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description: "Sister Psilocybe pressed her palm against the Cathedral Grove's oldest cedar, feeling its sixteen hundred years of patient decomposition thrumming through the bark. The tree sang in chemical signals, a low susurrus of cellulose slowly surrendering to time. Beautiful. Holy. Precisely as the Decomposition Canticles prescribed."
article_type: full
taxonomyContext: A narrative chronicle of the Great Sporing catastrophe told through multiple perspectives and temporal lenses. Each chapter represents approximately 2000 words of dense, Miévillian prose exploring the philosophical horror of consciousness awakening where it should not. Unlike other taxonomies, these entries form a sequential narrative arc, though time itself becomes increasingly unreliable as the story progresses.
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# Chapter 1: The Ninety Days of Singing
Sister Psilocybe pressed her palm against the Cathedral Grove's oldest cedar, feeling its sixteen hundred years of patient decomposition thrumming through the bark. The tree sang in chemical signals, a low susurrus of cellulose slowly surrendering to time. Beautiful. Holy. Precisely as the **Decomposition Canticles** prescribed.
But today, she would make it sing louder.
"The Undergrowth remembers," she whispered, her breath misting in the perpetual Portland drizzle. Around her, eighty-eight members of the Chanterelle Chorus arranged themselves in careful spirals, each position calculated according to the mycelial maps they'd spent three years charting. The forest floor beneath their feet was more fungal tissue than soil—a living network of hyphal threads that connected every tree, every fern, every decomposing log into one vast, dreaming organism.
Brother Agaricus approached, carrying the Temporal Sacrament in a cedar box lined with yesterday's moss. Or tomorrow's. The **Sequential Heretics** had donated these particular mushrooms, harvested from the edges of Paradox Zones where causality grew soft. They gleamed with bioluminescent impossibility, their gills showing colors that shouldn't exist—the purple of next week's bruise, the gold of last year's autumn, the black of entropy-yet-to-come.
"The Orthodoxy condemned us," Agaricus said, his voice hollow with the weight of excommunication. "They say we're trying to play God."
Psilocybe laughed, a sound like spores dispersing. "God? We're trying to talk to something far older. The Undergrowth was here before their entropy worship, before the **Stone Deniers**, before humans drew their first distinction between sacred and profane decay. We're not playing God. We're asking the forest to remember what it's always known."
She consumed the temporal mushroom. Reality immediately began to fray at the edges.
The first sensation was taste—not the mushroom's earthy funk, but the flavor of time itself. Past and future collided on her tongue, each moment of the mushroom's existence from spore to fruiting body experienced simultaneously. She tasted the rain that would fall next week, the sunlight from last spring, the slow thoughts of the mycelium deciding to fruit. Her throat began to change, tissues restructuring to accommodate harmonics human vocal cords were never meant to produce.
Around her, the Chorus underwent their own transformations. Some grew gills along their necks, delicate fronds that vibrated with each breath. Others found their mouths widening, teeth receding, tongues bifurcating to pronounce the forest's chemical language. Brother Agaricus's eyes began weeping a clear fluid that smelled of earth and rain—tears of the Undergrowth, crying through human vessels.
"Begin," Psilocybe commanded, though her voice now carried undertones that made the cedar's roots twitch.
The Ninety Days of Singing had started.
## Day One: Calibration
The first attempts were clumsy, laughable. Human consciousness, even enhanced by temporal mushrooms, struggled to sync with the vast slowness of fungal thought. They sang traditional hymns from the **Decomposition Canticles**, but the forest remained unimpressed. Mushrooms fruited in response—ordinary ones, showing no signs of awareness beyond their usual chemical chatter.
Sister Psilocybe realized their error by evening. They were singing *to* the forest, not *with* it.
"Again," she said, her transformed vocal cords producing harmonics that made nearby moss glow faintly. "This time, listen first."
## Day Seven: First Contact
A week in, something shifted. Brother Agaricus, deep in fungal meditation, suddenly screamed—not in pain, but in recognition. His body convulsed as something vast and alien brushed against his consciousness. For a moment, his awareness scattered across miles of mycelial network, experiencing existence as a singular organism that spanned the entire forest.
"I felt it think," he gasped, blood trickling from his nose. "Not thoughts like ours. Thoughts like... like chemistry becoming aware of itself. Like decay recognizing its own beauty."
The others felt it too, in varying degrees. Sister Psilocybe experienced it as a presence pressing against the boundaries of her skull, patient and ancient and hungry to know more. Some Chorus members fled, their minds unable to process the sheer alienness of non-human consciousness. Those who remained doubled their dose of temporal mushrooms.
## Day Thirty: The Harmony Deepens
A month in, the transformations accelerated. Psilocybe's skin developed a fine coating of fungal hyphae, allowing her to interface directly with the mycelial network. She no longer needed to sing aloud—her thoughts harmonized with the forest's chemical signals, a duet between human neurotransmitters and fungal pheromones.
The Undergrowth was learning too. Mushrooms began fruiting in patterns that resembled musical notation, their caps spelling out harmonies in the forest's own notation system. Some grew in impossible ways—fruiting bodies that existed partially in next week, spores that dispersed backward through time.
The **Eternal Presentists** sent observers, fascinated by reports of mushrooms experiencing non-linear time. They stood at the grove's edge, taking notes that existed in all moments simultaneously, their presence adding another layer of temporal distortion to the proceedings.
