The moon was a small grey circle picked out against the roiling orange and red chaos of the gas giant, one of the dozens that accompanied the massive planet. There was nothing from afar that indicated it was special, but the Wanderer had insisted that this was the celestial body in the system where life had arisen, and Rhas had later confirmed that he could sense the buzzing crackle of consciousness as they made their approach.

Anything yet?> Zogrusz asked the world-spirit, who had curled up in the space between Anecoya’s vast wings again not long after they had flown away from the fish. Their earlier telepathic conversations had improved Zogrusz’s ability to project his thoughts, and now he was able to communicate without Rhas first constructing the bridge between their minds.

It’s . . . garbled> Rhas replied, this statement flavored by his frustration. Communicating is very difficult with such a rudimentary intelligence. It . . . says something descended from the stars claiming association with the Wanderer. What happened after the world-mind – or, I suppose in this instance, the moon-mind – isn’t very clear. The phrase it keeps repeating is that this emissary from the Wanderer ‘went below’ and is now gone. I have no idea what that means>

Zogrusz traced the shallow cut on his belly with a claw; the wound had mostly healed, but still it itched. He wondered what else they might encounter that could hurt them – after all, something had happened to Ixia’s ward to keep him from returning, and Zogrusz could only assume that whatever sort of creature the Wanderer kept as a companion was a cosmic being as well. The old man had been evasive about the exact nature of his ward, but he had assured them that there would be no doubt once they’d found him.

Where should I set down?> Anecoya asked, interrupting Zogrusz’s musings.

Were you not paying attention, Annie? The Wanderer said his ward was investigating an anomaly in the largest crater on the moon>

I remember> Anecoya grumbled in reply I just wasn’t sure if we wanted to go to the exact same spot where he disappeared. You know, just in case the reason he disappeared was still there.>

Let us risk it. We should try and finish this task as quickly as possible. We don’t know how much time we have left>

Zogrusz felt a telepathic surge of affirmation from the phoenix, and then Anecoya began to spiral down. The moon was uniformly gray, without the green of vegetation or the blue of water, and from a distance Zogrusz had thought this meant the surface was covered in the regolith that he’d encountered on other dead worlds during his wanderings. But as they drew closer, he realized that something was different here. The texture was wrong, not the fine-grained dust he remembered, and it seemed to flow together into an endless carpet that completely draped the hills and mountains and valleys.

Anecoya also seemed disturbed by the strange substance covering the ground, and she did a few extra gyres in the sky before descending to land.

It won’t hurt us> Rhas assured her. That must be the fungus that has become sentient. I wonder what sustains it – I don’t see anything else on the moon it might feed on>

Hopefully it doesn’t rely on foolish travelers coming to visit> Anecoya murmured, but still she swooped down and gently settled on the surface, raising a cloud of glittering silver spores.

Zogrusz leaped off her back and into this dissipating mist, his clawed feet sinking into the spongy ground. More of those spores rose up, and his mouth-tendrils twitched at the smell. It reminded him of sulfur, harsh and acrid.

“I can’t say I’m enjoying this,” Rhas muttered after joining Zogrusz on the surface. The cat was light enough that it could stay on top of the fungus, but still Rhas kept raising its paws and giving them a shake after each step, as if it found the feeling of walking here uncomfortable.

Light flared as Anecoya reverted to her human form. “Ew,” she said, wrinkling her nose in disgust at the aroma drifting up from the ground.

A crackling sound made Zogrusz turn, and he took a surprised step back as he suddenly found himself face to face with . . . himself. An Eldritch Horror molded from gray fungus had appeared just behind him, nearly identical to him in size and shape. Some of the details were missing, like his individual scales and the creases in his broad forehead, but there was no doubt what this thing was supposed to represent.

“Rhas . . .” Zogrusz said, raising his hands so he could react quicker if this simulacrum made any sudden movements. He was not surprised at all when it mimicked this action.

“It’s all right, Zog,” the cat said. “This is the mind of the moon, the sum total of all the intelligence contained in the fungal growth.”

“It still can’t be too smart,” muttered Anecoya, coming closer to inspect the fake-Zogrusz. “Since it’s really just a big mushroom. And also it chose to take his form.”

Rhas winced. “Please be polite, Annie. We are guests here, and I don’t know exactly how much this mind understands. It’s not stupid, as far as I can tell . . . we just are radically different. In some ways, I’m more like you than this world-mind is to me. At least all our consciousnesses arose from within the folds of a brain – or brains, in my case – and not by whatever process brought about awareness in this organic mass we now see all around us.”

