Screams rose from across the square as city folk and palace guards alike cowered. The vast celestial horror leered down at Draconium, and as its pallid light bathed her Aelyn felt her head spin and her gorge rise. She could not tear her gaze from the moon’s pockmarked surface, the great craters that looked so much like shadowy eyes. She felt the malevolence and cruelty that radiated from those immense black pits, and knew as surely as she had ever known anything that these were the eyes she had seen in her dreams, only writ impossibly vast.

Aelyn could not have said how long she knelt, staring upwards, her mind and body both paralysed by unthinking horror. It was a sharp stab of pain in the back of her right hand that shook her from her stupor. She looked down and made a sound of disgust as she saw a white-tipped lump pushing up through the skin on the back of her hand. Even as she watched, revulsion tingling through her, the skin split and a white and purple mushroom the size of her fingernail pushed up from her flesh.

She snatched at the horrible growth, grabbing its rubbery flesh between the finger and thumb of her left hand and plucking it out of her skin. It came away with a slight tug, as though she had plucked out a hair, and a thin trickle of blood welled after it. Aelyn flung the mushroom away with a cry of disgust.

‘Rust and iron!’ cursed Borik, and as she glanced his way Aelyn saw that two small fungi had burst from the metal of his armour just as easily as one had poked through her skin. The others were exclaiming in horror now, too, and Aelyn suppressed a surge of panic as she realised that all of them had small, pallid mushrooms forcing their way out through flesh, metal and cloth.

The palace guards were similarly afflicted – as, it seemed, were the remaining feastgoers and mummers still scattered across the square. In fact, Aelyn realised as her aelven senses relentlessly drank in detail, there were patches of fungi bursting from every surface, forcing their way up between the cobbles, sprouting from the stained glass of the palace’s windows and popping up across people’s bodies like obscene pustules.

‘Is it the spore sickness?’ asked Romilla, aghast.

‘No, look, its everywhere. It’s in everything,’ said Aelyn, her voice a weak croak.

A palace guard staggered past her, clawing at his face and wailing. She gasped as she saw purple-capped mushrooms forcing their way out of both of his eyes, thrusting through his tear ducts in dribbles of blood.