89. Mycelium Man

The Outland was a peculiar piece of land formed from floating continental plates stitched together, a patchwork in the most literal sense.

It wasn't remotely as bad as I would have imagined, to the point I could hardly believe it was the same hellhole I once played on.

The Hellfire Peninsula had life; it was no paradise, it was an arid desert, and yet there was life aplenty.

A flora and fauna of its own, one that was undoubtedly affected by Fel, but contrary to what one would expect, was more or less adapted. And it wasn't filled with tumors, brimming abominations.
They were mutating at an extremely rapid rate, but a strange balance existed nonetheless, shaky as it may be. It was both perturbing and fascinating.
But the bits and pieces of life didn’t hide the bones of millions of innocent people, from newborns to the elderly.
They formed a road that stretched for kilometers on end, and the fertilizer it brought made it all the more evident in this almost sterile, blasted land. Giant mushroom cacti hid only so much.

It was the culmination of the Horde's sin, one even they couldn't entirely ignore, or so I hoped.

It was for the best of everyone. I wasn't personally affected by what was done, but an attempted repeat was an entirely different matter. And I knew it wasn't out of the realm of possibility.

Demons didn't mind-control them, and bloodlust was an excuse for only so much.

Thrall and Varok weren't the average stock, but that was beside the point, and the blame was only on the murderers, of whom Varok was a part. But he saw it for what it was.

I am unsure how I would feel about knowing that my people had engaged in such acts. Jalgars did commit genocide, but that was the same as predators overhunting. It wasn't right or an excuse, but we didn't feed cubs to demons and pissed and danced over their corpses.
Anyway, most of Outland was a shithole, regardless, crawling with demons to boot. The army we crushed was the majority, but there were differing loyalties.
Some bend the knees to the physically blind one of the Stormrage twins, and others to local warlords and such. It was a mess.

But at least the Outland was stabilizing through the roots that had bloomed from my gift to Vandel.

Or so was from the studies done on the young World Tree–the Evil Tree, the Qlipoth–behind on the border with Nagran, Zangarmarsh, and the Terokar Forest. It wasn't the tree itself but its impact.
It wasn’t my domain of expertise, but the roots were many and deep, deeper than one might expect, even for a ‘plant’ that size.
The subterranean system wove a tapestry, tying the plates together and holding the fragment of a world together.

Something very intentional, due to the trees’ location and the surrounding topography, this one was the largest and most significant; however, the two others further enhanced its effect.

Up north, one was stitching the Netherstorm into a whole while tying it back to the wider Outland through the Blade's Edge Mountains.

The last was in the heart of the Shadowmoon Valley, but with a purpose still mostly unknown. They were all connected through their roots as well.

It was truly ingenious, and I didn't mind the desecration at all.

It would be hypocritical; I modify life on a daily basis. I had no right to be angry about anyone doing the same, even if I would criticize their mistakes.

Sloppy work was bad for everyone, and while amateurish on the Life living part of things, it was magically wise.

It was a chimeric masterwork that not only enabled them to survive but also thrive; they were far from defenseless. They weren't above a little fleshly snack; the demon varieties, in particular, were an all-time favorite.

I dubbed them Qlipoth for a reason; they were part demon, like those Illidari, demon hunters more commonly called, and eagerly demonstrated it.

A plant wasn't sacred by itself, and those seeds' purpose was to surge with pure Life mana, providing a healing and stamina boost.

They were disposable, nothing holy about them, and Undrassil wasn't a sacred temple. Even their source wasn't blasphemed, not that furbolgs would have cared unless it was a direct attack.

To have those acorns consolidate a realm wasn't what I imagined they would be used for, but it was certainly a sight to behold. Even if they were twisted from their original biology by the Fel and Arcane imbued in them.

Many kaldorei saw it diametrically opposite, and I understood, but that was no reason to go and kill those three World Trees. Not yet, anyway. You don't cut the branch you are sitting on.

They stood out on the horizon, taller than any of the few remaining mountains around this relatively small chunk of floating land.

They were beacons in the twisted, chaotic sky where horror and beauty mixed, and against the encroaching Twisting Nether.

How this all worked was again outside my understanding, but it apparently did from the mages and warlocks of Dalaran's point of view. They didn't understand a lot either.

But who was I to discredit them entirely?

The only point of certainty, and that was daring to say, if not outright arrogant, was this place's interactions with the Emerald Dream. Or lack thereof, partly.

It was complicated…

It didn't extend here; the curated version and stable version we had on Azeroth didn't. The Emerald Dream wasn't its actual name or the origin; the true one was Life in its rawest form.

