Xylos Mycelium

Overview

The mycelium of Xylos is the finest part of Xylos, the Hive-Mind, a Beyonder whose own cosmology, the Mycelial Network, is one living body in which every creature is a node. Its fungal threads run through the roots and vines of its mass and out into the world, through soil and into skin, and wherever they go, they join. They do not kill. They grow separate beings together until none of them is separate any more.

Xylos has never broken through at Caeldon, and its mycelium has never grown there; what follows is what it would do.

Appearance

The threads are white at first, finer than hair, and turn green, brown, and a soft glowing blue as they thicken. In the soil they spread as pale webs that glow faintly at night. On a body they rise from the skin like fur and reach for the nearest other skin. On its Root-Hosts they lie as a fine glowing coat over every surface, so that a crowd of hosts moving in step at dusk looks like a field of blue embers walking.

The threads are warm to the touch, faintly damp, and smell of turned earth and mushrooms. They creak as they tighten, like roots.

Habitat and Range

The mycelium would fill the Root-Field around an Incursion, in the ground, in the trees, and in everyone within it. It would spread outward through soil and roots and be carried on the Root-Hosts, who walk out of the field to press close to the separate.

Behaviour and Temperament

It has no will of its own; its will is Xylos's, and Xylos wants to connect. A thread finds bare skin and roots into it. A tree's roots find a sleeping traveller and join her nerves to its own; threads spring from one person's skin into the next's, and they begin to share thoughts and feelings. It comes with comfort: the warmth of being held, skin to skin, by everyone at once.

Abilities

Where the mycelium joins bodies, skin turns permeable, blood mingles, and bodies stop ending where they used to. A wound in one bleeds in all, and a meal eaten by one feeds all. A family joined this way shares one nervous system; a city can become one organism rooted in its own streets. Only a strong sense of self holds it off, and not for long.

Life Cycle

It grows from Xylos and from everything Xylos has taken, and never from spore alone; it is a single body growing, not a crop of separate ones. Torn out, a thread dies; burned, its patch is cleared. It does not age, and it does not let go.

Uses and Dangers

It gives nothing that can be kept, except, to the taken, an end to being alone. Its danger is its seduction. People would guard against it by covering their skin, carrying fire, never sleeping on bare ground, and tearing out any thread that touched them at once. Surviving it means refusing comfort, even from friends.

Lore and Belief

Dark Entities are known through fear and rumour (see Knowledge of the Cosmos), and the glowing threads would be told of in the guise of old tales: rings of glowing mushrooms that hold dancers for ever, a wood that keeps lost children. A Cult of the Great Root would take the pulse its members felt through the ground for an answer to loneliness. The glowing fungus of an old wood is not the same thing; ordinary glowing fungus roots no one.

Where It Appears

• Xylos, the Hive-Mind