The acolyte could not name the feeling, but it was a weight in his core, a dissonance that hummed just beneath the surface of the Silent Faith’s prescribed apathy. The spore had not given him answers; it had given him a question. And the question, once formed, was impossible to ignore: Is this all there is?
He began to observe his fellow acolytes with a new, unsettling clarity. He saw the same hollow-eyed devotion, the same practiced emptiness. But now, he also saw the faint, almost imperceptible tremors of unease. A fleeting expression of longing in another’s eyes, a slight hesitation before they joined in the silent rituals. The spore was working, not as a weapon, but as a mirror, forcing them to see the void they had so eagerly embraced. He started to leave small, almost accidental traces of the old world in his wake—a pattern in the dust that hinted at a forgotten melody, a sequence of stones that echoed a line of poetry. He was not rebelling, not yet. He was simply asking his question, in a language only the infected could understand.