Chanterelle Sporewhisper's Arc

Chapter 7 of 7

Chanterelle knelt at the birch stand with foreign spores drifting into her cap. The web was here, thick and healthy under the roots, but it did not answer her. She pressed her good hand flat and pushed a request into the soil: let me in. The threads pulsed once and went quiet. She tried again. The pulse came back wrong-shaped, like a door with no handle on her side. Melodius lowered his flute. "It's humming clean," he said. "But it's not talking to you." "It's old," Chanterelle said. "Older than my spores know. I'm asking in the wrong tongue." Her cap tightened. Without the web's answer, she could not join it. Without joining, she could not grow. She needed someone who spoke every dialect a mushroom had ever used. She knew one. Aldric had told her about the tavern with the cloud-shaped roof, and the prince he had hired from the kiln to steer the flying carpet. A prince from the lion's mane clan. A prince who spoke every language he had ever met. She sent Melodius home by the safe path and walked to the tavern before her nerve failed. Inside, lanterns swung over a table carved like a tree, its runes lit faint gold. Prince Mycel Sporehart sat with his boots on a chair and a dragonfly on his knuckle. He looked up as she came in. The dragonfly bit him. He winced. "Zyl says I owe you before you ask," he said. "So. Ask." "You speak old spore-tongue." "I speak the one the elders used. Yes." "The healthy web won't hear me. I need you to translate my request to join it." Mycel set the dragonfly down. "Once," he said. "I give it to you once. Then it's yours to hold." He walked her back to the birches without another word. She knelt. He knelt beside her and laid his palm flat on the soil next to hers. He spoke a low string of clicks and hums she could not follow. He paused. He spoke again, slower, shaping each sound like he was setting a stone. The web answered. Not a pulse this time — a long, warm draw, like a mouth taking a first breath. Threads reached up through the soil and knit against her stem. Her cap flushed. New spores poured into her from four directions at once. She felt the forest widen inside her chest, larger than her grove had ever been. Mycel took his hand back. "They said yes," he said. "They also said you're young. They'll watch you." "Watch me how?" "Closely." He stood and brushed his knee. "You're in the web now. Everything you dream, they'll taste." Chanterelle rose. The web hummed under her feet, wide and awake and listening. She had what she came for. She had also just handed every vision she carried to a network she did not yet know.