#we'll see how many weeks in the middle are just image descriptions of mushrooms

[scribefindegil]

Cycle Eight--Week 1

[Ao3]

The bright blue leather of the book's cover has faded over time, and the silver metalwork has tarnished, but the ink inside is still crisp and clear.

A (condensed, if I'm being honest) version of Lucretia's journal from Cycle Eight.

Day 1

For the first time, we spend the night of our arrival still airborne.

Lup is eager to explore the land below us, a world covered in vast glowing forests of fungi. Even now, when the single sun is on the far side of the planet, it glows as though it were daytime (At least, if daytime were characterized by an ever-shifting pattern of neon hues). The air is filled with clouds of spores which diffuse the light, concealing the edges of individual mushrooms so the entire world looks like a great ocean of light.

Tomorrow we head for one of the dark spots we can make out on the horizon in search of a clear landing ground. Captain Davenport has ordered that no one is to leave the ship until we can verify that the environment is inhabitable. Thus far, we have had the good fortune to only visit worlds on which we can walk and breathe, but there is no guarantee that every set of Planes will be so hospitable.

Magnus offered to go down to the surface by himself. “It’s the quickest way to see if we can survive!” he said.

Taako scoffed. “Oh, right, check it out by dying, that’s a brilliant idea. Idiot.”

“Yeah, Maggie,” said Lup. “You only just got back! Is the company really that bad?”

He didn’t push the matter, but offered to man the helm for part of the night so Captain Davenport could get some sleep.

We’ve seen no signs of inhabitants so far. Perhaps there are none, or perhaps they’re just hidden by the lights and the wide caps of the mushrooms. My lenses are of limited use from this distance.

The world appears to be of medium size, similar to that of Cycle 4 and to our home. It has only one sun and no moons. Our course is high enough that despite the light from below and the dense clouds we’ve been passing through it is easy to make out the unfamiliar stars that fill the sky.

(The next page spread is taken up by a painstakingly drawn star map, with notations on brightness and hue. Later annotations have been made in lighter ink connecting certain stars into constellations: The Mask, the Spider, the Pipes, the Bear.)

Three hours into his watch, Magnus called out and pointed to the forest below. I caught the briefest glimpse of what had startled him—movement, as if there was a creature passing through the mushrooms. Neither of us got a good enough look to describe what we saw, but it would appear that the life on this world is not, after all, limited to the vegetal.

Day 2

Throughout the night and the early hours of the morning we continued to make out shambling figures moving through the forests below, though we haven’t been able to identify them. Lup offered to burn a path through the mushrooms so we could have a better view, but she was overruled.

In the afternoon we finally discovered a settlement. It was easy to make out from a distance—one of the only dark patches in the glowing forest. The village is small and circular, with low, squat buildings clustered in the center. The outskirts are guarded by bonfires—dozens of them in three staggered rings—and the earth inside the village is charred. The inhabitants are in a constant battle against the encroaching forest, and fire is the only weapon they have. I suspect that Lup will get along well with them.

When we landed at the edge of the village, the inhabitants ran out from their dwellings to meet us. There was barely room for the Starblaster to touch down between the buildings and the flames, but Captain Davenport has always been a deft hand at the controls and only becomes more skilled the longer we spend on this mission.

At first we were unsure what race these citizens are. They are small in stature, no taller than Davenport or Merle, and are clad in long garments made of a heavy, dark material. But their most notable feature is the masks they wear. Everyone has some type of face covering, although there appears to be no standard type. I saw some with fine white veils wrapped around their heads and faces, revealing only their eyes. Others wear large masks with bulging glass eyes and long protrusions in the front like a bird’s beak. Still others have masks that seem to be made of the same material as their clothes sewn into a bulbous shape that covers their mouths and noses.

When the ship first landed, some of the people raised weapons—long tubes attached to packs that rest on their shoulders—but when we emerged they lowered them immediately. For a moment they stared at us, their eyes wide above their masks.

“Hail and well met!” said Merle, waving at them.

There was a brief shuffling as they spoke among themselves, and then one of them stepped forward. They wore one of the beaked masks and were short even by the standards of their companions. When they spoke, their voice was deep and strangely resonant—perhaps by nature, perhaps due to the acoustics of the mask.

“Where did you . . . come from?” they said.

