The spiral sun had entered its waning phase, lending the morning a chill that froze dew on the vine and made the ground hard as ice. Mycal could feel the mycelium around the edges of his footpads burning from the cold, but the clusters under his feet were fine, insulated as they were by his body’s own heat.

It took him some time to get moving. While carefully retracting his roots he watched what must be the Twiglings that Aggie had mentioned. The little stick creatures obviously had a well-established routine of garden care. They started with a thorough weeding of unwanted sprouts, some of which were separated and set aside to dry while the rest were dumped in a feeding trough at the edge of the garden. Mycal had no idea who or what the trough was for, having not seen a single horse or sheepig.

With the weeding done the Twiglings next task was pest control. They formed an orderly line and proceeded to march from the far end of the herb garden, tiny twig-spears levelled and ready to skewer any unwanted bugs they encountered. He saw one of them corner a giant earwig, clacking its arms together to signal for backup. Three more rushed to its side and together they flipped the bug onto its back and stabbed at its underside in a frenzy.

Remembering Aggie’s warning, Mycal hastened his extraction, not wanting to have to fight the little gardeners if they determined him to be an undesirable intruder. He pulled his footpads free and shook off a few clumps of dirt, heading toward the cottage and leaving the stickmen to the grisly task of dismembering their kill and sowing the remains into the soil.

A mist was rising as the sun touched the frozen grass, wreathing the cottage and prompting an unexpected twang of homesickness in Mycal, the twisting fog reminding him of the steaming nursery caverns back home. Aggie was already up, sitting on the porch and combing her long feather tresses, removing loose quills and occasionally teasing a fresh barb to release the new feather within.

“How did you sleep? Do you sleep? I probably don’t know as much about Shroomans as I should. Your people are very secretive.”

He stopped near the gate. Leaning on the fence, he did his best to appear nonchalant while constantly looking around in a way that was sure to show off the new crop of mushrooms on his back. It was difficult, because he couldn’t stop looking back at her. The delicious combination of the crisp morning, the wan light and her shimmering hair tickled something deep inside him. “Yes, we sleep. But I don’t think it’s quite the same, not like the animals I’ve seen in the forest. We’re still conscious, but slower to respond…I think you’d call it a…trance? There’s no day or night back home like there is up here, so it's more like resting during times of low activity.”

“But you can grow mushrooms overnight?”

“Not exactly. They grow in the dark. The time of day doesn’t really matter.”

“Hmmm, interesting.” She set down her comb and stood up. “Well, seeing as you’re here I might as well show you around.”

Aggie led him around the cottage, pointing out various exotic plants and explaining some of their uses in her potions. She led him to the riverbank to show off a giant umbrellarose whose petals filtered the dawn light into a soft pink hue. They sat beneath it while she told him about the river. She called it the Weeping Wallow, and claimed it was all that remained of the giant Ymir, whose tears flowed eternally from the snow-capped twin-peaked mountain that had once been his eyes. Mycal asked why the giant wept, but Aggie just shrugged her shoulders.

They returned to the cottage and she opened the gate for him, leading him up to the front porch and pointing out the various charms and fetishes she’d hung about the place. “That one helps to keep away the racoonomes,” she said, waving a claw towards a shrivelled head wearing a tiny crown of knucklebones. A pair of puffy brown-and-white striped tails hung to either side.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“That must be very powerful magic!”

“Ahh…no…no magic in that one. I just cut off their fingers if they get near the clothesline. Thieving little perverts.”

“That makes sense. What about those?” Mycal pointed at a row of glass jars on a table, each filled with floating green orbs that seemed to be staring ominously at him. “I bet they’re the eyes of some horrible, magical beast that you captured to use for your potions!”

“Olives.”

“Oh. Magic olives?”

“No, just olives. And you’ve already met Monkey over there. There’s Goblin up on the roof.”

“Umm…”

She rolled her eyes. “Yeh, I know, weird names. Whatever. I think it suits them.”

“That’s not what I…umm…” He watched the hairy little creature with open fascination. “I thought monkeys were just a fairy tale?”

“That’s an unfair stereotype. Fairies tell the truth more often than not. You know what though? I’ve heard if you can breed monkeys together enough times you eventually get a human! Crazy huh? Unfortunately I only have Goblin, and they’re not native to the area, so that experiment is on hold.”

He repeated the strange word. “Ex-pe-ri-men-t…experi-ment…experiment?”

“Yeh, that’s it. An experiment. It’s kind of like, you try something to see what happens. Kind of like you leaving your colony. You’re an experiment.”

“I’m not sure I understand.”

“No, you don’t. That’s why you do the experiment.”

Mycal scratched his headcap. He was having trouble keeping up with Aggie’s pace of thought. “You’re very smart, miss. Do you know everything?”

She laughed. “No one knows everything. But my coven has a pretty good induction process, lots of reading and learning before you earn your pointy hat. I think we’ve got some of the oldest history records left, maybe older than anything the humans have.”

“Older than humans!” Mycal scoffed. “If that was true you’d know what happened to the old world!”

Aggie said nothing.

“Nooo…no way! You know what happened to the old world?”

“That’s a pretty big question, Mycal. What do your people say about the past?”

“We have some stories about the creation of the universe, like everyone does. There’s the First Shroom and the Great Sporing, but I think they’re just myths that someone made up because they didn’t know any better. Some of the Morelists have a theory they call Pansporea, that all mushroom life came here from another world, but I don’t really buy that either. And none of the myths really explain the Buried Worlds, or go back as far as the times you talk about, like the giant Ymir…you said the giant weeps for the world he destroyed, but what world was that?”

Mycal was suddenly very conscious that she was scrutinising him, judging him. “What? Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Honestly, I just don’t know how much I should tell you. Sometimes it’s just easier not knowing things. And you can’t unlearn stuff like this.”

“I want to know! Come on…if I wanted to stay stupid I’d have stayed at home! I’m out here because I want to know more. Please, Aggie, please tell me what you know?”

“Okay, but it’s only the truth so far as I know it. I could be wrong about some of it. Keep that in mind, alright?”

“I promise.”

“Good. So…grain of salt…the world that we live in is just the most recent in a long , looong cycle. Death and rebirth, you know? It’s older than we can comfortably comprehend. Try to imagine a thousand cycles of a thousand days, then imagine a thousand of those. And a thousand of those. And a thousand of those. And a…”

“Is this going to go on for a while?”

“No, that was the last one, but it’s still an awful lot if you try to fit it all in your head. I don’t know exactly how many times the world has died during that time, but our best evidence points to at least six.”

“So when you talk about giants and Ymir and all that, you’re talking about the…” He did some quick counting on his fingers. “That was the sixth world? And we’re the seventh?”

“Yeh. And the people who existed in that sixth world were not so different to us. They learned things, they experimented, they built and destroyed and built again. But here’s the really freaky bit…they were all human! Yeh, hard to believe I know. And they had no magic, at least not until their final days.”

“They discovered magic?”

“Not discovered. They created magic. And they created the giants. They created Ymir. And in doing all of that, they probably destroyed themselves.”

“Deer Lord!”

“They probably didn’t even have a Deer Lord back then. No real gods at all, just a load of monkey tales. I mean…they did have gods, but they didn’t answer prayers or anything practical like that.”

“Then what was the point?”

“Now that,” she said, opening the front door and gesturing for him to go inside, “is something I cannot answer. Care for some tea?”