Bokelskere.no

Black and cancerous, their branches rattled with the wind, bending themselves to the cries of the owls and the calls of wolves from the north, so that they formed a kind of music, an eerie cacophony that followed me from the village and trailed me like the moonlight

The withering of my body made my soul riper, nearly ready to pluck.

No propulsion, no food, no light other than the eerie phosphorescence emitted by the foreign fruiting bodies grafted to the puffball's exterior, anchored by stringy stalk tethers to dimly illuminate the black ink of deep ocean several meters in every direction, orbiting their giant puffball with slow underwater undulations like glowing globular planets orbiting a drowned moon.