After seven years on seven different worlds, we’ve become used to questions like these, and everyone knows that explaining our situation requires a certain delicacy of phrasing. So, of course, Taako said, “We came from fucking space, my man!” and then high-fived his sister.

“. . . Not a man, but okay,” the speaker muttered. Then they seemed to pull themselves together and said, “Listen, you’re in grave danger. We’re sheltered here . . . a little. As much as . . . Listen, you need masks or you’re all going to die.”

Perhaps not the most positive welcome we’ve received, but honestly not the worst either. We stepped down into their village and let them fit us with masks as they explained that the spores produced by the mushroom forest are deadly poisonous if inhaled. The constant bonfires around the village provide something of a buffer, but not enough to protect them completely.

The person who originally spoke, a dwarf who introduced themself as Mico, invited us into their dwelling for a meal and to learn more about us. We accepted, though we soon found that the building was too small for all of us to enter. I had hoped that I could at least remain at the door and record the conversation but Captain Davenport insisted that would be impolite. While Merle and Davenport went inside, the villagers built us a sort of crude tent out of the same white material they used for their veils.

They are all both curious and shy. They haven’t asked many questions yet, but they stare at us openly, especially Magnus. He’s as big as three of them put together.

Davenport and Merle returned and let us know that this village is known as Fungston and we are welcome to stay as long as we like provided we help with protecting the town. The mushroom forest is always advancing, and it has been as long as any of them can remember, although there are stories of a time before the mushrooms came. I hope I have the chance to record some of them.

There are other villages like theirs scattered around, the closest a ten days’ march through the forest, but as far as the people of Fungston know there are no elves or humans left on this world. None except us.

Day 3

Magnus and Davenport have spent the day on the Starblaster, in hope that they will be able to track the Light of Creation as it falls. It has given the rest of us the opportunity to explore the village.

(The rest of the page is taken up with a map detailing the locations of the two dozen buildings that make up the village of Fungston)

They have a regular pattern to the day. When they wake up, everyone checks the inside of their own buildings and then the common areas for any mushrooms that have sprung up overnight. It they find any, they burn them and the ground around where they sprouted with the flame cannons that are their primary form of weaponry.

Then they breakfast, usually in their own small family groups. There are one or two buildings covered in extra layers of the veil fabric that are devoted to the growth of herbs for cooking and medicine, but their primary diet is insects and the non-luminous mushrooms that grow on the floor of the forest. Boiling neutralizes the effects of the spores, but it still feels like tempting fate. Food is a necessity, not a pleasure, although from the meaningful glances that Taako and Lup share over mealtimes I suspect the village may have some cooking lessons in store if we remain here for any length of time.

Most of the villagers spend the day working on the incredibly fine white fabric which, along with fire, is their primary protection from the spores. The weave is finer than any cloth from home. Air can pass through it, but nothing else. Barry is fascinated by it and had taken some samples to study.

Their secret is the colony of fist-sized spiders that live in the forest directly outside of town. It would be wrong to call these creatures domesticated, but they are farmed. The villagers provide them with food and then use a large spindle powered by magic to gather their silk for weaving. Nearly everyone has a loom in their home, but they will sometimes take them outside and sit together under an awning at the center of the village, working steadily with only the clicks of their shuttles and the sound of the everpresent rain disturbing the silence.

Those who do not weave or have their own specific duties tend to the bonfires, making sure they continue to burn high. They are fueled by dried sections from the stems of mushrooms and by the oil well which caused the early villagers to settle in this place.

A little before sunset they prepare the main meal of the day. Even when eating, they wear spider-silk veils over their mouths, and usually use the opportunity to check that their masks are in good repair.

As night falls, the scorch teams head out to the North and South, burning the forest back as far as they can before their flame cannons run dry. It is only when they return, with no spores for several hundred feet around, that anyone dares to take off their masks. Still, this is something that is done only within their homes. Seeing another person’s face is considered a moment of rare intimacy. They barely know how to react to knowing what the seven of us look like.

I thought at first that it was just their shyness, but these people are exhausted. Every night they send out scorch teams to burn as many mushrooms as they can, and every day the forest grows back. It reminds me of our own mission, these seemingly endless loops of struggling to find the Light and protect a world from the Hunger only to be thrown back into another cycle.

