Cacophonous chirping gave way to the trudging of long worn boots. A slurping and sucking as they rose from knee high mud. Detritus and decay lay heavy beneath a cotton fog, cloying in its heady mixing of moisture and rotting biology. The slapping of feet on solid earth played staccato to the squelching monotony.

‘Do you know the Mushroom man?’

Muffled beneath a mask of rags the voice was barely audible. It continued to the beat of footfalls.

‘The Mushroom man.’

The claustrophobia of the outer forest had long given way to its bog-like heart. Before dawn the forest was a writhing of change. The morning hens nested in the low shrubs and warbled in their hushed daze, while the dark dwelling marsupials wandered in their weariness to hollows in high places.

Experience had told This One that the suns rays were still hours away, though they had likely begun to caress the borderlands. Warming the valley into newness.

The dark was growing elusive in the promise of morning light. A nervous excitement had begun to fill the air and the lone footfalls grew hastier in response. The botanics were thinning now, all that remained were the trunks of dead trees, black and brown in their rotting state. Where, only hours before, there was scarcely room to move between the imposing pines. Now only their husks remained scattered between the milk-pale stalks of the fungal ferns.

Marble and hard on their exterior but sponge like beneath. The fungal ferns, even in their infancy, towered over the lone figure. Absorbing the nutrients of the pine corpses as they vied for positions on the earthy islands amongst the bog. A weary hand is pressed against one of the fungal giants’ bonelike exteriors as This One sighed. When This One withdrew their hand, a faint indent was left on the stalk of the fern. Much like its smaller brethren these fungal ferns were spongy in their newness, but hard and skeletal when mature. This One knew that the growth before them would be close to its tenth year, as it still retained some of it spongy exterior.

Before This One lay island like patches of fertile earth and between the islands were rivers of muddy water. This One knew that as they moved deeper into the fungal forest larger pieces of fertile soil would sprout, but as always, they must first cross through the bog-like ring that sat between pine and fungal forest.

‘The Mushroom man.’

A kindness. This One had thought to themselves. The timing would be perfect if they could keep pace. With continued fortune they would make it to the Sun Glade with time to spare.

A crunch welcomed the next step, and This One flinched as the sound echoed out into the surrounds. A whisp of what could be hair greeted This One’s downward glance and a pang of disgust shot through them. This One was filled with relief when their foot came away to reveal the half-consumed remains of a doll. It would not have been the first time that This One had stumbled across a lost soul here in the forest.

At one point the doll may have had yellow or gold hair, though now it was bleached and matted by time. The doll’s clothing too had faded long ago, covered by grime and silt. The face, arms and torso of the doll were made of the hard posion, plastic as they called it in the older times. Half of the doll’s young and feminine face had been eaten away and replaced by a half mask of fungal growth. This One crouched over the trinket and observed the growth, this was a telltale example of mycelium taking the shape of the plastic as it ate. The fabric parts of the doll were left intact with only the fingerlike hyphae of the fungi probed. Hyphae, small appendages that reached outwards from the fungal body, sensing for more of the hard poison to consume.

This One could feel a breeze on the back of their legs as they stood. The southern winds carried across the seemingly endless islands of land and the tangled rivers of mud before This One. Where the breeze moved a faint shimmer followed, the spores danced on the air between motes of low light. This One knew that the mass of spores could be from a hundred-hundred different species of fungi. All of them in a constant struggle for sustenance and reproduction. Some of the fungi reached taller than the fungal ferns, and other species reached deeper than the foundations of the mountains in the Howling Pass.

Or so This One had been told.

Onward This One continued. Sometimes clambering down the bank of one island to another or jumping between them when they were close enough.

Everywhere This One stepped or looked or breathed the Pale was there. It was named for the way it sapped the colour from everything it touched. Some said the sky had once been blue, not grey or green like it was now. It seemed ridiculous to This One, but then again so did the idea of a place where everything was made of the hard poison. Those Before had called it plastic. They had eaten from it, drunk from it and even made buildings from it.

That had all come crashing down when the people began to get sick. From the unseen poisons that leached from them. First into their food, the water and then into themselves. So pervasive was this hard poison that it even passed from parents to offspring.

‘Do you know the Mushroom man,

Who lives on every lane?’

                A sardonic grin touched This One’s face beneath the layers of cloth. They had called it the ‘Cure’ then, a fungus with the capability of consuming the hard poison no matter how small or large it was.

And, for a time, it had worked.

With their ‘Cure’ came their Mushroom Men. They had been tenders of the fungus and they took it to the corners of the world, and they let it flourish.

It was one fungus with one purpose. It had done as they had foreseen, it ate away at the posion in the water and the land, leaving it fertile again. It had grown and prospered. The ‘Cure’ was even edible.

It was perfect… Until it wasn’t.

‘He came one day with Cure in hand.

To save the poor and clean the lands.’

This One had paused on a particularly large island of land, they let the remnants of their water trickle into their mouth, quick to replace the cloth that covered This One’s face. The animal hide pouch that held the water had cost This One a great sum of funds, but it had been worth it. Gods forbid This One would need to resort to drinking from a poison cup or bagged water.

The Mushroom men had been trained to care for the ‘Cure’, though none of them had prepared, it seems, for the day that it speciated into something else.

They called it ‘Caine’.  Named for a figure from a story that was long ago forgotten.

