B'doom stepped through the rusted archway of the Shroom Zoo, its once-whimsical lettering now dangling in pieces, half-swallowed by vines and soft moss. The air was thick with the scent of damp decay. It did not offend him. Not yet.

  Each step brought more memories than answers. He had helped shape this place, though few would remember it. Once, it had been a thriving greenhouse complex—a sanctuary of balance, where rot and bloom lived as one. Now, it was a carnival of corruption.

  He passed broken glass domes, overturned carts labeled with cheerful fonts: "Mushroom Mayhem!" and "Spore Safari!" Hollow, laughing remnants. The signs mocked him.

  He walked in silence until he reached a small, hidden alcove—a caretaker's nook tucked beneath the collapsed hull of an observation platform. The space was crude but tended. Someone had lived here. A woven hammock still sagged between two support beams. On the table, a cracked nameplate read: Spib – Junior Head Gardener.

  The room smelled of old water and dried spores. Scattered across the shelves were diagrams of mushroom clusters—some labeled with names, others circled and questioned. Little drawings—happy faces, confused arrows, a stick figure holding a watering can. One wall had a pinned note that read, in shaky hand:

  "Day 4,487: Still no one came. Trying to keep them happy. Garden is... restless?"

  B'doom pressed his hand to the table, bowing his head. Spib had stayed. Spib had tried. No one had taught him what this place had been. No one had told him how to listen. B’doom had to respect Spib’s dedication.

  Beyond the caretaker’s nook, the garden began to change. The tourist trails gave way to overgrowth. Here, at the edge of the Old Grove, B’doom felt the pulse of his former magic—dim, but not dead. Fungal trees still stood, though many were sick. Others had turned strange: wrong shapes, wrong rhythms.

  And then he saw it.

  A mushroom unlike any he had ever known. It stood waist-high, glistening as if wet, though the air was dry. Its cap spiraled in unnatural curves, geometric and smooth—more sculpture than growth. Faint lines pulsed beneath its surface like circuitry.

  He reached out without thinking.

  The moment his fingers brushed the cap, the world screamed.

  His vision twisted. Time and space fell away, replaced by a cold, spore-choked void. A throne of iron and rot. Machines fused with mycelium. Pulsing fungal towers rising like antennae. And atop a mound of twitching roots and broken bone stood Rhyzomund—the Lord of Decay.

  His form was swollen, regal, monstrous. His eyes were pits of writhing mold. Around him moved an army—fungus-wrapped constructs, minds overwritten by a sentient spore intelligence. Machines that bled sap. Soldiers that breathed plague.

  Rhyzomund had once been a peer of Krungus, a conceptual force of decay given form—less a man than a principle in motion. Long before the fall, he had ruled over an underworld of decomposition and renewal. But when Krungus sought to create his own pocket dimension—Syzzyzzy—he needed a space of immense conceptual power. Rhyzomund already ruled such a space. Rather than negotiate or build his own from scratch—a task nearly impossible even for an archwizard—Krungus banished Rhyzomund, taking the decaying domain for himself. That act of erasure marked the beginning of Syzzyzzy. None had seen or spoken Rhyzomund’s name since. It had been over 9,000 years.

  Yet here he was again. Changed. Focused. Alive.

  B'doom staggered back with a shout, heart thundering.

  The vision was gone. But the knowledge remained.

  Rhyzomund had twisted the garden’s legacy. Not just stolen it—weaponized it. He was building something vast, connected, unnatural. And it had started here.

  B’doom stood in silence, then bent down and took the cracked nameplate from Spib’s table.

  “I’m sorry,” he murmured. “But I see now.”

  He turned and left the garden behind, cloak trailing through the spores. There was no more time to mourn.

  He had to warn the others.

  He had to tell the rest of The Number.

  Eugene sat cross-legged on a floating chunk of basalt, gesturing animatedly with his hands while Krungus hovered nearby, reclining midair in a lazy curl of wind and robes. They were somewhere high within the Veiled Pinnacle, where the walls shimmered with impossible angles and the air carried a hush of waiting magic. Gravity was more of a polite suggestion.

  “I’m serious,” Eugene was saying. "It’s called ‘gentle parenting.’ You basically treat the kid like a person—like a full person, even when they’re tiny. You don’t yell, you don’t hit, you don’t punish to control. You set boundaries and model the behavior you want them to mirror. The idea is... if you respect them, they’ll grow up learning how to respect others. Simple, but not easy."

  Krungus blinked slowly, his red lenses catching the drifting light. "And this... works?"

  "Sometimes," Eugene admitted. "A lot of it is about repair, not perfection. When you mess up, you admit it. You show them how to make things right. It’s... human."

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  Krungus rotated slowly, one hand propping up his chin. "Fascinating. Astonishing. Revolutionary."

  Eugene grinned. "They’ve got books and everything. Whole parenting shelves at libraries. You’d love the discourse."

  Krungus waved a hand absentmindedly, summoning a spectral scroll midair and scribbling something in an arcane shorthand. "None of us... not one of The Number... ever had a child. Not even Stinky, and he was the most sentimental of the lot."

  "Why not?" Eugene asked.

  Krungus did not answer immediately. He turned, gazing out across the shimmering halls of the Veiled Pinnacle, where the architecture folded into itself like mirrored thought, and distant corridors bent light in impossible geometries.

  Finally, he said, "We are wizards, Eugene."

  Before Eugene could reply, the sound of footsteps echoed from a corridor. B’doom emerged from the darkness, clutching something in his hand, his expression grave.

