1773: Foxfire, Sarcoma, & Witchworms

A report of ‘Grisóstomo’ to the Lodge of the Fraternity of Obliviates in Vera Cruz, 28 March 1773.

I have nothing good to report. The fools have succumbed, and soon perhaps all of our designs upon this hemisphere will succumb with it. 

The journey was arduous and my guide deeply unfriendly. I found her constant evocation of the Laughingthrush (whom she did not even identify properly as a laughingthrush, preferring instead some little bird of the mountains) to be vexing and much of her ceremony seemed to merely be an attempt at confounding me as to the actual route to the library. I resent her attempts. 

When finally we did reach the Company Anchorite’s pitiful Colegio, it was a shadow of itself. The wizened trees around the mountain glow green with foxfire and I was forced to delay yet another day preparing wards against oneiric hazards. My guide also advised the use of a face covering. 

A great many spores billowed from the doors upon my entrance, and I was welcomed only by the most pitiful of servants, a hunched-over, sarcoma-wracked, wheezing creature that was likely once human (perhaps a friar, even) but now is a mere vessel of the Growth that has undoubtedly seized the place. I enquired after the rector but received no reply. No trace of the expelled Company, even clandestinely, or their native cohabitants is left in the place. 

The attendant did provide me with a book when I asked after the copy of An Echo of Silence which we hoped to suppress from the collection. However, the text was a crudely bound but exquisitely written work entitled, puzzlingly, Exercises in the Continuity of Self. Its author was listed only as “A Mutual Effort.” I realized only after reading and paying exorbitant tally that it was crawling with witchworms.

Away from the eyes of the attendant, I did attempt a journey into the cellars, where I remembered a great collection of Cinti Singani had been stored. Instead of libations I found only a great overgrowth of fungi and rot; mushrooms of enormous variety and significant Nowhere-influences. The place that the Incas once called the “Ruin of the Roots” is now a kind of Haustorium––a fungal intrusion into the depths of the earth, draining life and vigor from all the great minds that once labored within it. 

I fear our only path is to abandon the aims we had for the library and to seek out influence elsewhere, perhaps in the North, or to consolidate around Noon. This place is lost to us for a time.