From the moment that Uula stepped out of the portal into the rusty alien haze, it knew something was very wrong. The Avatar was no stranger to dead worlds, having seen myriad planes in terminal states of decay and corruption before. Some had fallen to the rampant predations of demons, others to the violent and rapacious impulses of their mortal inhabitants, and still many others had been visited by cataclysms of a random, yet absolute, nature. In all of the previous cases, the mechanism of destruction was usually immediately apparent to Uula - a catastrophic war, celestial impact, demonic incursion - all were fairly straight-forward. But this time was different.

A dense, dusty haze permeated the air, imbuing the sunlight with a baleful blood-red hue. The earth beneath the Avatar's feet was soft and almost spongy, yielding to its weight as it settled upon it. As far as it could see the entire surface of the world was covered in a thick sheet of a reddish-orange substance much like gossamer, soft and damp, punctuated here and there by grotesque organic tendrils. Towering rectilinear shapes jutted from the ground, each coated in a veneer of that same sickly substance, appearing very much to resemble buildings of some kind. Judging by their arrangement and distribution, she seemed to have happened upon some manner of city, but one apparently devoid of any sort of activity save the ruddy tendrils glistening in the rusty gloom.

Something precipitated through the air - tiny nodes of matter that sailed to and fro on the stale winds. Uula extended its hand, allowing several to land in its palm. Contact instantly revealed their nature - they were spores, though unlike any the entity had previously encountered. As more settled upon its hand, Uula's infallible vision could see them reacting immediately to its skin, suddenly writhing and multiplying on a microscopic level. Growing at an astonishing rate, the tiny spores each extended multitudinous membranous appendages in all directions, as if seeking the touch of its own kind. Within a minute, a web of mycelium had spread across the landscape of her palm, similar to that which already blanketed the earth below.

Uula was intimately familiar with life of all types, including those of fungal typology. Yet these organisms were profoundly different. Although each spore was technically a discrete life-form on its own, Uula could sense that these all shared the same essence, as if the entire scene stretched before her represented a patch of skin on a single vast organism. Furthermore, it was clear that these spores were somehow associated with the fate that had befallen this world. But the presence of buildings suggested that there were once people here, or at least beings capable of erecting artificial structures. What had happened to them?

As if in response to its unspoken query, Uula detected motion within the nearby buildings. A humanoid shape stepped haltingly out of the shadows, its motions less like the animation of an autonomous creature, and more akin to the awkward, wooden movements of a marionette. As the being entered the light, Uula might have caught its breath - were the Avatar a creature that breathed. The man or woman - it was impossible to tell - was covered in a dense layer of a thick organic substance, almost like an orange lichen. Here and there strange bulbous protuberances grew directly from the surface of the skin, as if some infestation had borne fruit within the body and had sprouted violently outward. These formations occurred more prominently on the upper body than the lower, extending up to, and including, the face - if the creature could be said to even have a face. Where one would typically expect to find that comfortingly familiar arrangement of features was instead a blood-curdling chaos of fungal formations - a horrid canyon of shelf-like growths that seemed to have erupted from within the head itself. For the first time in its existence, Uula felt a stab of revulsion so powerful that it was nearly compelled to snuff the creature's life in that instant, in utter violation of the Avatar of Life's very raison d'etre. It might very well have even done so, had it not become apparent that the humanoid was not alone.

Dozens more figures began to exit various structures on all sides of Uula, plodding slowly towards the Avatar across the seeping orange mat of membrane with the same ungainly gait as the first. Uula tried to sense their souls but could only detect a mute emptiness issuing from the core of their beings. If anything, the creatures' energies seemed to exist in continuum with that of the fungal mass that covered every other surface as far as the eye could see. The nearest humanoid stopped approaching her at a distance of ten feet, and there it stood in a strangely wobbling, twitching attitude that Uula found extremely unpleasant. The others each stopped at a similar distance, completely encircling the Avatar. They encroached no further, just stood in place, swaying and spasming, as if they only vaguely controlled their own limbs.

"Planesssswaaalkerrrrrrr..." Uula heard a strange, sibilant voice whisper in its mind. The psychic message had seemingly been broadcast from everywhere at once, as if the ground itself had deigned to speak of its own volition. "Planessssswaaalkerrrrrrr..." the voice repeated. The voice again seemed to come from everywhere, and nowhere, at the same time.