Zogrusz had a strong desire to reach out and break away one of the dangling gray mouth-tendrils. “So what do we –”

“Wait,” Rhas said, his voice slightly strained. “It’s communicating with me. It . . . welcomes us. It has a name, but it’s not something we can easily understand, since it’s not a collection of sounds . . . more like a smell.” Rhas sniffed, its whiskers shivering. “That smell. The smell of the fungus.”

“So should we call him Mister Miasma?” Anecoya asked. “Sir Stinky?”

Rhas flashed her an exasperated look.

“It smells like rotten eggs to me,” Zogrusz said. “We could call it . . . Eggy.”

“I don’t think it cares,” Rhas said. “That sounds fine. Now be quiet and let me concentrate – speaking with a sentient fungus is harder than you might imagine.”

Anecoya and Zogrusz dutifully fell silent as the two world-minds engaged in whatever could pass as a conversation between them. The fungal-Zogrusz was absolutely still, but Rhas’s tail kept lashing back and forth in fairly obvious frustration. Finally, the cat stopped staring at Eggy, blinking its golden eyes as it turned to the two cosmic beings.

“Well. That was interesting . . . and exhausting. I hope you never have to try and cobble together a coherent story from an entity that communicates mostly through electrical impulses. But from what I can gather, the One-From-The-Sky arrived on the moon and somehow opened a dialogue with Eggy here. How, I have no idea – I would have thought only other world-minds could possibly parse out meaning from this fungus. And the One claimed to be a . . . servant, or companion, perhaps, of the Wanderer. Eggy isn’t being too clear here. Anyway, the One told the moon-mind that he had come to, and I quote, ‘go below by passing through the Door’.”

Anecoya and Zogrusz glanced at each other in confusion, and then out at the endless rolling seascape of gray fungal swells. “Door?” Zogrusz said, wondering if this was a problem of translating from mushroom-talk to flesh-and-blood-speak.

Rhas offered up another of his cat-shrugs. “I have no idea. But Eggy says the Door that the One entered is nearby, just over that little hill.”

Zogrusz’s gaze followed where Rhas’s face was indicating. It looked like everywhere else on the moon, a line of rumpled mounds coated with the omnipresent gray fungus.

Anecoya was already striding in that direction, shimmering spores erupting from the ground in her wake. Rhas bounded after her, and after a last lingering look at his fungal clone, Zogrusz followed as well. And it was because he was behind his companions that he saw Rhas stumble. At first, he thought the cat had just caught its paw on the spongy ground, but then Rhas staggered a few steps before coming to a halt and swaying drunkenly.

“Are you all right?” Zogrusz asked when he came to loom over Rhas.

The cat shook itself, dislodging more of the glittering spores. “I’m fine. Just a little dizzy.”

“Do you want to ride on me?”

Rhas golden eyes blinked up at him, its expression unreadable. “That would be much appreciated.”

Zogrusz bent and scooped up the cat, then deposited it on his shoulder. Immediately Rhas found a comfortable spot and curled up, its dangling tail tickling his mouth-tendrils.

“Thank you, Zog,” Rhas said, and as Zogrusz started walking again he felt a pleasant vibration emanating from the cat.

“No eating my soul,” Zogrusz warned him teasingly, to which Rhas responded with something that sounded like a cat-snort.

Anecoya had stopped at the top of the small hill and was staring down at whatever lay beyond. Zogrusz slogged up after her, wading through fungus that reached nearly to his knees. When she heard him approaching, she beckoned him on faster without tearing her gaze from whatever was on the other side.

“I think we found our door,” she said when he arrived beside her.

The slope was far more pronounced here, dropping almost vertically into a broad, circular depression. It looked like many of the other meteor-impact sites that they’d already seen on the surface, but this one was not completely covered with the fungus, the gray arms stretching only partway to the barren center of the crater. These fungal limbs became black and withered before they could reach a massive stone hatch set in the ground. This portal looked large enough that Zogrusz could have lowered himself inside at the greatest extent of his true-form . . . and it was flung open, revealing an abyss so black that even his void-fashioned eyes struggled to pierce the darkness.

“I hate going underground,” Anecoya muttered as she began to descend the slope, dislodging a large chunk of fungus with an annoyed kick. “It’s no place for birds.”