Chapter 10: The City of Spiders

You head further through the tunnels, eventually coming to one dominated by a huge amount of fungi, including a mass of it nearly forty feet high and just as wide. Staring at it, you can see that the way the fungi is arranged seems almost humanoid in shape.

There are six older myconids here, who turn to Basidia when you enter, "We must hurry. It won't be long now. Minutes perhaps, before she arrives," one of them says urgently.

"You must wake Araumycos before Zuggtmoy can complete the merge. With Araumycos' help, we should be able to fight Zuggtmoy back or maybe even destroy her corporeal form. Are you ready?"

To Aelfric: "Those of our kind are too familiar to break through into Araumycos' slumbering mind," Basidia replies to the nods of a few other elders, "It is our hope that your alien minds will alert it to danger before Zuggtmoy can complete her grim task."

Now that you are all here, the elders surround you, a sense of urgency about them, "Zuggtmoy approaches," says a myconid from the exit to the chamber. That's the last thing you hear as the rapport spores drift down around you and everything goes black for a moment and then...

You are floating, weightless, adrift. A gray, silvery light spreads around you like the dawn of a cloudy day, illuminating a peculiar realm. All of you are floating in a silvery haze that shimmers with swirls of color. Objects drift past in the distance, but whether they are small stones or rocks the size of mountains, you can't say for certain. Your moment of reverie is broken by the sound of Basidia's voice in your mind. "It begins."

Through your link with Basidia, you sense that Zuggtmoy's "wedding" ceremony has begun. Receiving the myconid's impressions, you become aware of a huge crowd of fungal creatures and spore servants—hundreds, perhaps thousands of them—watching as a grotesque procession makes its way through them. Myconids of all sizes caper madly before a troupe of giant animated mushrooms, bearing a mossy litter upon which sits the Demon Queen of Fungi in all her terrible splendor.

Zuggtmoy is draped and veiled in molds and fruiting mushrooms woven into a grotesque gown. Vaguely humanoid figures set with clusters of luminescent lichen and tumescent fungal growths follow her like bridesmaids, carrying a veil and train of lacy mycelia. Stepping off the litter as her followers set it down, the Demon Queen of Fungi rises to tower above all the creatures around her. "My betrothed," she intones, the meaning of her words clear within the vision. "I am here at last."

As you acclimate yourselves to this strange place, you find that movement is more a act of will than it is any physical thing, similar to how it is in the astral plane for those familiar with it. As you float there deciding where to go, you feel an indescribable presence in the distance ahead of you.

Your thoughts draw them toward a distant, floating object. It appears to be a hemisphere, until its slow rotation reveals its true form: a giant skull missing its jawbone, formed out of some kind of pale rock. As the characters draw closer, the skull reveals itself to be the size of a small mountain. Its surface is covered in lichens and broad patches of mold, the colors resembling those of Araumycos on the Material Plane.

Through the empty eye sockets of the skull, you can see that its interior is hollow and filled with a bewildering variety of giant fungi. Tendrils and growths extend outward, twining together to form a mass suspended in the middle of the open space - a brain-shaped fungus the size of a castle.

As you drift closer to the skull and make plans, there's a sudden flood of energy from nearby. "Who dares?" a voice shouts in your mind. "Who dares disturb my intended nuptials?" Spores and tendrils erupt from the surface of the skull, coalescing before your eyes into the image of the Demon Queen of Fungi, her dead eyes glaring with inhuman fury.

Before Zuggtmoy can do anything to you, the demon queen is distracted, turning away to glance at something you can't see. She hisses the name "Juiblex" like a curse, then recoils as if struck. Her image then vanishes.