A gnome child ran up to us this morning and demanded, “Have you come to save us?” None of us knew how to answer, and finally Lup said, “. . . In a way . . .” The child could tell it wasn’t the answer she needed, and the bright spark of hope in her eyes faded away. Even if we do prevent the destruction of this planar system there is nothing we can do about the great mushrooms amidst which these people eke out a living.

Deadly as they are, the mushrooms are beautiful. I’ve been able to make out at least ten different species without passing beyond the ring of bonfires. They vary so much in structure and color: there are ones with stalks like smooth treetrunks and domed orange caps with deep pink gills, ones that jut out of the ground like green dripping fingers, tall ridged ones and orbs that sit low on the ground. All of them glow and all of them release sprays of the deadly spores.

I asked Nita, a Halfling with bright, deep-set brown eyes who walks with two canes carved from the tough caps of the shelflike purple mushrooms, if it would be safe for me to leave the village to make more notes and sketches of the forest provided I wore my mask at all times.

She looked at me like I’d grown a second head. “You can’t go out alone,” she said. “The Keepers will find you!”

Apparently the strange moving shapes we’d seen on the forest floor were no trick; there are ambulatory mushroom creatures as tall as a human that tend to the forest. None of these Keepers have ventured within the circle of bonfires in living memory, but there are still stories of them sneaking up to remove the masks from incautious travelers.

Day 4

The Light of Creation fell early this morning before the sun had risen. Magnus, Davenport, and Barry had been taking turns watching for it, and it was Barry’s watch when it fell. We heard him cry out and followed his pointing finger, but by the time we looked the trail it left in the sky had already faded.

“I barely saw it,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s somewhere to the South, but that’s half the world to search . . . I don’t know if we’ll be able to get it this time.”

Magnus clapped him on the shoulder. “Of course we will!” he said. “You and Lup just need to do your whole science magic thing! You’re great at it!”

The mask covers most of Barry’s face that isn’t already covered by glasses, but the blush reached his ears.

After a brief discussion we decided that we would stay here in Fungston for the time being, at least until we had a better sense of how to navigate this world. In a month or so we would discuss organizing an away mission.

Magnus has spent most of his time since our arrival waiting on the ship, so this was his first day spent out among the villagers. They all stare when they think he isn’t looking. They also stare at me and Barry and the twins, but Magnus is both taller and broader than the rest of us. One of the children asked how he could be so tall, and he laughed and said, “Like this!” and swung her up onto his shoulders. She screamed for a moment, but then it turned into laughter as he helped her balance and she got to look down on all of us, even the rest of the crew.

It attracted quite the crowd: other children begging for a turn while their parents looked on in shock and muted horror which slowly abated as they saw how careful he was not to let anyone fall.

Vetch, the first child he picked up, is a small dwarf girl who looks younger than her nine years. She wears her hair in small braids that stick out all over her head. One of her mothers, Frelya, leads a scorch teams and Jarrus, the other, spends most of her time tending the spiders. Befriending the “giant” has made her very popular among the other children.

Frelya has agreed to take me out into the forest tomorrow, although I don’t think any of them really understand my work. I tried to explain it, but they insist they simply remember everything important and have no need for writing.

Day 5

The forest is even more astonishing up close! I will have to return with my paints to see if I can capture something of the colors of these mushrooms! There is so much variation in the form and texture! Some of them do remind me of fungi I’ve seen on previous worlds, but so much about them is utterly alien.

And the insects! These spores may be deadly to mammals like ourselves, but the forest is still teeming with life. I saw butterflies as big as my head and worms that glow the same shade as the mushrooms they feed on and tiny flies with delicate, lacy wings and bugs with armored carapaces that burrow through the leaf-mold. There are even frogs that live in the cup-shaped caps of some of the smaller mushrooms where the water collects.

(The rest of this entry consists of pen-and-ink drawings of the fungi and creatures of the mushroom forest. On one page the drawings are somewhat smudged with tidelines, as if it had gotten wet. There is a note next to it: “Better ink! Also: umbrella!”)

Day 6

I had hoped to spend another day in the forest, but Nita found me after breakfast.

“Come give Frelya a break and take a look at the gardens!” she said. We are all growing more accustomed to reading expressions without being able to see people’s mouths, but there was a genuine sparkle in her eyes.

