A mist-pale movement flashed atop the body. A tiny hill mouse staggered out from the fold of Fulmo’s neck, having somehow gotten caught in the tumble down through the Pall. One of the mouse’s forelimbs was already torturously transforming into a wicked-looking claw, while its ears were flowering like dandelions ready to burst.

Elen cursed, kneeling, and set her hand on the ground as she rolled up her sleeve. The viper stirred, uncoiling from her heart but not yet emerged. The Spore-ridden mouse hopped from Fulmo’s neck to his shoulder and scurried down his motionless arm toward the ground and the plants and the life, the life, the life that it would burst upon and thus trigger an irruption to race, unchecked, along the canyon floor.

The haunt plucked up the mouse by the tail. It struggled, writhing and twisting, and its body elongated in multiple directions as it tried to escape his grip. It hissed in the malignant manner of Spore everywhere. The haunt merely opened his mouth wide, dropped the mouse in, and closed his lips over it, sucking in the tip of its tail.

Pain burned like hot ash through Elen’s skin as the viper finally emerged from her arm. It slithered eagerly across the rocks to investigate Fulmo’s body. For once, Elen scarcely noticed the pain, because she was staring at the haunt. She couldn’t be sure whether she was horrified or entertained or maybe both, because she’d never seen anything like this.

He munched and he crunched with an expression of delight, and, still masticating, he pointed at the viper as if to remind her to keep an eye on its hunt. It had discovered a seedling Spore nestled in one of the gagast’s armpits. The viper sucked down the wisp and kept on searching as the haunt swallowed, once, twice, and a third time. He wiped his mouth with the back of a hand and sighed with pleasure.

“So much texture,” he said. “I do miss that. The Heart Temple was the worst. There was no flesh at all to be had.”

“At a Heart Temple, they don’t eat the flesh of animals.” She didn’t know what else to say.

He looked at her quizzically, eyebrows spiked upward. “Is something wrong?”

She waved a hand, aware she was grimacing, and choked out, “You ate it whole, fur and guts and bones and all.”

“It seemed the most efficient way to be rid of it.”

“Won’t the Spore infest you? Eat you out from the inside?”

“Didn’t we already have this discussion? It can’t eat me faster than I can repair the damage it causes me.”

“But you don’t have a viper to eat the Spore.”