MYCELIUS SPOREBORN's Arc

Chapter 7 of 7

The starving trees kept Mycelius awake. He walked the roots at dawn, feeling for strength through his feet, and found only cold thread. Then he smelled it. Rot on the wind, coming from the ridge. He climbed the rise and looked down at the great tree beyond the dead land, the one he had robbed. Someone stood among its roots. A tall figure moved slow through the trunks, touching each pod, counting. The owner was checking the harvest. Mycelius froze. If that figure followed the trail of stripped pods, it led here, to twelve colonists grown from stolen spores. He would lose all of them. He hurried back. Fenn met him at the shell-home, the young shepherd who spoke to animals like neighbors. Fenn wrestled with a huge creature, arms locked around its neck. It was a squirrel the size of a hound, its bushy tail crowded with small mushrooms of red and blue. "Meet Nutcap!" Fenn said, grinning as the beast dragged him a step. "Found her sniffing our saplings. She smells fungus trees from a mile off. Isn't she wonderful?" Mycelius stared at the squirrel, then at the ridge. An idea took shape. "She smells trees," he said. "Can she carry weight? Climb fast?" "Fast as falling," Fenn said. "She ran me up a trunk before I could blink." Mycelius pressed his palm to the squirrel's flank and felt her heat, her strength. The owner would trace the stolen pods. He could not hide the theft. But he could bury it. "We plant every spore we have left tonight," he said. "And we spread the empty pods far. If the trail scatters, it points nowhere." They worked through the dark. Fenn rode the squirrel with a sack of hollow pods, and she leapt the dead land in long bounds. She dropped pods in gullies, on far slopes, wherever her nose found old fungus scent. The trail that once ran straight to the colony now split into a dozen dead ends. Mycelius knelt at the saplings and pushed the last gathered spores into the warm soil, hiding the evidence in new roots. At first light the figure came over the ridge. Mycelius met it in the open, spores drifting from his cap. The owner walked the dead land, nose lifted, and stopped where a false trail scattered into nothing. It circled. It found another. The scent led everywhere and home to no one. The tall figure studied Mycelius a long moment, then turned back toward its own tree, unsure, empty-handed. Mycelius let out a breath. The owner was gone, and the twelve were safe. But the squirrel had proven something worse and better at once. She had smelled a dozen buried fungus scents across the dead land in a single night. His trees were dying. Yet out there, more trees waited, and now he had a mount that could find them and carry their spores home before anyone else claimed them.