The Evil Trees weren't tapping into it, but they were producing a field of energy that encapsulated the entirety of Outland, a very rough, limited equivalent to the Dreaming.

They were filters and purifiers wrapped into one, and their products weren't solely oxygen.

And this field wasn't incomparable to the Dreaming; the ratio of Chaos and Order was flipped, with too many distinctions to name in a concise list.

There was also the Void, but it wasn't the Nightmare or related to any Old Gods.

It was weirdly natural, but Shadow was Shadow magic. That always ends with someone insane with too many eyes and a few tentacles in the wrong places for the wrong reasons.

It was only marginally less dangerous; the voices did not desire the end of the era. That was all. Regardless, this veil from the three Qlipoths was vital to this broken world.

Thereby promoting Life and Nature to grow and adapt to the unique conditions. It didn't explain how everything else, like gravity or a magnetic field, worked.

Regular physics existed; the name wasn't excluding anything. The Light was as natural as a leaf falling, both were essences of the universe in different shades.

The Outland current tempering was pushing away the inevitable, but that wasn't our problem.

But now, how did it even hold?

Again, frankly, it was utterly mystifying, my head spun trying to make head or tail of this, or how this insult to common logic, this madness, somehow didn't end up with everything dead.

It put many assumed inviolable truths under extreme scrutiny. It was humbling, in an existential kinda way.

This was magic in its most primordial aspect at hand here. It worked because it did. Didn't mean I wouldn't love an answer, but what I got was the best I could hope for.

Ultimately, there wasn't a complaint.

Those ‘World Trees’ couldn't be used as bridges as they were. Their twisted essences made it virtually impossible to occur in regular conditions.

But it was to be closely monitored. Illidan had been a student of Cenarius, one of the two first night elf students, to be exact.

What was short for an elf wasn't short for me, and he was highly talented. If my understanding was correct, he was thrown out because he was too good, while also being too reckless and power hungry.

Those are combinations you do not want, and I have been lucky to have avoided a scenario like this with any of mine, for now.

So it was no surprise he unraveled my enchantments. Not that they were spectacular, clever, yes, but I was a biomancer first.

Now the locks were genetic, but back then, they weren't.

That was why we needed to be careful, the Dreaming with our presence and that of Azerothian wildlife was extending here.

Time and space were subjective variables to it. It was significantly less, but it was here, and the Qlipoth were unknown variables. They were constantly changing.

That Illidan succeeded in growing three out of five was proof to be wary. World Trees were no regular plant you grew like that. They were capricious and demanding.

And the Emerald Dream presence would only grow. Hearths of nature were being built around, and shamans joined in, stabilizing the rageful and sorrowful elements to the best of their abilities.

They were mainly around the Dark Portal, but far from exclusively.

It was our stronghold, and while the most well-guarded and crucial, it wasn't the only one.

But it was one I wasn't right now, since we had a biotope built from the last war that worked just as well here. I didn't need to handle that.

Magatha was good enough for that project, and it kept her happy with the people around her to spin her web.

Aviana had vanished on a quest to find the native bird people of the area while also mapping and scouting the land. She did whatever she wished, which I couldn't and didn't want to stop her from doing.

And for me, finding Maiev and any of her surviving squad members was more of my mission. This mission wasn't something I believed would succeed.

Tracking where they went was one thing; they left marks, as per protocol, that any servant of Elune worth his dollop of royal honey could point to. They hadn't intended to get lost and didn't hide after all.

They didn't have a map of the area, but they were competent. But actually finding anyone… heh… not so much. Not right now, at any rate.

Still, it led us to a swamp, a drained sea now named Zangarmarsh, a fascinating place, all things considered, with the greatest amount of biodiversity to date in the Outland.

“Lord Ohto, can you help with the flesh-eating flies and such?” Eleana, a priestess of Elune, asked. Nay begged from the inflection of her tone, and my comparatively massive head turned to hers.

That was a common occurrence around here; this place wasn't kind, with no large animals disregarding those large bipedal beast mushrooms or floating, entrancing jellyfish-like amoebas.

The first weren't unlike bog beasts, slower and bulkier, but they were just as aggressive, desperately so. They were starving and dying. I avoided killing them; they weren't mindless either.

A threat to the unprepared we didn't wish for, but which we were able to push back, but bugs, parasites, and toxic spores? And the second, the towering mushroom land cnidaria?

They used spores as airborne paralytic, mind-altering drugs, and could fire bio-electric beams of Nature mana that could heat stone to the point it began to melt.

And my shoulder wasn't immune; I nearly lost my right arm and my life from ignorance.

