Chanterelle Sporewhisper's Arc

Chapter 4 of 7

Aldric rode for Melody Lake with the wolf loping beside him. Chanterelle stayed on the fire pit stone and watched the black stain crawl past her second knuckle. Then she felt it — not on her hand, but under her feet. A cold thread pulled through the soil. Something wrong was moving in the mycelium below the glade, and it was moving toward her roots. She knelt and pressed her palm flat to the dirt. Her spores read the ground like a map. A blight, gray and slow, was creeping along the fungal web that fed every root in the clearing. If it reached her stem, the prophetic spores in her cap would rot before they opened. No more visions. No more answers for anyone. She needed a cut. A firebreak in the soil, a strip of ground severed from the sick threads. She could not dig fast enough alone. She needed shears sharper than roots, and hands that knew how to separate one strand from another without tearing. She followed the lake road to the seamstress who had once untangled her visions with painted lines. Vivienne Tailweaver stood in the doorway of her patchwork hall with a sheep tucked under one arm and three more butting at her ankles. Pins bristled from her cuff. Her pink wig sat slightly crooked. "You look poisoned," Vivienne said. "Under the glade. A rot in the roots. I need to cut a line around my grove before it reaches me." Vivienne set the sheep down. "Cut a line. Like a hem." "Like a hem." Vivienne fetched her long shears and a spool of waxed thread. She whistled and the flock followed her out the door in a bumping cloud of wool. "They'll trample what we cut," she said. "Keeps it from stitching back." They worked at the edge of Chanterelle's grove until the moon rose. Vivienne knelt in the dirt and did not complain about her skirt. She slit the topsoil in a clean ring while Chanterelle lifted each pale thread and snipped it at the root. The sheep stamped the loose earth flat behind them. Chanterelle's blackened hand shook, but her good hand held steady. At the last cut, the cold thread under the soil went still. The blight pressed against the ring and stopped. Chanterelle sagged forward and touched her cap. The spores inside felt dry, ready, alive. Vivienne wiped her shears on her apron. "Circle holds. For now." "For now," Chanterelle said. The ring had saved her spores, but it had also cut her off from the wider web. She could feel the forest beyond the line as a dim hum, muffled, far away. Her visions would come only from what grew inside the circle. To become the Mother-Mushroom whose spores bloomed across the whole forest, she would have to reach past this ring again. And whatever was rotting out there was still rotting.