Chapter 20: Don Miguel and the Mycelium Chorus
In the fungal heart of the Amazonian cathedral, Don Miguel sat cross-legged, cupped in the woven womb of the maloca. The yagé brew hissed in the pot like the serpent’s dream, steam rising in unsteady vowels. Around him, the dancers of shadow and leaf flickered, each breath a testament to the jungle’s green teeth.
He drank the dark liquid—bitter, green as the memory of the forest itself—and his tongue unraveled. Words began to seep from his mouth, soft spores of meaning, drifting and rooting in the dirt of silence. The Icaros he sang, the healing songs of his fathers’ fathers, slipped into the night air and dissolved. Each note, once a perfect spiral of intent, now fractured—splintered into crystalline syllables that pulsed with alien light.
The mycelium beneath him stirred, threads of white nerve flickering with an intelligence older than the river’s patience. Don Miguel felt it—felt them—inside his marrow, a chorus of hyphae tongues weaving a language no human ear could cradle. They sang not in notes, but in pulses of rot and birth, a hymn of dissolution. In their chorus, he heard the jungle’s final prayer: unspooling, uncoiling, unmaking.
Insects, emboldened by the fungal canticle, began to mimic. Cicadas rasped the syllables of Don Miguel’s own name, but the name bent under their chitinous chirping, twisting until it was a prayer for no one. Vines convulsed against the maloca’s wooden ribs, spelling sentences in fronds and mildew: words that lived and rotted at once.
Don Miguel’s skin prickled with each breath. He tried to speak—tried to pour the Icaros back into his throat—but his voice had grown spores. Each syllable was a cap and stalk, splitting and birthing more. Language became a garden of alien fruit: words sprouted in his mouth like damp things, rich with meanings no man could till.
He saw them, the mushroom’s visions—white threads in the green dark, fingers of rot and promise, clutching at the air. They spoke in fractals, each word a thousand others, each root a thousand tongues. “We are the un-voice,” they sang in him. “We are the echo that eats its own tail.”
Don Miguel’s eyes rolled back to see the vines spelling their scripture: green letters curving and breaking, leaf and rot entwined. The insects repeated the lines, but their mandibles chewed the words to pulp, the language turning back to earth. The boundaries between his mouth and the forest’s throat crumbled—his tongue no longer his own, the Icaros a river of fungal breath.
In the final exhale, he saw the cosmic horror in the center of the mushroom’s hymn—something vast and unspeaking, a hunger that dissolved not flesh but the very shape of sense. He was Don Miguel, and he was the Mycelium Chorus. He was the song, and he was the rot. And the song kept singing, even as his voice vanished into spores and leaf-litter, forever fractal, forever devoured.