And so the chick, large and round as a giant black puffball, enthralled its returned parents and siblings to its own feeding for the whole summer, eating more of the book-nourished moths and richly muting the floor of its niche. The exterior of the spire had long sprouted ferns and other wind-bornes, green against its grey stone, but the interior had been dark and dry till the mute-trickle began from above. Fungi began to grow thereof, glowing unobserved in the darkness, and in time the hortus siccus of the moth-gnawed library was sprinkled and, no longer siccus, became a hortus in truth, with fungi and molds digesting its parchment and papyrus. In late summer, some men among the lake-dwellers thought, staring up or across at the spire as they paddled by or walked the shore, that it had caught fire and was burning, so thick were the spore-clouds that drifted from within it.
The following season the spore-clouds would be thinner, for the chick would soon reach the limits of its growth and in its third summer would permit most of its returned kind to breed, knowing that it must establish a spire-line for its own sake, that it might be fed down the coming centuries. But by then the spore-clouds, dispersing over the lake, had induced a strange phthisis in the children of the lake-dwellers, with a faint shrill of inhalation that recalled the cries of the insect-seeking swifts, swooping the sky and lake to feed that single esurient chick. And in winter, when the swifts were gone, the dreams of the infected children mingled with the dreams of the spire-chick, large and round now as a boulder of obsidian in its niche. The dreams would reshape the lake-dwellers’ cults in coming years, spawning rites of ornitholatry and practices of ornithomancy and elevating the lake-swifts to psychopomps, with black sickle-wings to cut the soul-cord and haunting cries to shepherd the loosed soul to the afterworld as they spiraled the green-sprouted grey of the spire beneath a blue or banded or mackerel sky.