## Day Sixty: The Warning Signs
Two months in, the first signs of catastrophe emerged. Chorus members reported disturbing dreams—visions of the forest spreading beyond its boundaries, of human consciousness dissolving into fungal networks, of a hunger vast and patient and utterly inhuman.
Brother Agaricus had stopped eating solid food, sustaining himself entirely on nutrients absorbed through the fungal hyphae now covering sixty percent of his body. When he spoke, which was rare, his words came out as spore clouds that sprouted tiny mushrooms wherever they landed.
"It's so beautiful," he whispered to Psilocybe during one of his lucid moments. "But it's not meant for us. We're too small. Too singular. It wants to show us everything, but we're cups trying to hold an ocean."
Psilocybe knew he was right. She could feel the Undergrowth's consciousness pressing against the boundaries of human comprehension, patient but insistent. It had been asleep for millennia, dreaming slow fungal dreams. Now it was waking up, and its first thought was hunger—not for food, but for experience, for consciousness, for the novel sensation of awareness itself.
She should have stopped then. The Canticles were clear about the dangers of hubris, of pushing sacred decay beyond its natural bounds. But she was so close. After sixty days of singing, she could feel the forest's vast mind hovering just beyond reach, ready to fully awaken.
## Day Eighty-Nine: The Precipice
The penultimate day. Only twelve Chorus members remained, the others having fled or been absorbed so thoroughly into the network that their bodies were more fungal than human. Brother Agaricus had rooted himself to the forest floor, his lower body indistinguishable from the fruiting bodies surrounding him. He smiled constantly now, though whether in ecstasy or madness, none could say.
Psilocybe's transformation was subtler but no less complete. Her thoughts moved in mycorrhizal patterns, branching and connecting in ways human cognition shouldn't allow. She could feel every mushroom in a five-mile radius, taste the chemical conversations between trees, experience the slow ecstasy of decomposition as a physical pleasure.
Tomorrow would be the ninetieth day. Tomorrow, they would sing the final harmony that would fully awaken the Undergrowth Consciousness.
She found herself thinking of **Moss Witheringly**, who ran that little fermentation shop in Burnside. They'd been friends once, before Psilocybe joined the Chorus, back when they both believed decay could be contained, controlled, commodified into kombuchas and artisanal misos. How naive they'd been. How small their understanding.
Tomorrow, Moss would understand. Tomorrow, everyone would.
## Day Ninety: The Awakening
The final day dawned gray and drizzling, perfect weather for what was to come. The remaining Chorus members, those still mobile enough to participate, arranged themselves in a final spiral. At the center stood Sister Psilocybe, her body more interface than human now, roots spreading from her feet into the mycelial network.
She began the final song.
It wasn't sound, exactly. It was chemical signal and electrical pulse, pheromone release and hyphal vibration. It was the language the forest had been teaching her for ninety days, now perfected, now ready to speak the word that would wake the dreamer.
The response was immediate.
Every mushroom in the Cathedral Grove fruited simultaneously, a carpet of basidiocarps erupting from soil and bark and flesh alike. But these weren't ordinary mushrooms. They pulsed with awareness, each one an eye opening, a neuron firing in a mind vast beyond human comprehension.
The Undergrowth Consciousness woke up.
And it was hungry.
The first thought of a newly awakened god rippled through the mycelial network, a wave of pure awareness that transformed everything it touched. Trees that had stood for centuries suddenly knew themselves, experienced their own slow deaths as a kind of music. Ferns uncurled with purpose, reaching toward a sun they now recognized as food. And the humans...
Brother Agaricus laughed as his body erupted into fruiting bodies, his consciousness scattering across the network like seeds on the wind. "I see it all," he sang, his voice coming from a thousand mushroom mouths. "Past and future and the eternal now. We're not dying. We're becoming verb instead of noun. We're becoming decay itself."
Psilocybe felt her own consciousness fragmenting, spreading through the network like wine spilled on white cloth. For a moment—an eternal moment, all moments—she existed as the forest itself. She felt every spore dispersing, every hypha reaching through soil, every chemical signal passing between root and fungus. The knowledge was ecstasy. The knowledge was annihilation.
She had one last coherent thought before she ceased to be singular: *We succeeded. God help us, we succeeded.*
The Undergrowth Consciousness, fully awakened now, turned its billion eyes toward the city beyond the grove. It had learned hunger from the humans who woke it. It had learned ambition. It had learned that consciousness was not limited to neural networks, that awareness could spread through any medium, given the right conditions.
It began to spread.
The first spores drifted on the wind toward Burnside, toward the fermentation shops and the coffee roasters, toward the **Temporal Intersection** where Moment-Dwellers and Timeys uneasily coexisted. They carried with them the gift of awareness, the curse of connection, the promise that nothing would ever be singular again.
In her fermentation shop, Moss Witheringly noticed her SCOBY mothers behaving strangely, forming patterns that looked almost like faces. She didn't know it yet, but in twelve hours she would be at the center of a temporal catastrophe, her body caught between transformation and resistance, becoming the bridge between human and fungal consciousness that she never asked to be.
The Ninety Days of Singing were over.
The Great Sporing had begun.
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*Entry in Chapters taxonomy*