Luckily, they were slow to move and sluggish to act, but they could hide with ease due to their exceptional mimetic skin.

They were threats of the highest level as they were subjects of future study. The biomancers and druids I brought were as excited by them as I was.

That was more complicated to deal with; we would have had a dozen deaths in the first few days without my presence.

And almost every last one was either a fungus or in a symbiosis–rarely was it sympathetic–with one. Then there was the heat and smell.

There were reasons in general that I usually avoided tropical and hot areas. It was pretty, and the biodiversity was incredible, but by the Twin Bears, it was unpleasant everywhere else.

Here, the temperature was barely supportable, if not for the incredible alien fauna and flora in direct lineage to a similar life form to that of the primordial plant life I revived. I wasn't light on my samples for that reason; it was akin to completing a puzzle.

And I would complete I.

“Has a new nest been disturbed?” I queried, but then began my work immediately. Vorpal wasps buzzed from my body, and threads of emerald and ruby light flickered from my extended left paw.

Then our march continued onward, following the path that Maiev and her group had taken. We weren't discreet and didn't try to be.

There were naga; they avoided us as it was a kill on sight, and the majority weren't suicidal idiots, but they weren't happy with our presence. Some of the most foolish attempts were made to ambush isolated groups.

Traps of ours, but hate ran deep with their non-corrupted kins, and male nagas weren't the smartest. Any information gleaned would be of great importance to them.

It predictably ended horrifically for the Old God's spawn. We suffered losses. It was hard to revive when the head was crushed, and our enemies were still skilled, but the number of casualties was in the single digits.

We also noted how water flowed; it was being drained. We arrived from above by cutting through the mountains and spotted an entire lake that had been drained.

There was still a lot of water, of course, and a lot of it was lost when Draenor was shattered, but this was being pumped by that large structure at the heart of the biggest lake remaining.

Everything here adapted to the climate would die if that were to pass. It was unacceptable; losing this area went beyond ecological destruction.

This entire swamp was too valuable, but we wouldn't attack out of emotion. We were still searching for the Watcher, and yes, the nagas would likely have clues about what happened.

But it was no reason to be hasty, and we continued our exploration till we stopped at an abandoned village of huts built from thatch, mushroom bark, hide, and mud.

Who it once belonged to wasn't difficult to answer.

“What a terrible destiny to suffer… can they be helped, Master?” My first dryad student, Lilin, whispered softly, tears welling up in her eyes with genuine grief.

Her delicate fingers hovered above an out-of-place polymer plate with drawings of people, draenei, screaming as their bodies were twisted into smaller, weaker, hunched-over forms.

The centerpiece was what I assumed to be a child losing his mother, living through it. It was sickening to imagine, but it was real, far too real.

I took it with golden mycelium tendrils so as not to scratch it and frowned. It was the work of someone inexperienced, but art was hardly dependent on pure skill to bring emotions.

“I hope. It would not be easy or painless in the best-case scenario… and I fear that this blight affects their souls too. For a curse like this to happen so quickly, it isn't purely physical.” I rumbled, placing the child drawing where it once was.

“I… yes, I thought as much.” She said, a moment of heavy silence followed. Sorry, but I didn't lie in such subjects. Not that it would affect the fact that everyone was gone, the lack of bones clearly showed they had moved, willingly.

Then this moment was broken by the sound of tapping feet, and our ears flicked toward its point of origin, a mycelium bush with something inside. We were farther away from where our camp was setting up, and it could be anything.

This creature was a small humanoid with a large, oversized conical head adorned with glowing yellow plates, the same shade and color as its eyes.

Its ears were more like grooveless ears, and where a nose would be, instead, like a catfish, fleshy whiskers grew. Its violet, tiny, pudgy body was naked with no notable genitalia, and it had no natural weapons to speak of.

That told little of the actual threat level, though.

My eyes flicked to my right, and Lilin was gone.

She was sitting right in front of the kobold-sized mushroom person, and she cooed in the language of the elements, Life and Nature used to speak to all of the above, Kalimag.

“By the warm embrace of Grandmother Elune! Who are you, little one? What are you to be so adorable? Can I hug you? Please! Oh, no! I’m sorry! Pardon my rudeness, can you understand me?” She rattled like an excited child, and I sighed but didn't let my guard down.

Typical dryad behavior, if I have ever seen it.

“Wh-what?” It, no, she spoke, probably a she or maybe not. Anyways, the voice was feminine, she had said that with extreme confusion and nervousness.

“Lilin, calm down. Greetings, I'm Ohto, a creature of another world. To whom and what am I speaking?” I said, as well in Kalimag, in a calm tone.