Tinkleaf Gearsprout's Arc

Chapter 2 of 4

The teeth came at Tinkleaf's sprout. He swung his sword and cut a red tendril in two. The fungal monster hissed and pulled back into the dark. Its cap split open, dripping. The little mushroom creature shivered behind his boot. Tinkleaf did not chase. He stood over his green sprout and thought. Killing the beast was not his goal. Waking his grove was. And he was stuck. "I can grow plants now," he said. "But that's all they do. Grow. I need them to think. I need to graft my gears into living roots. And every time I try, the metal cuts the root and it dies." "So don't cut," the sword said from his belt. Its silver face grinned up at him. "You keep pushing metal into wood. Wood hates that. Ask the wood what it wants." Tinkleaf frowned. He knelt by his sprout. He set one copper finger against its stem, gently, and waited. The little mushroom creature crept out and copied him. It pressed both small hands to the soil. Something moved under the loam. Pale threads of fungus rose. They wound around Tinkleaf's copper wire on their own. They did not shy away. They drank the metal in like water. The sprite squeaked and clapped. "The fungus," Tinkleaf breathed. "It grows on anything. Even me." He pulled a thin gear from his pouch. He laid it flat in the black earth and waited. Threads climbed over the teeth of the gear and held it. When the sprout's root reached the gear, the fungus passed it through, thread to metal to root. No cut. No wound. A living bridge. Tinkleaf's heart ticked hard. He worked fast now. He seated three more gears in the loam and let the threads take them. He fed one copper wire into the sprout's base. The fungus sealed it. The sprout drank, and a gear turned, slow, driven by the plant itself. Then the sprout did something new. A leaf tilted toward Tinkleaf's face and followed him when he moved. It watched him. "Hello," he whispered, the same word he'd given the little mushroom creature in the dark. The leaf shivered. A soft glow ran down the wire into the soil, then back up, like a thought passing. The sprite hugged Tinkleaf's leg. He laughed and set a hand on its round cap. Deep in the tunnel, the toothed monster dragged itself closer again. Its cap dripped. But Tinkleaf barely turned. He had his bridge now. The fungus that fed the beast was the same fungus that would wake his grove. The threads ran everywhere down here, through all the dark loam, root to root. Which meant the monster was wired into his grove too. Every gear he seated, every root he woke, ran through the same living web that thing crawled inside. He had found his path at last. And he had just built a road straight to the teeth.