32. Intro to Mycology #2
I bit my tongue before I could say anything stupid.
This conversation was ridiculous. It wasn’t a problem we had to worry about until much later.
And yet—
What was I saving the worlds for if it meant resigning myself to a life I didn’t want?
I bent over my knees, and Ciarán put an arm around my shoulders.
I wasn’t saving the worlds for me, I reminded myself. I was saving the worlds to save the worlds and to rescue Gams.
“What if my mom seals the Rift instead of me? And then jumps back into the dating pool. She’s only forty. That’s not too old.”
But that wasn’t fair either. None of this was.
“I’ll stay if you want me too,” Ciarán assured me. He leaned his temple against mine, and our proximity made our tether buzz. “Wren, I would do anything you asked of me.”
I nodded, but I knew it was out of the question.
As for Ciarán, I would not let us both be miserable. I would not let him suffer because of the role I was required to play.
Una was ready to travel again late in the afternoon.
I’d managed to sleep for a few broken hours.
Hopefully I didn’t look as exhausted as Ciarán.
He was impassive behind his dark cowl, and while he communicated mostly in tight bows and ‘yes, my Lady’s, I knew it wasn’t because he was trying to get under my skin, but rather because he was still trying to sort out his own feelings.
As Una ran through meadow and forest, Ciarán kept his arm around my waist to keep us balanced on her back.
Whatever future we were riding towards, and as uncomfortable as riding an onchú across a magical landscape was, there was something gentle about this moment, and I tried to sit in it as comfortably as I could.
Fog rose on the horizon to occlude the darkening sky. As the sun continued to fall, a faint glow emanated from the low cloud.
“Skal?” I asked Ciarán through our mental bond.
He replied with a nervous hum.
We met the cloud at its edge, right where the terrain dropped off into a steep valley full of behemoth trees.
Thick trunks ridged in frills and strange steppe-like growths made it difficult to see far into the forest despite the ambient glow of the fog that shifted between the foliage.
While most trees I was familiar with had wide bases and pointed tops, these ones seemed inverted.
A familiar earthy smell wafted on the wind, and I wrinkled my nose, trying to place it.
Una came to a stop at the valley’s lip, and Ciarán slid off her back to walk ahead.
Rays of dying sun caught the bits of hair that had come loose from his knot as he rifled through his pack.
He pulled out a map and spread it out in the dirt while I tried to make sense of the forest in the valley below.
“That’s not good,” Ciarán said as I came up behind him to look at the map. The rough shape of Skalterra’s continent took up the page, and while I recognized the squiggle of mountains near the top, I had no idea what I was looking at.
“What’s not good?” I asked.
Ciarán sighed at the trees. “Mycastrath. Skalterra’s most deadly forest.”
“I can handle trees if I have to,” I promised, though apprehension was already turning my palms slick with sweat. I reached for the back of my head to pick at the hair fuzz at the nape of my neck. “Promise. If I keep my eyes on Una—”
“It’s not a forest of trees,” Ciarán said. “It’s fungi.”
I inspected the forest below with fresh eyes, and the lopsided, gilled silhouettes suddenly made more sense.
“Fungi,” I repeated. “And are mushroom forests common in Skalterra?”
“Thankfully, no.” Ciarán continued to inspect the map. “We can go northwest and cross into Riverstead, but there’s a marsh there, and we’ll need to find someone to ferry us through. Or we can go southeast into the Barony Deadlands.”
“‘Deadlands’ doesn’t exactly inspire confidence. What’s there?”
“Rotsbane, mostly. Some desert. You traveled through it earlier this summer, but I think you were on the Baron’s boat.” Ciarán pulled his hair down from his knot to scratch at his scalp as he thought.
We had traveled on the Baron’s boat, but I’d been posted up outside Fana’s cabin door for most of the journey on Galahad’s orders. The few moments I’d been allowed on the deck, rotsbane had paced along the river cliffs.
“Probably best to avoid rotsbane,” I suggested.
“True, but there’s the issue of getting a boat in Riverstead.
” He looked up at the stars as they winked to life in the darkening sky.
Their constellations were foreign to me, but Ciarán traced a finger through the air.
“And I think we might be significantly closer to the Deadlands. It’s going to add a few days to the journey regardless but—”
“A few days?” I blanched. “We don’t have a few days! We might not even have this day! Our friends might already be sailing to their death!”
“And passing through the strath would be our death.” Ciarán pushed his map back into his pack. “So marsh or Deadlands? You’re in charge, my Lady. It’s your call.”
