Chapter 2 Ren
Ren
Look-alike, look-alike,
Do you think you guessed it right?
Sure, that mushroom does look tasty,
Better not to be too hasty!
Is it red-on-white or white-on-red?
Made a mistake, and now oops – you’re dead!
“MUSHROOM MISTAKES”, A GOBLIN NURSERY RHYME
There was a halfling outside the cottage.
And not just any halfling, Ren realized with a cold jolt of nascent dread. But the halfling from the forest, the one who would have baked enough Bloodletter Shrooms into a quiche to fell a full-grown dragon if left to her own devices.
Evidently, she’d taken Ren’s warning to heart, despite her less-than-grateful response at the time.
Given how mule-headed halflings always were, especially about things they knew comparatively little about (because of course that made perfect sense), Ren wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d loaded those mushrooms right back into her basket the moment they’d turned their back on her.
In some ways, that might’ve actually been preferable.
Ren wasn’t particularly enamored with the thought of some halfling tramping around their garden, and quickly discovered they were even less enthusiastic about it in practice.
Leave those alone, they thought, eyes narrowing as they watched the halfling prod at the start of their mushroom farm, a number of narrow logs, all stacked in a grid-like formation.
Judging from the halfling’s expression, she had no idea what she was looking at, rendering her insistence on messing with it all the more infuriating. Exactly. It’s not for you.
But the halfling couldn’t hear Ren – what with several paces’ worth of garden and a window and, you know, Ren’s skull separating them. So, the inevitable happened: the logs fell over.
“Told you so,” they muttered under their breath, sour heat pooling beneath their skin. It had taken hours to put those logs together, and they didn’t relish having to repeat the process once more. At least she hadn’t broken anything that couldn’t be fixed.
Yet.
Abandoning the mess she’d created in typical halfling fashion, without even a shred of shame, the halfling clomped over to the other side of the garden, where she promptly vanished from Ren’s sight.
Smothering a curse between gritted teeth, Ren set down the fruits of today’s foraging on the kitchen counter – an impressive assortment of mushrooms, sweet chestnuts, wild garlic and blackberries – and went to find a new vantage point.
Dinner would have to be a matter for later.
No way were they going to let this halfling roam around unsupervised.
Slinking across the floorboards like a shadow, Ren crept towards the living-room window, a half-moon opening along the cottage’s front, framed in robin’s-egg blue.
They carefully nudged aside the thick veins of ivy their family had grown to serve as curtains; enough that only a single, narrow sunbeam spilled across the sparsely furnished space.
Just because they’d noticed the halfling didn’t mean the halfling needed to notice them.
In fact, Ren would greatly prefer it if she didn’t.
Or, better yet, the halfling could just turn around and leave.
Sadly, things couldn’t be so easy.
The halfling went right up to the front door and, after digging around in a vast array of bags and satchels that couldn’t possibly mean anything good, produced a key.
A key! Not even Ren had a key, and their clan had been taking care of this place for decades!
Too bad, the indignation searing its way up Ren’s throat would have to wait.
The halfling had inserted the key into the lock and, discovering it unnecessary, had settled for simply turning the knob.
A low creak then followed, unmistakable in its origin.
If Ren was going to have any hope of keeping this halfling out of their house, they were going to have to act now.
“Oh, wow,” the halfling said, near-breathless with wonder as she stepped into the entry hall, its exposed beam ceilings, each inlaid with loose swirls of living moss, unfurling overhead in a precise geometric pattern.
“This place has held up really well. I was expecting some holes in the roof. Maybe some missing floorboards. But this—”
With teeth bared and arms raised, Ren leapt from the shadows and roared.
It wasn’t the fiercest of sounds – frankly, Ren had heard wolf cubs produce better – but it nonetheless had the intended effect.
The halfling screamed, scrambling backwards without a second thought.
Unfortunately, instead of racing out of the cottage like Ren had wanted, she slammed into the wall behind her at full-force, hard enough to send the beams overhead rattling and loose the carefully cultivated moss from its inlays.
Years of work, ruined in an instant.
