You Give Up

You stay.

There is no choice, not anymore—not after everything you’ve lost in the labyrinth of trees and fog. You are done wandering. Done stumbling forward, searching for roads that only bend back into themselves. Done bleeding. Done hoping.

The mushroom people remain close, their tiny, damp hands still resting against your skin where they last stitched you. They smell of wet rot and sweet decay, the cloying perfume of autumn leaves turned to sludge underfoot. You can feel the threads they wove into you—fine as spider silk yet biting into your flesh like living thorns.

You don’t care.

You lie back in the moss, eyes half-lidded, breath shallow. The forest hums quietly, as if it too has been holding its breath, waiting for you to stop resisting.

The first sensation is warmth—not the pleasant warmth of a fire, but a deep, spreading heat, like something fermenting in your chest. You can hear it before you feel it fully: a wet sound, like something soft tearing, the faint gurgle of liquid moving where it shouldn’t. The stitches along your ribs tighten, tug, then give way as something inside you shifts.

The mushroom people step back, making space. They do not speak. They simply watch.

Your ribs arch upward—not your choice—and the skin over your sternum bulges. You can feel the grain of it from the inside, the way it stretches and thins. The heat becomes pressure, pressure becomes force, and then—

A tear.

Not a clean cut. No. It is a slow, dragging rupture, the way bark splits under frost. Your chest parts in jagged seams and a slick white stalk pushes outward, splitting you further. You want to scream, but your lungs are full of something thicker than air, heavy and spore-scented. It feels like breathing in warm soil.

The stalk climbs higher, impossibly strong, widening as it rises. Fibrous roots lash down into your body, burrowing deep, wrapping themselves around your spine and threading into the meat of your shoulders. You feel them replacing you from the inside out—where there was muscle, now there is pulp; where there was bone, now there is a lattice of mycelium.

And you are not dying. No—this is not death. This is dispersal.

Every heartbeat pushes you further into it, your awareness bleeding upward into the stalk, spreading into the vast crown unfurling above. You feel the cap splitting its veil, a slow and deliberate peel of flesh, until it blooms wide over the circle. Its skin is pale, almost luminous, patterned with faint rings like the age marks of a tree. The air under it is damp and thick, a greenhouse heat that seeps into the moss.

Below, your human form slackens. Your fingers twitch, then stiffen, then curl into claws that root into the soil. Your face droops and hollows, eyes clouding over with the haze of spore mist drifting down from above. You can feel your mouth still, forever half-open, as if mid-breath.

The mushroom people shuffle closer again, pressing their small heads against the base of your stalk, murmuring in their wet, clicking language. Some kneel beside your discarded skin, patting it down, flattening it as though making a bed. One carefully removes your heart—what’s left of it—and buries it between your ribs like a seed.

From your new vantage, high above the circle, you can see everything. The forest stretches in every direction, a sea of shadow and motion. Wind brushes against your cap in long, stroking currents, and you feel it as thought. Each draft carries a scent, a message—rain coming from the east, a fox moving through the ferns, the slow rot of a fallen deer two days past.

You belong here. You are here.

The last scraps of your human mind sink slowly, like silt in water. Names fade first—your own, those of anyone you loved. Then the sense of years, of days, of time at all. You are only the moment and the moisture and the pulse of the mycelium network running like a great nervous system beneath the forest floor.

Something brushes against your roots. A vole. You taste it in the soil. And through the network, something older than you hums approval.

Your body—what’s left of it—softens into mulch. Your stalk thickens. Spores drift from your cap, invisible clouds carrying pieces of you into every corner of the forest. Some will root in moss. Some will cling to the fur of passing animals. Some will find their way into the lungs of travelers, where they will sleep until the forest calls them home.

You feel no pity for them.

The mushroom people disperse at last, leaving you alone in the circle, though you are not alone. The forest breathes through you, speaks through you, dreams through you.

Somewhere far away, the sound of bells begins. Slow, deliberate, each one echoing through the root network. You do not wonder what they mean. You understand.

They mean the forest is ready.

And so are you.