Morbid Pathology

Not long after Aliana had made the first incisions down Viper's torso, the soft sound of claws on the hardwood floor made her ears flick back and her head shoot up I the direction of the door. She saw Dalila approach, keeping her distance, but also watching with grim curiosity. The mottled woman asked if she could help and Ali glanced between her and the body for a moment. "I think I've got it, but I wouldn't mind the company. It might be less... morbid if I'm not alone," she said, words slightly muffled from the scalpel between her teeth. "Grab a mask. I don't know if she's contagious." She, not it. She was still Viper, not just some cadaver. Even if the woman had hated her in life, Aliana would treat her remains with respect. Once Dalila had donned the proper safety equipment and joined her, Ali took another deep breath and leaned in to finish making her cuts down and across the torso, making four diagonal lines to Viper's hips and shoulders respectively. "These cuts along the length of the torso and to the joints allow us to open the body cleanly," she explained to her companion, finding a bit of comfort in pretending this was a medical lesson than her carving open her former pack mate. "Now we can take a look inside and see what happened to Viper. Hopefully, it'll teach us something helpful..." Then she began to peel away the cooled flesh and muscle with careful paws.

The inside of Viper smelled terrible. All corpses stunk, sure, but there was an odd, earthy smell to the wolf's remains. Aliana didn't realize what it was until she pulled back the skin and flesh from Viper's chest and recoiled in disgust. The tricolored fae's lungs were almost entirely covered in fungi, mushrooms matching the ones that had appeared all across the world outside. They grew like tumors from the organ, sticking to her ribs in some places where they'd fused between meat and bone. It was truly a revolting sight, and it looked like the fungi had already been eating away at her body before she was even dead, killing her slowly. The same viscous glowing ooze that had been dribbling from her mouth seeped from her lungs, which looked bloated and unnaturally large, pressing into her ribcage in a grotesque manner. Ali swallowed back her gag reflex, steeling herself as she brought the blade of the scalpel down towards the mushroom-encrusted lungs.

The moment the scalpel punctured Viper's left lung, a burst of fluorescent spores erupted out along with a deluge of thick glowing sludge that poured out into Viper's chest cavity. Aliana retched and reeled back, stumbling away from the autopsy table to suck in a few gasps of air and calm her dry heaving. By the gods, this was horrific! Viper had quite literally suffocated on the ooze filling her lungs while the mushrooms decayed her organs from within! It took a good long while for Aliana to settle back down, but when she did, she began to count down from 20 in her head, psyching herself back up to return to her task. By all that is holy and evil, what is this sickness...?! The traumatized thought passed her mind, and then the ash and snow fae turned to go back to the table. In all honesty, she wanted to know how this had happened, and what had caused Viper to snap and turn on her own child. "It... It looks like the mushroom spores caused growths on her lungs. They prevented her from breathing right and getting enough oxygen. I... I think... the mushrooms were filling her lungs with this fluid too. She... She drowned in her own lungs." Gods, just that mental image was horrifying. But they still had a little more work to do still.

"Aliana"