde surrounding the carcass. Arbero, who just managed to lose their pursuers, stood with their eyes fixated at the tragedy, their body twitching as their legs convulsed. “It couldn’t be... Don’t take him away too…“ screamed Arbero internally, their Essence raging into the ground and raising a wave of mushroom around themselves. Breathes were starting to get cut short, their eyes tunnelling to only the monsters trampling the soil around Mortigus’ corpse. Their vision would switch on and off between visions of burning figures, releasing grey spores among the ash and sparks. Humanoid shadows were chasing mycolians in a fiery vortex of burning wood, getting further and further away as Arbero’s perspective gained more and more distance. The wounds on bodies of the past lighting with bright ochre colours, overlapping with the corpse of Mortigus. Arbero’s mind was bombarded by visions of melding past and present, pushing each other out of Arbero’s consciousness, now their body moving on emotions alone. Each step was getting closer to the horde of savages, mushroom arms forming all around Arbero, ready to snap forward. Arbero could see it all and nothing at the same time, acknowledging and denying reality in a loop of dissonance and hope. The final straw was the moment the voice of a human broke past Arbero’s detached senses, for Arbero to push forward all the arms like bullets from a gun’s barrel, ploughing through the ground and trees. In an instant, all the people gathered around the corpse were smashed into trees or into the soil and kept in place. Many were knocked unconscious while others writhed in pain and panic, but no human seemed to be yet dead from the mushroom arms. Not yet; Arbero wouldn’t be satisfied to finish them off so quickly. Their rage needed more, to burn longer. Arbero pressed against a human chest slowly, a vice crushing the air out of them. Slowly, Arbero could feel more and more details, the mirage of past over present dripping out as their senses focused more and more on the revenge of that moment. 

   And then they felt it—right after the screams of suffering, the void. A void coming from the corpse, unlike any other. Arbero’s mind got struck by a thought of utter hopeful wish fulfilment: this was not the corpse of a mycolian. The life in mushrooms is never-ending; the ground below it always would remember the unique sign held in each mycolian body. But this was not what Arbero felt. The lifeless husk was rather too empty to be true, or it never held life to begin with. “A decoy, Mortigus must’ve created a decoy!“ gasped Arbero, losing all the focus in their powers and letting the humans slip through their fingers. Screams and groans were muffled by Arbero’s relief that burgeoned into their body. Still a few meters away from the group, Arbero stepped back and retrieved the conjured mushroom limbs, letting them be absorbed by the ground. With their emotion twisted back into hope, they started sending signals into the ground. 

 Not long after, Arbero felt the response of Mortigus, who was taking a longer route out of the forest. Arbero’s heart was nearly crushed by gratitude, and their legs threw them like a spring, heading towards Mortigus. Escape was nearing. The hunt was reaching its end; they could feel the humans getting left further and further back; even their torches and the stray gunshots were left in the darkness and echoes. 

  Arbero saw the forest thinning and thinning in front of him, but something looked off. The trees were slowly getting more warped, as if the air itself was crushing them. A glade opened in front of Arbero, with its grass already crushed by the moonlight. With a resounding thud, a rock brick crashed onto the glade's edge, and then another, and then another, a shower of stone descending upon the grass right before Arbero’s eyes. An arch was slowly being built, and as the bricks started resembling a round wall of a tower, two handles spawned out of thin air, sticking to a yet unbuilt door. Arbero looked at the structure in disbelief, yet their eyes hinted at a growing realisation. They finally acknowledged the apparition before them, the fable true and false, No One’s Tower. Slowly, all its details unravelled under the moonlight. The sky crumbled as the bricks reached higher and higher and cut the night with ever-taller walls. The bricks left noticeable gaps between one another, a thin void that let none of them touch; a simple breeze should’ve been able to spread them across the forest, yet the tower soared with the weight and presence of something beyond what mortal hands could craft. Window-like openings were scarcely spread out on the tower, though nothing could be seen inside through them. Only two dim lights from an incandescent metal were illuminating the sturdy wooden door and the path between it and Arbero. 

  Meanwhile, having sensed Arbero’s stopping nearby, Mortigus hurried towards the glade. He made the last few steps from behind the trees and stepped into the moonlight; there he found the motionless Arbero, their body seemingly frozen in place. Mortigus shouted in relief of finding his friend, but he received no reaction. “Arbero, Arbero, are you okay?“ he repeated once, twice, still nothing. He took a glance at the enormous tower of just walls and seemingly no entrance, but it would have been impossible to miss such a structure before. How did it appear here, and why was Arbero so absorbed by it? His foot moved forward, yet he couldn’t land a single step. Mortigus could force his legs to push forward only to land right back, like running on the spot, like a wind rejecting him. Mortigus’ shouts grew stronger, no longer carrying if the humans were to hear him, asking for answers from Arbero.

   “It’s truly here; it was real. A thousand years worth of rumours and false hope, of unquenched destiny and aimless life. Yet now it appears.“ muttered Arbero, eyes still fixated forward towards the door’s handles. “Now, now, why now?“ Arbero looked around themselves, yet their eyes did not register Mortigus’ existence. “When hope and despair meet, only then the sincerest of wishes are born, the Tower will answer to your Essence’s truth.“ 

  Mortigus yelled again, to no avail. He stomped the ground, deeply ingrained himself into the soil. Mushrooms grew fungi around himself, and with an arm gesture, he sent them to spread towards the tower. Yet again, the mycelium tried to dig into the ground, only for its roots to be sent sideways, encircling the glade from the underground with no chance of reaching Arbero. He poured his Essence more and more, his whole soul attempting to connect to Arbero, but he was rejected. Whatever this cursed pile of bricks was, it clearly wanted to be alone with Arbero, holding a conversation only Arbero could partake in.

  Mortigus abruptly took his feet out and charged towards the moonlit glade, his hand reaching forward desperately, only for him to stop in the spot, his arm repelled like before. Arbero began speaking again, far more clearly and louder than before:

  “The door is open, Mortigus!“ Yet Mortigus was only seeing a plain wall in front of Arbero. “The door is open. I believe in you, Mortigus. I appreciated these days with you more than I’ve appreciated any day in the last centuries. I believe the Tower will let you in soon, wherever you are. This is the chance, Mortigus, we may escape the humans for now, but the only hope for a future is beyond this door.“ Arbero grabbed the handles, opening the door slowly and stepping in.

  “We’ll see each other soon!“ Arbero called out softly before their body disappeared beyond the door. Mortigus was banging the air to let him past, but he could only watch as his eye caught its last glimpse of Arbero going into the ether. With a booming noise of the gate closing, the tower slowly floated back into the void of the sky, bricks dispersing into dust. Mortigus could suddenly enter the glave, but for what? He tried grabbing the fleeting tower, anchoring the walls with fungi, only to feel them slip away. In the cold, empty glade, he was now alone. It all slipped away from him in a single night, again and again. 

  At this moment, Fate blinked, letting time pass until Its eyes would open to let reality unfold again.