I looked back over the forest. The smell clicked into place. It reminded me of the mushrooms back home. These ones were definitely a bit bigger. But big mushrooms were just big mushrooms. As long as we didn’t try to eat them, we’d probably be fine.
“What’s wrong with Mycastrath?” I asked.
“Marsh or Deadlands. North or South.” Ciarán stepped in front of me to block my view of the valley. “There is no forward.”
“Is the fungus poisonous?” I asked.
A muscle in Ciarán’s jaw twitched. “No. Maybe. No one who has entered the strath has ever come out. I thought we were aimed more south and would miss it entirely. Passing through isn’t an option. It’s death. We have a better chance against the rotsbane.”
“We have a better chance, but Orla and the others don’t,” I asserted. “We’re short on time as is. If we go north and take the safe route through Riverstead, we’re almost certain to take too long, right?”
Ciarán nodded. “That is correct.”
“And if we go south, we might shave a couple days off that time, but we’ll be dodging rotsbane, and it still might not be enough?”
“That is also correct, but Wren—”
“No one has ever come out of the strath, but how many have gone in?”
“I’m not sure.”
“And is there anyone on the other side checking to see if people come back out? Or is this all hearsay?”
“Four hundred years worth of hearsay is still—”
“And didn’t you just say this morning that most Magicians aren’t capable of more than cheap magick tricks?”
“Yes.”
I straightened up and brushed onchú hair off the leather armor strapped over my hoodie.
“We are stronger than most Magicians, I thought. We don’t have time to go around, and we can’t afford to fail.”
Ciarán nodded and turned to look back at the valley. “You are in charge—”
“No. I’m not making you go into the strath if you don’t want to,” I said. “But you have to see that it’s the only way.”
“I do, my Lady.” He took my hand in his. “I wish it wasn’t, though.”
“I wish most of this wasn’t the only way.” I laughed as we took on the decline together with Una padding after us.
“Most of this?” He smirked at me.
“Don’t flatter yourself.”
Glowing spores rose to meet us, and I curled my fingers to catch one in my palm, already doubting our path forward. “Does it have Skal in it?”
“It must.” Ciarán frowned at the spore constellations gathering around us. Una leapt and tried to catch a glowing bit in her mouth, but it drifted out of reach of her teeth.
“What if it is poisonous?” I asked.
Ciarán shook his head and pointed towards the colossal fungal stalks where an owl perched on a ridge, hooting at the oncoming night. “If it were, there wouldn’t be wild animals. And Una doesn’t seem to mind it.”
Una jumped again, pawing at the spores with her talons.
We descended into the ambient glow of the cloud, and while the spores lit the strath in hues of blue, it was hard to see far through the muggy haze.
Condensation and sweat stuck to my forehead, but I didn’t dare take off my armor and hoodie, no matter how humid it became.
The slope leveled out, and we stared at the bright shadows sifting between the fungal stalks.
The silence was as stifling as the air was thick. The soft dirt, the heavy air, and the massive bodies of dark fungus absorbed all the sounds of a usual forest. I scratched at the short hairs on the back of my head just to check that I could still hear at all.
“Back onto Una,” Ciarán suggested. “I don’t want to spend longer inside than we have to.”
“Right.” I let Ciarán help me onto Una, and then offered my hand to help him up after me. “First Magicians to make it through Mycastrath?”
He wrapped an arm around my waist. “You do love making history.”
Una lurched forward, sprinting into the fungal forest. Spores stirred in our wake, and an owl glided overhead.
Something in this forest killed Magicians. If it wasn’t the spores, maybe it was some beast hiding in their haze. I scanned ruffled trunks, some of them large enough to fit Gams’s marina shop within their diameter.
Thin strands of mycelium hung from ridges and criss-crossed between stacks of fungi, creating a web of fungal roots that caught the glow of the spores. They looked like amorphous ghosts, hauntingly beautiful in the humid mist, but not frightening enough to worry about.
I craned my head back to search the gills that fanned out on the underside of the upper mushroom canopy. There were no monsters lurking there, either, and the farther we ran into the strath, the more at ease I felt.
Whatever rumors surrounded Mycastrath had to be just that—rumors.
Every running step of Una’s brought us closer to saving our friends, and every running step proved that there was nothing dangerous about this forest.
“That’s weird.” Ciarán chuckled behind me after a while. He pointed at a fungus stalk as we passed. “Did you see that?”
“See what?” I twisted around, but Una was moving too quickly.
“It was a starfish! Look, there’s another! Up ahead!”
I squinted through the haze.