"I am no mere planeswalker, creature." Uula replied flatly in its multi-tonal voice. "Who are you?"

"We... Are..." The response echoed through its thoughts.

"We are... what?" Asked Uula impatiently, disliking this entity's cryptic manner of speech. "Speak!" Uula commanded.

"We... Are..." came an identical response, though this time the words also reached Uula's ears through the thick, moldering haze. The Avatar turned towards the source of the utterance as the circle of humanoids parted slightly to admit a new member. She, as the figure's vaguely feminine traits seemed to suggest a feminine gender, was a being of a much more definite character than the others. She was slender of form, a few inches shorter than Uula, and roughly humanoid in shape. Whereas the others' bodies seemed to have been ravaged by fungal infection, this creature displayed no overt signs of disease. Her gaunt, sinewy form was not lacking in fungal features however, though these were of an ordered character - apparently intrinsic to the creature rather than parasitic. Her entire back and upper head were completely covered in wedge-shaped orange growths, similar to the buds of an artichoke. From these a thick cloud of orange spores emitted profusely, filling the air behind her with a dense ruddy haze. She traversed the webbed terrain relatively easily - for a creature lacking any feet. Instead she seemed to balance expertly on the tips of two curved blades that arced down from her ankles.

The creature stepped into the circle, stopping perhaps two yards before Uula's impassive face. Uula felt a tingling on its forearm, and glanced down to see that the gossamer web had spread to cover its entire hand, and was now slowly travelling up towards its elbow. A similar sensation on its feet suggested that the mat of mycelium on the ground was attempting something similar with its legs.

"Chillldreennnn weeeeak... Sssstarviiing..." The creature whispered, extending several wickedly-taloned fingers in Uula's direction. Beneath the gaping hole that occupied the center of her face, her full lips pursed and then pulled back into a sneer, revealing a row of gleaming white teeth that tapered to needle-like points.

"Huuuuungrryyyy..." she hissed insistently, followed by a single word that further clarified her intent: "Freeeeedoooommmmmm..." Suddenly she lunged at Uula, claws homing towards the Avatar's throat.

Uula's upper-left arm was a blur of motion as it extended its open palm into the creature's face.

"Denied." The Avatar of Life stated evenly, and the creature's body exploded into a thick cloud of fine orange dust. Uula raised its other hands in all directions, and the heads of the other humanoids exploded in a grisly chorus of wet pops. They abruptly stopped swaying and slumped gracelessly to the ground, immobile.

Uula tore its feet free of the revolting tendrils and ascended high into the spore-filled sky. It momentarily contemplated engineering the final destruction of this world - but then relented. This world was still full of life. Festering, putrid life, but life nonetheless. Though it was clearly unsuitable to be incorporated into the Eternal Garden, the Avatar would leave it as it had found it - a sanctuary, or perhaps a prison, for whatever cursed survivors remained of the bizarre doom that had befallen this plane. It turned away from the hellish fungal-scape and, with an arcane gesticulation involving all four of its arms, opened a portal to return to the Eternal Garden, its home.

The Avatar of Life stepped into the lush verdant clearing and paused, taking a moment to savor the caress of golden sunlight upon its ebony skin. Turning towards the dissipating portal, it made a series of warding gestures, marking and sealing that world from any further passage. That done, Uula was suddenly aware a tingling sensation on its arm, realizing with chagrin that it had forgotten to remove the sheath of orange tendrils that had now formed up to its elbow. With a slight gesture of its finger, the writhing gauntlet suddenly unraveled and fell into the grass, where it was immediately and hungrily dispatched by several golden-skinned earthworms that were summoned for that very purpose. Forgotten almost immediately, Uula rose swiftly into the clear azure sky, unmindful of anything save its next task.

Unmindful of the agonized writhing of the formerly golden-skinned earthworms, which had begun to take on the peculiar rusty hue of their last fateful meal...

*****

A new character that I adopted and customized from the talented Raven-Blood-13 (https://www.furaffinity.net/user/raven-blood-13/ ). I saw her and immediately knew how I wanted to use her! I tried to resist but it was no use - a few drinks, paypal infos exchanged, and BOOM! I'm now the bewildered, but happy, father of this little gal here.

No name yet, but I'm open to suggestions. But seriously, no more adopts for a while... Got enough mouths to feed already!