Chapter 70

Ava

Chris pulled the car up to the side of the road and put it in park beside a narrow pathway cordoned off with a chain and a large yellow ‘warning’ sign. A silence fell as he shut the ignition off and pulled the keys out, and he glanced over at me with a quizzical look on his face.

“You’re sure you’re up for this?” he asked.

I nodded. The poisoning had only happened yesterday, but thanks to the effects of the moongrass juice I had been given, I felt much better. And besides, Chris needed answers. He needed to see for himself what I had mentioned during the council meeting.

Without a word, Chris and I got out of the car. I dug through my bag and pulled out to respirator masks and held one out to him.

“Put this on.”

“What the hell is going on, Ava?” he asked as he gingerly took the masks. “Where are we going?”

With my mouth set in a grim line, I slid the mask on and fastened it, then pushed it up onto my head for now. “Just trust me,” I said, my voice somber. “You’ll need it.”

Chris opened his mouth to argue, but then shut it again. He then slipped the mask on and I helped him to fasten it. Then, gesturing for him to follow, we stepped over the chain and headed into the woods.

We walked in silence along a narrow dirt path for a while, neither of us speaking. The path had become overgrown with the years, but it was still relatively easy to follow the deep ruts in the ground. The forest itself was lush and vibrant as ever.

But not for long.

We had hardly been walking through the forest for fifteen minutes or so before the trees began to thin, and the unmistakable stench of decay reached my nostrils. Grimacing, I pulled on my respirator mask and gestured for Chris to do the same.

When we finally broke through the treeline, he understood why.

Spread out in front of us was a barren wasteland like something out of an apocalypse movie. The ground was charred black, as though a wildfire had raged through here. Twisted, gnarled trunks of dead trees clawed up from the ashen earth like bony fingers, their branches entirely stripped of any foliage. The air itself seemed to hang thick and obscured with distant clouds of spores.

And in the center of it all was a worn down, decaying warehouse.

“What... is this place?” Chris breathed, his voice muffled behind his mask as he stared out at the desolation in abject horror. This was nothing like the lush, beautiful forests we were used to—this was like something out of a nightmare.

“The remains of Ethan’s arrogance,” I answered, gesturing for Chris to follow me into the clearing. He hesitated at the edge, shifting uncomfortably in his spot. I sighed and turned to look at him, and tapped my mask with one finger. “These will protect us just fine. You don’t need to worry.”

Chris hesitated for a moment longer before taking a deep breath and following me toward the warehouse. Our boots kicked up clouds of black dust with every step, the crunching sounds of our footsteps unnervingly loud in the eerie silence. Silence in the forest usually meant that there was a predator approaching, but this…

This was far worse than that.

“What did Ethan have to do with this?” Chris asked as we walked toward the desolate warehouse.

I drew in a shuddering breath. “Do you remember the stories about the moondeer from your childhood? Aside from what I mentioned at the council meeting?

Chris gave a slow nod, but remained silent.

“What you might not know,” I continued, “is that our connection to the moondeer—and to this land itself—runs so much deeper than just respecting the forests. The land has a life of its own.”

I paused then, turning to face the crumbling facade of the warehouse looming up ahead of us. Even from this distance, I could make out the faded letters on the side—RADIANT INDUSTRIES. Just seeing the name made me shudder.

“A few years ago, this facility was constructed after Ethan sold a sizable portion of our territory to a human corporation,” I explained, gesturing towards the building with a jerk of my chin. “They built it to mass-produce fake moonstone—essentially just cheap, glowing plastic masquerading as the real thing so they could sell it to human children as a toy.”

A muscle ticked in Chris’s jaw as he stared at the warehouse, but he remained silent, allowing me to continue.

“At first, it was just an... unpleasant development,” I said, fighting to keep the bitterness out of my tone. “The construction scarred a part of our lands, certainly, but it wasn’t anything too severe. Not at that point, anyway.”

Striding toward the warehouse, I stopped in front of a large metal door. I gripped the handle and gave it a few yanks, and finally, it broke free from the latch and swung open with a deafening creak. I saw Chris tense up beside me, but when I gestured for him to follow me into the warehouse, he hardly hesitated.

“But then... then the fungus appeared,” I said, wrapping my arms around myself with a shudder. “No one had ever seen anything like it before. It was this… black mold that seemed to quite literally drain the life out of everything it touched. The plants... the animals... even the soil itself became poisoned.”

Stepping into the warehouse, we were instantly met with the scent of something ancient and rotten, even through the masks. It was safe enough to walk here now, although the smell still made my throat constrict. Beams of sunlight streamed through the gaping holes in the metal roof, illuminating what looked like dust motes floating in the air.

But they weren’t dust motes. They were spores.

“No matter what they did, it just kept spreading,” I said, gesturing to the spores. “Smothering this land and the warehouse and the land around it like the earth was trying to swallow everything whole.”

I swallowed hard against the lump welling up in my throat. “Eventually, the corporation that bought this land wizened up and abandoned it. They had lost too much property, and… too many people.”

“People?” Chris asked, taking a step forward.

My hand shot out on instinct and stopped him. He glanced over at me, his eyes questioning behind his mask. I merely nodded my head toward what he had nearly stepped on.

Human bones.

Just scattered there like discarded trash, amidst the ash and decay.

Chris gasped and immediately dropped into a crouch beside the skeletal remains. There wasn’t much left besides the skull, a few vertebrae, and the tattered remnants of blue work coveralls.

“What the hell?” he whispered, his voice trembling. “How is this possible? The fungus did this?”

I nodded stiffly. “It’s safe enough now, so long as we wear our masks,” I said. “But when it was at its peak, inhaling the spores for even a few seconds could cause them to lodge in your airways and choke you out. And if you didn’t die from loss of oxygen, the spores would… well…”

I gestured around the skeleton, where dozens of tiny, black, glistening mushrooms had wrapped themselves around the bones and anchored themselves into the earth. A shudder quaked both of our bodies as we imagined the utter agony of having your entire body consumed by fungus from the inside out.

Swallowing hard, I dropped to one knee beside Chris. I closed my eyes as I bowed my head in a silent prayer over the bones.

“Forgive them, Moon Goddess,” I whispered under my breath. “They didn’t know what they were doing. They were only following orders.”

When I opened my eyes again, I found Chris watching me, his expression unreadable behind his mask. For a long moment, we simply stared at one another in silence.

Then, Chris surprised me by lowering his head and emulating my stance, his shoulders rising and falling with a deep, steadying breath.

I could sense him trying to remember the words to our prayer for the dead, but he clearly didn’t know them. So instead, he simply rested his hand on top of the bones in a silent act of respect.

My chest tightened at the gesture.

Once we had finished paying our respects, I rose to my feet again and turned to exit the warehouse. Chris trailed beside me, his expression grim and his shoulders tense.

“How did this happen?” he asked after a long stretch of silence, gesturing towards the blight surrounding us. “I mean, what could’ve caused this fungus to appear here? An invasive species, maybe?”

I stopped in my tracks, turning to face him, “Isn’t it obvious?” I whispered. “It’s the Moon Goddess’s wrath.”