The End Has Come

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Avellone is the Creative Director of Obsidian Entertainment. He started his career at Interplay’s Black Isle Studios division, and he’s worked on a whole menagerie of RPGs throughout his career including Planescape: Torment, Fallout 2, the Icewind Dale series, Dark Alliance, Knights of the Old Republic II, Neverwinter Nights 2, Mask of the Betrayer, Alpha Protocol, Fallout: New Vegas, FNV DLC: Dead Money, Old World Blues, and Lonesome Road. He just finished working on inXile’s Wasteland 2, the Legend of Grimrock movie treatment, and the FTL: Advanced Edition and is currently doing joint work on Obsidian’s Kickstarter RPG: Pillars of Eternity and inXile’s Torment: Tides of Numenera.

RESISTANCE Seanan McGuire

January 2029

The gray world moved around me, and I moved in the gray world, untouched and unforgiven. I wasn’t alone there. No one was ever alone in the gray, which lived, in its own strange, soft way. But there were flickers of motion through the layered film of fungal strings — fast, hot animal motion, signaling the presence of cats and squirrels that had yet to succumb. Maybe some of them never would. Resistance had to exist in all branches of the animal kingdom for it to have any meaning at all. Maybe some of them would shrug off the searching spores over and over again, shaking their coats clean before resuming the endless, futile search for food that was not soft, was not slow, and was not of the gray.

I had seen a dog a week or so before, a big beast of a creature rendered thin and weak by starvation. Strains of gray had been clinging to its muzzle, places where it had fought the fungus for the remains of bigger, bulkier things. Dogs weren’t made to digest fungus, were they? I had never cared enough about dogs to know. I vaguely remembered that cats were obligate carnivores, needing meat in their bellies if they wanted to survive, but were dogs?

Judging by the big black dog that had greeted me as I walked through the gray, if they weren’t purely carnivorous, they weren’t well-suited to an all-fungus diet, either. I didn’t know if any mammals would be. Cows were herbivores, not fungivores. Maybe they could eat until they burst, and still starve.

The dog had been frail and slow, hampered by fungus growing in its fur, even if the gray hadn’t seeped into its bones. It had shown me its teeth. I had shown it the crowbar I carried, and that night I had slept beneath a veil of gray with my belly full of dogmeat. It had been red and raw and hot, so hot, so much hotter than the world around me.

In a kinder world, we might have been friends, that dog and I. We might have been bosom companions, the two of us standing against all obstacles, my hand resting on its proud canine head, my daughter standing nearby, ready to roll her eyes and complain about the state of her wardrobe. Together, the three of us could have faced anything.

But the gray had taken Nikki to punish me for my hubris, in thinking that I could save her, and the gray had given the dog to me to keep me strong, because my punishment was not over, my punishment would never be over, and the gray wouldn’t let me die. That would have been too merciful, too kind, and while the gray might be soft and all-covering as a child’s favorite blanket, it was not merciful. Mercy had no business here, in the slow softness.

Neither did I, but still I moved through the gray world, and still the gray world moved around me. I had been walking for a very long time. I realized, with the dull surprise that was all that I could manage anymore, that I was tired. There was no reason to look for shelter — what could threaten me, the woman who moved through the gray and was not touched by it? There was no need to look for comfort, either. I stopped where I stood, dropping to the ground and stretching out in the spores and puffed filaments that covered whatever surface I had been walking on. Concrete or flowerbed, it didn’t matter: the softness was everywhere.