Welcome to the Nightmare Magazine Story podcast.

Enter freely and of your own free will.

I am your humble host, Terence Taylor, one very much at home with the Children of the Night.

Stay close as my muse, the medieval demon goblin, guides us down into beautiful darkness.

In this episode, before our full-length story, we have a short shot, primordium, written by Erica Rupert,

and narrated by Stefan Rednicki. But first, a word from our sponsors.

And now, Stephen Rudnicki. Primordium by Erica Rupert.

I have a long-standing fascination with fungi, their interconnectedness, their otherness,

their ability to emerge from seemingly nothing.

I also have a long-standing fascination with serial killers

and the dehumanization they inflict.

When I began writing Primordium,

it was only a vignette about mushrooms and their drifting spores,

but it grew unexpectedly to incorporate both interests.

In the night they open, gills delicate as frost, spores like stardust. They feed on the wounds

of our heart, our torn mouth, our unlidded eyes. They feed on the wounds of our heart, our torn mouth, our unlidded eyes.

They feed where we are damaged, and they grow.

He buried me in the dark, in the fertile ground.

I didn't know it.

I was nothing, then, an empty body,

a thing he made and hid away.

But I did not stay empty.

...