“Stop! You’re destroying it!” Ren shouted, dropping into a far less aggressive posture. It was one thing for the halfling to break the things they’d made. But the work of Ren’s clan – well, that was something else entirely.
The halfling, however, wasn’t listening. “Get out of my house!” she cried, kicking at a nearby cluster of moss. Perhaps she’d meant to launch it at Ren’s face, but she only managed to send it fluttering weakly into the air.
“Your house?” Ren repeated, incredulous, their ears flattening with displeasure. “No. This is my house.”
“Then why do I have a, uh…?” The halfling fumbled for something, temporarily lost in the eye-searingly yellow tangle of her skirts. “A key!” She raised it in a moment of triumph, holding it high for Ren to see.
They snorted, nostrils flaring around the halfling’s heavily spiced scent, tantalizingly sweet even from a distance. “Is that supposed to mean something? Move your foot so I can try and salvage what you just broke.”
The halfling didn’t budge, which was hardly a surprise.
She clearly had no concept of what now lay at her feet, the ruined tatters of moss scattered about her like bits of a desiccated corpse.
Ren knelt down anyway, well aware that doing so pushed them into range of the halfling’s kick.
But getting a boot to the face seemed a small price to pay if it meant scooping each green tuft into the safety of their palm.
Thankfully, the halfling’s curiosity overshadowed her capacity for violence – at least for now. “What are you doing?” she asked, as if Ren hadn’t already answered her question a second ago. Why couldn’t halflings just listen?
They let out a harsh exhale, not even looking up as they continued to retrieve bits of moss.
“All of this? Came from up there. My clan planted the spores years ago in the grooves lining each of the support beams. That’s where they should’ve stayed, by the way; but apparently, destroying my mushroom farm wasn’t enough for you. ”
Confusion streaked across the halfling’s brow; and yet, there was something else, too, a glimmer in her eye that Ren might’ve called interest if they hadn’t known better. Because, surely, no halfling would care one whit about goblin agricultural techniques.
Then again, maybe they would. If there was anything else as constant as the halfling penchant for running roughshod over everything, it was their love of food, made manifest in pantries so well stocked one would’ve thought these halflings were anticipating a several-centuries-long siege.
But those didn’t happen to halflings, “peaceful”, “jovial” people that they were.
Obviously, whoever had popularized that belief hadn’t found themselves on the wrong end of a halfling adventurer’s sword.
But, admittedly, neither had Ren, too young to have even constituted a spark in their mother’s eye the last time a dark lord had plunged the Realm into chaos.
Still, something dark simmered in their belly as they looked upon this particular halfling, her obnoxiously bright clothing as damning as her cluelessness. Ugh. Why couldn’t she just leave?
“I’m talking about those logs you knocked over on your way in,” Ren explained, even though she didn’t deserve it.
“But at least that I can fix. This”– they gestured around themself – “maybe not, and definitely not completely. This probably comes as a surprise to you, but cultivating edible moss isn’t something you can do on a whim, especially like this. ”
The halfling’s cheeks pinked. “Well, you shouldn’t have been doing it here anyway,” she declared with a huff, arms crossing over her chest. “This is my grandmother, Angelica Underburrow’s, house.
A house which she passed down to me, Pansy Underburrow.
So, like I said, this is my house.” She spoke the last two words emphatically, as if that would somehow render them true.
Ridiculous.
“If this is your grandmother’s house, then why hasn’t she lived here in over twenty years?” Ren asked, finally straightening back up.
The halfling – Pansy – scowled as she plucked a bit of moss from the front of her sweater.
She gave it a quick sniff, then flicked it over to Ren.
“Because she was old and needed help. That’s why she moved back to town – to Haverow.
Now, you have your moss; so, you can go back to… wherever it is you came from.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” Ren replied, standing as tall as they could manage.
Thankfully, this put them at least an inch above Pansy.
“Your grandmother left this place to rot. If not for my family, it would be exactly as you said: full of holes and missing pieces. Instead, it’s thriving. Look at how much life there is now!”