“Where am I?”

The frail question from an old man’s mouth slipped through my dry, cracked lips. As it came from my mouth, it sounded alien to my own ears, as if I hadn't heard my own voice in centuries. On hands and knees, I tried to open my eyes and look around, but I could see nothing but black emptiness. My brain felt puffy, as if it had been filled with goose feathers and nothing more. Around me, I could hear the sound of my knees grating against rocks and a slow, thick gloop noise that sounded like something boiling in a large cauldron. I attempted to slap my cheeks to remove my grogginess, but the slap of flesh against metal told me that there was something in the way: a helmet.

I slowly pulled the helmet up and off of my head. The light slowly started to seep into my vision, but it was dim, perhaps dawn or dusk. Even in the low light, it still stung my eyes as I took the helmet off the rest of the way. Long, gray hair tumbled onto my shoulders and wrapped around my neck.

I rubbed my crusted eyes and waited for the blurriness to subside. Finally, I was able to look around. My heart sank from my chest to my boots and began to rhythmically thump in panic.

“No… No!” I screamed from the depths of my raspy lungs. My carnal scream caused blood to trickle from the back of my throat down to the tip of my tongue. 

Gnarled, off-white trees twisted horribly around each other in a strangling embrace. Their roots, some as thin as a finger while others were as thick as my torso, snaked in and out of the ground. Upon these roots clumped hundreds, no - thousands of Uldrid Mushrooms. White with round, translucently orange bubbles on the top of the caps, the toadstools ranged from the size of tea saucers to as big as a wagon’s wheel, and they stood crowded on the pale tree roots. Some even climbed even further up the trees themselves, but gravity made their caps sag from their own weight. 

Distracted by the sheer horror that were the Uldrid Mushrooms themselves, I failed to notice the pool of bright red liquid only inches from my armored knees. A bubble formed from the pool, expanded to almost the size of my fist, and popped with surprising force. One single droplet of the scarlet liquid flung onto my right knee and sizzled slightly before that section of armor suddenly turned black and melted to my skin.

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I yelped and jumped backwards, nearly knocking into one of the larger mushrooms behind me. I felt something wriggle under my left foot, and my eyes slowly shifted down. My clumsy, steel-clad foot had brushed one of the smaller toadstools underneath the large one, and its orange bubble wobbled back and forth violently. I threw my gauntleted hand over my mouth in horror, waiting for the renowned self-defense system of these mushrooms. Fifteen agonizing seconds passed before I let out a slow, shaky breath, relieved to see nothing had happened. 

As if it had listened for my ragged release of air, the Uldrid mushroom squashed down, opened a tiny hole in the center of its cap, and squeezed itself slightly upward. The bubble gave a pop and released a cloud of white dust into the air, directly into my face. The smell of rotting corpses and sulfur entered my nostrils as I inadvertently gasped from the shock.

My vision went bright white to completely black as I felt the dust of the fungus enter my eyes and mouth. My throat burned like a hot fire poker had pierced my neck directly into my trachea. I gurgled and a mixture of bile and blood surfaced from my lips as I violently heaved onto the round rocks underneath me. Through the mixture of bodily fluids, I screamed with every ounce of my body that I could muster until I could exhale no more. Behind that very scream, something solid yet spongy slithered its way up from inside my chest up through my own mouth. I cracked an eye open through the blinding pain for only a sliver of a second to see the ribbed underside of a mushroom cap hovering above my face. Its stalk stood proudly out of my gaping maw.

There was what felt like a bolt of electricity that forced its way from my lower back to the base of my skull, and I fell backwards with clang as my armor slapped the rocks beneath me, no longer able to move any part of my body. The last thing I remember before I passed out from a mixture of pain and lack of air was the sound of the trees waving in the wind. Their creaking sounded like malicious laughter as they watched me writhe in pain, dying horrifically from the Uldrid mushroom.