The Mushroom Wars

Chapter 1

TRIGGER WARNING: Suicidal Ideation

Foraging for mushrooms is tricky business.

It takes sharp eyes. You need to uncover tasty boletes masquerading as wet leaves, spot impish chanterelles hiding under shady ferns, and recognize the telltale glint of a landmine ready to blow you to bits.

It takes encyclopedic knowledge. Which mushrooms are going to love the darkness under a big beech tree, and which ones thrive in the salty marshes of the southeast. You need to know which mushrooms are going to take care of your micros for a month, and which ones will kill you or warp your mind. Of course since the Daughters of Gaia control nearly all of the True Forests, you also need to know the patrol routes of the resident traitors.

Above all you need precision. Are those gills decurrent or subdecurrent? Are those spores white or white-ish? Is that a fairy ring or a punji pit? When any mistake can mean your death, nothing can be left to chance.

Of course I had none of these skills. What I did have was sheer, unadulterated desperation. My stomach was blistering with emptiness and anger. I'd been traveling for nearly a month without food or company, and when I saw green clouds gathering on the horizon I ran for the nearest treeline.

Not exactly my brightest move, but I wasn't at my best.

There was a kind of pleasant confidence that came with thinking that this was likely to be my last desperate scramble for food. I heard that some mushrooms, some of the deadly ones that is, they taste delicious.

Not a painful death either, in the grand scheme of things. Few days of shitting myself dry if I'm unlucky, then organ failure. Better than whatever the traitors would do to me at least. Better than running out of micros. Way better than coughing my lungs out piece by piece in the fog.

In every picture I'd ever seen of True Forests, I never imagined that they would be so sharp. Cord-like vines with finger-sized thorns stretched over a curtain of pine needles. Every step I took was loud. The brush was so thick that there was no way around it.

The forest held me, and stabbed me with every step. It tore into my woven clothes and my skin. Thorns sliced long angry gashes into the tops of my feet and stuck just deep enough into my calluses to stick me every time my foot came down.

'You do not belong here' crunched under my feet with every bent vine and snapped twig. I was a brutal, destructive beast. Ugly just like the rest of us.

It wasn't strange for me though, to be in a place where I didn't belong.

So I kept walking.

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By the time the sun was overhead I had just managed to make it out of the denser areas of the forest into a space where the trees were... trunkier. I could see a hundred feet in each direction and I saw a ring of fat red mushrooms growing between two large pine trees.

I smashed my scrawny body through screens of pine needles. I tore the sleeves off my shirt and knelt in front of the beautiful mushrooms. Their caps were bright red like strawberries, dotted with scabby chunks of white. The stem was thick and stiff like a stalk of celery, with a small floppy ring.

I grabbed the biggest mushroom I could see. Half a foot tall and a cap that was just as wide. My stomach churned and growled at the weight of it. I snapped it out of the ground, my heart panging as I realized I left half the meaty stalk in the ground.

Never eat strange mushrooms.

The earthy smell made me salivate.

This is a bad idea.