Robyn Renou

Once, on Earth, there was a fungus called Ophiocordyceps unilateralis. It grew in the rainforests and would infect the Camponotini ant, sending tendrils of mycelia drilling into its brain. It would take over the neurons and force the ant to leave its work and climb the nearest plant, affixing itself with its mandibles. For a few days, the fungus would just sit and grow. Eventually, it would burst from the head - a long, thin sprouting organ that when ready would rain thousands of deadly spores on the ants below.

Once, on a far distant planet, a fungus evolved that did something similar to meat containers. The fungus - Ophiocordyceps mons - grew slowly in the brain over a decade or so. As it did, it released an ever-so-slowly increasing dose of psilocybin. Its hosts described it as a decade of slow descent into strangeness. Some even sought it out - as was the case of the painter Robyn Renou.

Robyn had been born at the foot of the great mountain Typis. It was an awe-striking sight. Three times as large as Everest, it stabbed like a great jagged spear into the purple sky. Its shadow stretched across the surface of the planet, a great tear across the horizon. Robyn had always loved to paint. And now, with the dose of psilocybin constantly generated in their brain, their landscapes had become more vibrant than ever before. More abstracted. More experimental.

They had heard they were famous, but they didn't care all that much. They hadn't left their home town in quite a few cycles, and it was how they liked it. The best weeks were spent hiking along the tracks with their equipment. They would find some new vista, some new sight, and set up camp for a few days. They would paint and smoke, and drink wine, and if the weather was good they would strip off their clothes and live naked.

their paintings started as fairly realistic renderings of the untouched mountains, the trees that had been bred an orangey color, ththeir leaves flushed with a rich infra-red hue that absorbed the shifted sunlight best. The magnetic field here was intense and every night there was a fireworks show across the electromagnetic spectrum. Renou tried to capture as much of that spectrum as possible, painting into the infrared and ultraviolet range, even touching the low microwaves with some of their more experimental pigments. Perhaps even a speckle of radioactive isotope across a prepared canvas, to show some streaking comet across the sky in all its incandescent glory. They had inherited their eyes from Grandfather when they was sixteen, the moment their skull had been big enough.

As the fungal condition progressed, Renou's landscapes became less realistic. More fragmented, more distorted, and more space between their eyes' interface with the optic nerve and their hand acting upon the canvas. More connections passed through on the way.

As the fungal condition progressed, the trips lengthened and lengthened, until their partners wouldn't expect em home for weeks. They would return eventually, whistling and humming and covered from head to toe in little flecks of paint.

Until, one day, they saw the mountain and it was different. There was a gateway at its peak, a gateway to some other world. Some different plane. It shone with a terrifying brilliance and Renou could only gasp and tear at their hair and gather their things for the journey, heading off upwards with shouts and whispers. After a few days, they had climbed emselves ragged, the hardest they had ever tried. They had left ththeir paints, their tent, their food, a while back. They stumbled and staggered up the mountain until the landscape stretched below them, curving away into the distance, the great turquoise asteroid ring stretching from one part of the horizon to the other.

Eventually, their body gave out and they collapsed on the harsh and sterile rocks of the higher reaches of the mountain where biological life had only just begun to take seed. They sat on the mountain, slack-jawed, staring out at the sunset and sunrise. Renou was still for days, their eyes never moving, looking out, out, at the picture in front of em. Every part of the spectrum glittering in their mind's eye.

A sprouting flower burst from their forehead. A thick stem, growing, pushing their skull aside as the fungus consumed all of Renou's brain and body for its rapid growth. Renou's eyes - any consciousness long-gone - bloomed into a garden. their body blossomed into new life, their skin splitting and countless new forms of mycology emerging from underneath.

The wind came, and an enormous cloud of spores took flight on it. Millions of them were carried on the wind for hundreds of kilometers. When they found the body, they burned it where it lay.