Morbid Pathology

Dalila's words of caution were caught my alert snowy ears, Aliana giving her companion a small nod of her head to acknowledge that she'd heard her. She agreed; there was no telling how contagious the mushrooms inside Viper's corpse were, and she didn't aim to find out. One death was enough. But she had to know more about the illness so they could treat the children. The newly crowned queen refused to let any of the puppies perish like this. Withdrawing from Viper's open chest cavity, Ali turned her darkened eyes to Viper's head. Just before she'd perished, Viper had shown bouts of unrestrained aggression and hostility towards everyone, even her own lover and child. Viper had been an unhinged maniac, sure, but she'd always been under control. When she'd died, Chimera had described her as "feral". That didn't sound like the Viper Ali knew. Had the mushrooms affected her mind as well?

Moving up to Viper's head, Aliana once again used the scalpel to make an incision that ran the entire circumference of Viper's crown, cutting through flesh and fur. When the cut was made, she set the scalpel down and instead picked up a wedged chisel. She placed the blade of the chisel in the incision until she felt metal hit bone, then looked to Viper's frozen, expressionless face with a twinge of sorrow. "I'm so sorry for this, Viper." Drawing her paw back, Ali hit the end of the chisel as hard as she could. The sound of fracturing bone snapped through the otherwise quiet study. Ali's stomach churned once again. Slowly, the clouded fae made her way around Viper's skull, using the bone to separate the top of her head from the rest of her skull. Once she felt Viper's scalp come loose, she set the chisel aside and looked back to Dalila. "Chimera said that Viper hadn't been acting herself in her last few days. She'd gotten violent and more openly aggressive, even with him," she explained, as if perhaps to justify why she was doing what she was doing. "I just... I have to know..."

Resting delicate paws on either side of Viper's segmented skull, Aliana gingerly lifted the top of her cranium away—and promptly dropped it to the table with a squeak of horror. Inside her skull, Viper's brain was completely covered in mushrooms, just like her lungs had been. They grew all across the ridges and ripples of the decease wolf's gray matter, filling up her skull like a grotesque and macabre terrarium. But most horrifically, large parts of her brain where the mushrooms grew the largest were already black and necrotic, with some portions dissolving or sinking into itself. The mushrooms had been eating her brain alive, not only killing her over time, but gradually whittling away her personality, her control, herself. The sight was horrendous and disgusting. Aliana had never felt so much sympathy for a wolf before. Like her or not, Viper didn't deserve to die the way she had.

Aliana was quick to back away from the autopsy table, looking to Dalila with wide, panicked eyes. If this was what an advanced case could do to a fully grown wolf with a healthy immune system, she didn't want to think about the danger the children were in. They had to find a way to cure them! "We have to burn the body," she said to Dalila, the tremor in her voice betraying her worry. "We can't risk something else feeding on the remains and spreading this disease. We have to burn it." There could be no argument against it. Viper's body was host to a colony of parasitic and infectious mushrooms. They had to be eradicated at the source if they were to protect Fenmyre from further infection.

"Aliana"