"I know that the fungus has no malice. That is not a comfort." – Mandelbrot the Symbios, laboratory notebook
*Laboratory notebook of Mandelbrot the Symbios, Mycelium Arsenal, the Sporeforge. Selected entries. The handwriting – mandible-scratched into wax – is fast and often abandons a sentence for an equation.* **Day 1.** Strain 14 isolated from the specimen brought in by the scouts from the Pale. A Carnophage worker, dead, clamped by her mandibles to the underside of a grass stem two metres above the ground. A stalk had grown from the back of her head. Nobody had touched her. The column must have walked past her for an hour. **Day 9.** Mechanism understood, mostly. The spore enters through the soft joints. The mycelium grows through the body without touching the brain – that is the elegant part, it leaves the brain intact, it does not need it – and wraps the muscles, and on the eleventh day it makes the host *climb*. Up, always up, to a height and humidity the fungus prefers. Then the jaws lock. Then the host dies. Then the stalk, then the fruiting body, then the rain of spores onto the tr...
From the lore of The Chitinous Mandate.