She led me to the herb-filled huts, which she and a gnome named Gully are the chief tenders of. “You like listening to people talk, right? Well lucky for you, I can talk all day!”

And she was right! She explained how the gardens were constructed differently from the other buildings, lined with stones and spider-silk so the mushrooms couldn’t creep up from underneath. She led me through descriptions of every herb they grew—which would relieve pain, which could be turned into a salve for burns, which ones would stop you from getting sick if you added them to your meals.

“This is the most important,” she said, pointing to a plant with purple-gray, arrow-shaped leaves. “There’s nothing that will save you if you breathe in the spores, but this slows them down. Before we found it, people had days at most. Sometimes just hours. But chewing on these leaves or making them into tea every day, we’ve had people survive for months. It grows wild in the forest and it’s one of the first things to sprout from ground that’s been burned. We call it Sparkweed.”

She made me explain everything I was writing; a few of the elder citizens of the town still know how to write, but most of them never learned.

(Several pages are filled with drawings of plants, along with their uses and notes on how to identify them.)

Lup and Taako volunteered to “help” with cooking tonight. It involved perhaps slightly more striking poses than was strictly necessary, but no one complained. The Starblaster’s larder is well-stocked, and when Davenport asked if they were afraid they’d run out of something important Taako just laughed and transmuted his spoon into a pile of white peppercorns.

It was a much more satisfying meal than the others we’ve had so far, and more importantly the villagers seemed to love it too. The brought out a barrel of beer brewed from mushrooms as a thanks and shared it with us. It was very . . . heady. And dark. Taako took pity on my and transmuted my second cup into wine.

Vetch, still proud of her favor with the “giant,” has taken to climbing into Magnus’s lap or across his shoulders during meals. He encourages it, of course, although sometimes he tickles her in retaliation.

Day 7

The Hunger has found us.

It’s not a surprise by now, but it’s still horrible to behold. For a few minutes the colors seemed to drain from the world and hundreds upon hundreds of eyes opened in the sky and stared down at us. The villagers pointed their flame cannons at the sky. Vetch and the other children ran and clung to Magnus’s legs. The rest of us simply . . . waited. And as it always has done before, the darkness passed.

And now we have a year. A year of waiting for the Hunger to arrive. A year to find the Light and save this world. A year to learn all I can about this reality before we leave it forever.

Mico strode up to us as the eyes winked out.

“What is going on?” they demanded. “What the hell was that thing? You weren’t even surprised!”

“It’s . . . a force,” said Lup at length. “A really fucking nasty one, not gonna lie. It will be here in a year, but if we find the Light that landed here a few days ago we can lead it off and your reality will survive.”

“Our . . . reality?” Mico said. “What about us?”

“Um,” said Lup. “Well. That . . . depends . . .”

We explained, as best we could, what we’re up against. What it does to worlds and why it’s so important that we find the Light. What it can do to worlds even if we do. There’s no good way to spin it.

Dinner was quiet. Some of the villagers stared at us distrustfully. Others looked vacant, their shoulders slumped beneath their heavy coats.

They’d had so little hope anyway, and when we arrived for a moment we’d given them more. Hope that there were other people still out there, other worlds where the inhabitants could breathe free. And then we’d told them that they had another enemy, worse and more inevitable than the mushrooms.

As the sun set and the scorch team began to prepare for their nightly work, we heard a voice cry out.

“Wait! Brothers and sisters, if I may, I’d just like to offer up a little prayer to Pan to bless your work tonight and every night and to give you hope and joy through these dark times!”

It was Merle. He did pray, and the villagers listened in puzzlement. None of them have mentioned any gods. And then, as the scorch team filed out into the forest, Merle began to sing. It was one of those old hymnal tunes with a set of words for almost every god. The rest of us hummed along even though we didn’t know the words about Pan.

When the song ended, Merle looked around nervously. The scorch team had paused at the final ring of bonfires. The other villagers were staring out from the doors of their houses.

“What . . . what was that?” said Mico. He looked flabbergasted.

Merle shrugged.

“Hope,” he said.

#araxie writes #the adventure zone #Magnus rushes in! #i've made a terrible mistake but i'm sticking with it #we'll see how many weeks in the middle are just image descriptions of mushrooms #cycle eight