‘Caine’ grew with only one visible difference to its predecessor. Where the ‘Cure’ had evenly sized white scales that grew on its cap the ‘Caine’ variant’s scales grew in uneven sizes. A small visible difference that had held a world of invisible ones beneath.

‘Caine’ multiplied quickly, it was voracious in its hunger and so it grew and expelled its own poison. It released, along with its spores, a gas which rose into the atmosphere and accumulate in the sky.

Years would pass with Those Before being ignorant to that fact that their ‘Cure’ had changed.

‘Folly’ was a second variant of the ‘Cure’ and it was named for the follies of Man. It was easily distinguished as it grew much taller and larger than its counterparts and it was ‘Folly’ that showed Those Before the hidden horror of their ‘Cure’.

‘Did no one think to check for stains?

Or build a guard against young Caine?’

The rags around This One’s face had grown damp with perspiration, but it remained in place despite the discomfort. They were deep now in the Pale and it wouldn’t take more than a few breaths in the wrong place to be overtaken by the spores.

At best the spores would lull This One into a deep sleep, never to awaken.

At worst they would be overtaken by a wracking cough that, only after months or even years of not being able to catch their breath, would This One finally die.

‘Caine’s fingers grew and touched the sky,

What once was blue began to cry.’

The fog above This One had receded into the hills leaving only the ever-cloudy sky, now tinged with the pink and orange stains of sunrise. The colours barely peaked between the fungal ferns as their number and density increased.

Deeper and deeper This One travelled.

Islands of land were now bridged with each other and the soil beneath This One’s feet was rich and loamy.

A plentiful troop of headboard mushrooms caught This One’s eye. They were named for their fan-like protrusions that grew to ankle height, clustering together in graveyard like colonies. The very thought of the headboards hearty aroma when it was cooked with butter and herbs made This One’s stomach gurgle with longing. A rest was welcome.

This One slashed at the stem of the first headboard so that it bled its orange blood on the soil. Severed from its brethren it looked like a large piece of flat stone. As always any of the edible growths were to be tested, first by sight, blooding, smearing and tasting. Taking the newly cut headboard mushroom in hand, This One dashed the still bleeding fungi across the back of an ungloved hand.

This One waited for a sting or a burn.

When none came This One continued, slashing with practiced precision and depositing the headboard fungi into the gathering satchel. When the bag was almost bursting, This One returned it to a weary shoulder. The blade disappeared back into its sheath at This One’s belt.

‘Then all at once the world was shifted.

Fear of poison, desperate and twisted.’

The Mushroom men had been loved, hated and would one day be loved again. In the time before the moniker had been for tenders of the ‘Cure’.

Then it was a curse, a derision for the people who had poisoned the air and covered the sky in a constant cloud of smog.  

Now, it was title, for the tenders of ‘Folly’ and her descendants. The headboard mushrooms and the fungal ferns being just some of the daughters of ‘Folly’.  

This One had been a Mushroom man since their seventh naming day. Together This One and the rest had taught the ways of gathering and tending to the changed places of the world. What an irony that they had indivertibly been the cause and salvation of the change.

‘I tell you this, so you remember.

The truth of Caine the great misnomer.’

The fungal ferns were older here, and they took on a deep greying at their base, where growth had stopped. The cells had hardened to something more akin to stone than tree bark. The richness of the soil and the canopy of fungal ferns here left an almost eternal dampness in the air, such that lichen and even moss grew.

This One admired the multicolored jewel cankers which peaked between the mossy steppingstones that now littered the floor. Even the scourge pops had a beauty to them, as they hung from the fungal ferns like vines, their bulbous endings stared down like many lidless eyes. Both poisonous to eat and both descendants of ‘Caine’.

Deadly but beautiful.

A curtain of the scourge pops lay ahead and This One ran a gloved hand through them pushing against their heft, stumbling into a bright open space.

‘The answer to the question, we all are asked.

The burden of our people, unduly tasked.’

The Sun Glade sat unchanged as This One passed through the curtains of scourge pop. The world opened to them in an overwhelming pale light. The sun had now come through and its rays bounced between the cloud cover, dispersing a radiant glow through the mossy glade.

                The green carpet of moss was interrupted only by the uneven sprinkle of daisy yellow growths. They were the size of a pinky finger standing straight, pointing towards the sky. A faint iridescence marred their surface and it glittered as This One walked through the glade.

                This One had arrived in time.

                The Sun Glade was a balm for This One’s aches and they waited… One moment and then another.   As if a silent call had rung out, the yellow growths began to twitch.

                One… then two… then twenty and all of them. Small jerking movements that shed the iridescent spores.

                A breeze rose up then it danced through This One like the breath of the very world itself. The spores of the Sun Glade rose higher and higher a shimmering flock of birds.

A breath. A single breath passed. This One’s eyes blinked through unshed tears.

The cloud cover opened.

True unfiltered sunlight fell on This One with a soothing warmth. Somewhere between a campfire and candlelight. This One brought their hand to the face coverings and tugged them away so that their pale face could feel its unfiltered caress.

This One felt the tears fall from their unblinking eyes.

Then, as quickly as it parted, the cloudy shell returned.

‘Do you know the Mushroom man?

The Mushroom man, the Mushroom man?

Do you know the Mushroom man?

Who lives on every lane?

He came one day with Curse in hand.

To set a blight across the land.’

In that moment the rhyme seemed, to This One, unfinished.