The Hollow Bloom
Part 5 – Seeds of the Self
The sun had not returned.
It hadn’t rained, either.
The world outside the Bloom was… off. The trees leaned in strange directions. Birds moved in silence. The breeze carried a heaviness that didn’t belong to the air. It belonged to something older.
The Bastards sat around a cold fire.
No one had lit it.
Not since Shroomer.
Trashcore poked the pit with a stick. It didn’t move. Not the stick—the fire. It refused to catch. The wood hissed when flame touched it, like it remembered burning and refused to do it again.
Hanh didn’t try.
He stared at his wrist.
The glyph was no longer just a mark. It had begun to grow—not physically, but in complexity. Sigils he’d never learned now curled around his veins. He could read them, somehow. But not aloud. Speaking them would mean something. Something final.
Lyra slept fitfully beside him, claws twitching in dream. The tiger had taken the battle hardest—her form flickering at times, spectral threads unraveling in the seams.
Across the circle, Scorpion Warlock stared at the edge of the trees like they might speak.
Frog Prince finally broke the silence.
“We should bury him.”
“No body,” Trashcore muttered.
“Then we bury his name,” Frog Prince replied. “Before the Bloom takes it for good.”
They agreed, in that way the Bastards always did—without nods, without words. Just movement.
They carved his name into a flat stone.
Not ‘Shroomer Monk Bastard.’ That had always been a title.
They carved The One Who Understood Rot.
They placed it at the edge of the fungal field, where spores no longer drifted but the ground still pulsed faintly, like a heartbeat miles deep.
And Hanh spoke just once:
“Bloom gently, Brother.”
The stone cracked as he said it.
They were a day’s walk from the Bloom’s edge when it reappeared.
Not the creature. Not the echo.
The presence.
It slid into the gaps between thoughts. It made the shadows longer. It made the insects buzz in wrong frequencies.
Frog Prince vomited up a mouthful of mushrooms he hadn’t eaten.
Trashcore briefly forgot who he was.
Scorpion bled from one eye. Calmly. Like it was expected.
And Hanh fell to his knees, choking.
The glyph burned—not from heat, but from recognition.
You are ready.
He was not.
You are chosen.
He had not consented.
You are seeded.
And then it spoke from his own mouth.
The sound wasn’t human. It wasn’t voice. It was root scraping against root, and everyone heard it.
“Return, or we will come to you.”
Trashcore dropped his sword.
Frog Prince backed away.
Scorpion raised his staff.
But Hanh just stood.
And then… he turned toward the Bloom.
They followed him.
Not because they trusted him.
Because they were Bastards. And that’s what Bastards do.
They walked deeper than they had before. Past where the lake had been. Past the tree’s roots. Past where Shroomer had vanished.
To a place beneath names.
And there it was.
The true Bloom.
It wasn’t a creature. It wasn’t a fungus.
It was a mirror.
A wall of living mycelium that reflected not their bodies, but their selves—twisted, raw, honest.
Hanh saw himself as the Bloom saw him—powerful, cruel, carved of hunger. A vessel pretending to be a hero.
Trashcore saw himself as a king of trash and bone, mouth full of rot, loved by none.
Frog Prince saw his smile melt away.
Scorpion saw… nothing. No reflection. Just a hole.
And then the mirror whispered:
You may leave what you fear… and become what you were.
Hanh raised his hand.
The glyph pulsed.
And for the first time, he spoke it.
The word.
The root-word.
The one that fed the glyph and had always been inside him.
“Virelun.”
The mirror shattered.
Light.
Not fire. Not sun.
Fungal light poured through them.
They screamed. Or thought they did.
Lyra vanished.
Trashcore sobbed.
Frog Prince collapsed.
And when it was over—
Hanh stood alone in the clearing.
The mirror was gone.
The others were waking. Changed, but alive.
And in Hanh’s palm was a seed.
Round. Pulsing.
His name—his real name—was written across it in silent script.
Lyra reappeared beside him, whole again.
Frog Prince opened one eye. “Did we win?”
Trashcore coughed. “I think we joined a gardening cult.”
Scorpion rose slowly. “We are not done.”
“No,” Hanh said. “But we’re planted.”
And behind them, far beneath the soil, the Bloom began to dream again.