  Krungus straightened midair, eyes narrowing behind the red glass. "B’doom?"

  B’doom approached slowly, the weight in his hand more symbolic than physical. The cracked nameplate from Spib’s quarters trembled slightly in his grasp, as if reluctant to be carried into the light. He had not stopped walking since he left the garden, and something about the Veiled Pinnacle’s strange architecture—its quiet folding of light and space—made each step feel both inevitable and weightless.

  Krungus hovered upright, his robes settling into stillness like falling ash. His red lenses tracked B’doom’s approach. “You’ve seen something,” he said, not as a question, but as a statement weighted with ancient expectation.

  “I touched a mushroom,” B’doom said. His voice, always gentle and half-soaked in breath, had a new edge to it—like a stone buried too long now dug up and cold. “Not one of mine. Not anything I’ve ever seen. It called to me. Not with words. With familiarity.”

  He stepped into the shared light of the chamber, where geometry bent softly in unnatural curves, and the shadows did not quite behave. His eyes swept the space as if confirming it was real. “The moment I made contact... I saw him. Rhyzomund.”

  Eugene’s brow furrowed. “Who?”

  Krungus did not speak. He only turned his head slowly, as if the name itself were a sound he hadn’t heard in a very long time.

  “He’s alive,” B’doom continued. “If that word even still applies. I saw machines laced with mycelium. Armies of fungal constructs—infected minds and metal limbs. He’s building something vast. Organized. Purposeful. The spore networks respond to intention. They remember. There was thought behind it—cold, slow, and methodical. And he saw me.”

  Krungus exhaled through his nose, slow and precise. He closed his eyes. "Of course. Of course he would wait."

  “You knew?” Eugene asked, voice rising. "You knew he was still out there?"

  “No,” Krungus said. “But I suspected. I have always suspected. Rhyzomund was not a being you kill. Not truly. He was the Lord of Decay—less a person than a principle in motion. He is what happens when systems are left untended. He does not require will to act, only time. And he has always had time.”

  B’doom nodded grimly. “He’s had nine millennia. And the garden—the one I left behind—it was just the edge. A wound he could infect. But it goes deeper now. He’s rooted himself far beyond what I can track.”

  “When I banished him,” Krungus said, “I did not do it out of justice. I did it because I needed the space. The pocket realm he governed was perfect for what I intended. A conceptual dimension. Difficult to construct. Near impossible to find. But he was in the way.” He stared into the air as though trying to see the moment across time. “I severed his link to the world and carved him out of it. I did not consider what that might do to him.”

  “And now?” B’doom asked quietly, the nameplate in his hand trembling anew.

  Krungus turned his gaze to the far wall, beyond which the Veiled Pinnacle’s spires pierced the hidden layers of the city. His voice was soft, but steady. “Now he knows I’ve returned. And I imagine he’s had 9,000 years to prepare. Not for revenge. For inevitability.”

  Eugene looked between them, suddenly aware of just how long these beings had been alive—and how many debts still lingered in the folds of time.

  The three stood in silence. Around them, the Pinnacle hummed like a patient throat. The light shifted just slightly, like a breath held too long.

  “I believe,” Krungus said at last, “this is not the beginning of his plan. It is the end of his waiting. We need to have another meeting.”

  Eugene hesitated, then asked, "Why can’t you just... give it back? The pocket dimension. If he wants it so badly—if it was his—can’t you just return it?"

  Krungus didn’t answer at first. His posture stiffened, but his eyes drifted again toward the Pinnacle’s far wall, as though seeing back into time.

  “I found it by accident,” he said. “It was during the days of The Number, when our magic was still sharp and untempered. I was deep in telemantic experiments—trying to fold space inward, searching for seams in the world that shouldn’t exist. And then I found one. A rotting hole in the fabric of the planes, older than anything we had mapped. It wasn't built, it was born. Anchored by something ancient—something fungal and dreaming. That something was Rhyzomund. I did not know his name then, only his presence.”

  He began to pace slowly through the air. “I studied the realm. Every inch of it, every breath. It was decay made space—an ecosystem of endings. But there was power there, Eugene. So much power, wrapped in the silence of things forgotten. I realized then that this wasn’t just any pocket. It was a conceptual realm, a place formed not by magic, but by idea. Something incredibly rare. Almost impossible to build. Almost.”

  Eugene swallowed. “So you took it.”

  “I figured out how,” Krungus said, with neither pride nor shame. “I found a way to banish a god from their own domain. Not kill him. That would have unmade the space. But banish? That, I could do. I carved out his identity like rot from a root. Locked him in conceptual stasis, far enough from the Weave to be forgotten. Then I began to reshape the space. Turn it into something usable. Stable. Mine.”

  He turned his gaze back toward Eugene. "I don’t feel bad about it. Rhyzomund wasn’t doing anything with it except... decaying. Rotting in his own domain, letting it fester in silence. I gave it purpose. He was content to wait forever. I wasn’t. I needed the power, the structure, the seed of something better. And I took it. That is what wizards do, Eugene. We do not wait for permission. We master what we find."

  “And that’s what became Syzzyzzy?”

  Krungus nodded. “And then, centuries later... Sharrzaman used it to trap me. My own stolen realm. My own tools. My own arrogance. Everything I thought I had conquered, turned against me.”

  He looked down at his hand. It trembled for just a moment. “So no, Eugene. I can’t give it back. Because it’s not a door anymore. It’s a fortress. And now that I’ve returned to the world... he will come knocking.”