The Mushroom Wars

Chapter 0

I am dead.

My heart still beats, and my feet still move, but make no mistake about it: I am dead.

I've been dying ever since I woke up in this world, but now I've reached past the edge of the veil. My mind is with my mother and my cousins and my sibs, only waiting for my body to realize that we're wandering somewhere past the end of it all.

My body is dry and withered and starved, just like every other part of the Open Wastes. The longer I wander through the parched desert of this word the more I become a part of it. Crystals of sand dig into my bare feet with every step. Moisture seeps out of me with every breath. My lips and skin crack like dried up mudflats and riverbeds.

The moon above me is a vicious crescent. The same moon that saw my whole family killed, but this night it's white with indifference.

The wind starts to pick up, and bouncing grains sizzle against my calves. Sand is harder than steel, and it cuts through skin like tissue paper, but most of the time it's dormant and merciful. For the weeks that I had been walking aimlessly east, I'd had the wretched fortune to follow some doldrum in the climate.

In a world that seemed desperate to scour humanity from its face it was a ghastly aberration to go so long without a fire tornado or a sandstorm or a cloud of sulfurous rain coming down on me. For someone used to fighting for every day of life, it was torture.

There was nothing left for me here, but to choose on my way out. I was tired, so tired, and starting to get more comfortable with joining the white sculptures of bone that dotted the Open Wastes. Nobody can survive in this world alone, and I was tired of trying. It's only that my body was stubborn.

I crested a dune, never fully realizing that I was climbing one. There I saw salvation in my final choice.

I saw trees - a lush True Forest that emanated danger and bloodlust like a physical miasma. Contrasted with the literal miasma of green, toxic fog that was gathering over the horizon. I felt a knot around my heart come uncoiled as I realized that death was finally close at hand.

Whether I decided to enter the True Forest and die at the hands of the traitorous lackeys of some lesser Daughter, or hack my lungs out in bloody chunks in that ochre fog, I would die in hours. There was relief in that.

In my mind's purgatory I saw myself, small and warm. I smell fried mushrooms and garlic wafting through the air. In the Open Wastes mushrooms were an unreachable luxury, but everyone knew that they grew free in the True Forests.

My withered stomach pulsed - the first sign of life in days - and I walked toward the treeline. A good death called to me like a siren. I had been following that sound my whole life, but something in the beating heart of this forest made it come to life.

A good death was waiting for me there.

I could feel it like I could feel the fingers on my hand or the eyes in my skull, because at that moment I had become a part of the earth, and it was the earth itself that was calling to me.