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There was a mushroom. One mushroom, a minuscule inconsequential thing, forgettable. One mushroom, under the root of that tree: it spoke. One mushroom, recycling the moulted skin of a reborn serpent: it spoke. One mushroom, illuminating the quiet of an empty cave: it spoke. One mushroom, a booming yield to a thriving ant colony: it spoke.
There was a mushroom. One mushroom, woven together, mycelium hand in mycelium hand. An interconnected blanket networking through the underground framework of the entire Cruor Swamps. Two hundred Kilometres wide, six hundred kilometres long, a total elevation of eight thousand ninety meters, one mushroom. Unnoticed and untended, millions of fruiting bodies all across the region ate, grew, spread, formed symbioses, overtook and betrayed, aided, cursed, watched on, intervened, died, birthed, and most of all: spoke.
In a single moment of time, one snapshot of history, instantaneous to most mortal beings, the mushroom spoke: this is its story.
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Border of Aegis
Latitude 10.47023 Longitude 76.953414 Elevation 811m
Geography: The divide between Aegis and the swamps is harsh. It's like an oceanic maw splitting from the ground and consuming the southern border. An otherwise vibrant field of fertile farmland suddenly dips down, and the soil so suffused in water becomes unmanageable for crops. The stagnant waters turn to a canvas of lichen and reeds, and a stench of rotten eggs fills the air.
Humans, never the kind to be dissuaded, have sporadically constructed peers along the border of civility and wilderness. A series of short, rickety wooden roads testing the early depths of the hazardous wetlands. The few platforms still tended by stubborn veterans are home to lit torches near the bottom of their support beams to burn any building methane.
Climate: Cloudy, predominantly nimbostratus, bulbous and dark. Light rain of approximately 0.4mm per hour, pH of 5.
Sociocultural Dynamics: A white lily blooms in a shallow pool, the first of the year and a beacon of approaching summer. Its metamorphosis into an adult is the declaration of death for a gold-touched fish now trapped in a shrinking pool.
The day star evaporates at the fish's territory every day. It had missed the final flood of spring, which would have bridged the pool with the deeper swamps where the rest of its kind would spend the shallow months. The gold-touched fish had not partaken in the final crossing with its brethren as it had been distracted at the time.
In this isolated pool, dominated by the comparatively leviathan gold-touched fish, there is a delicate truce among its inhabitants. There is a corpse, its body preserved by the toxic concoction of the waters but not by its occupants. Little flesh remains, and the gold-touched fish may turn its invasive hunger into the typical population of the tidepool once the corpse is cleaned.
This is an unlikely result. A woman, Nice, with a peculiar limp and rough demeanour, will probably come to investigate. When she finds her friend ravaged and destroyed, his bloated face painfully preserved in pickled agony, she will likely hunt the only beast large enough to be the culprit.
The act will return the ecosystem to managable stability even if her ire would be misplaced. She knew not that her small-town compatriot was a veteran. She knew not that winter seasons would bring with them images so perfectly burned into memory that his sickened bile frequently joined the shallow tides.
He remembered a fellow comrade in his ranks. It was a young child who had lied about their age to enlist and get vengeance against the mokoi that killed their mother. The child died simply and commonly.
The veteran remembered more; the veteran remembered things so dark, fears so complete that only chemical abuse carried him through battle after battle, and then the troubles twisted. Anxiety turned to power and fear to bloodlust, and an addled mind brought misguided courage. A man was sickly transformed into machine of violence too tortured and tired without recompense. A machine then thought that perhaps a sword and a will sneaking out of camp to the local farms in the dark of night could be reward enough to ease its torment.
And maybe a child enlisting in a war shouldn't have been seeking a mokoi.
A mother slain, a child lost, a monster finding humanity too late, a fish hunted unfairly, a white lily blooms. The cycle continues.
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The foot of the Serpentine Mountains
Latitude 10.194622 Longitude 76.821578 Elevation 1077m
Geography: Though the swamps continue to sink ever deeper like a rot eroding the very land feasting its way down to the planets core, the Serpentine Mountains rise from the vile and muck. Monstrous teeth of stone bursting from the fetid marshes and reaching for the skies. The top of the continent living right next to the bottom of the continent.
An alcove exists. It is partly up the mountain above the shrines of the Tarragon monks but still low enough to be in the territory of the Cruor Swamps. Not quite a cave, it drills into the side of the mountain, floor and walls formed in oversized fungi. They are spongey walls pulsing with a life of their own, and their breath chokes the air with plumes of sticky spores. Nothing lives here save for the monstrous decomposers that feed off the rock and iron of the mountain itself. In the middle of the alcove, a pool of blood stands unperturbed.
Though unperturbed, the pool moves. Of only its own influence, the pool bubbles and dances. Flowers bloom and grow from the sanguine liquid, crimson orchids forming atop the surface for but a brief instant, and then collapse back to liquid. Blood is blood, and without a body, it should not live anymore: though it really really wants to.
Climate: High in the mountains, it is thin with oxygen yet thick with clouds of spores. It is a dangerous area and avoided by all but one mushroom. The skies are dense with draconic activity but their movement continues to appear unrelated to the swamps.
Sociocultural Dynamics: Currently, the pool is full of blood. The blood is only strong enough to attempt floral transformations, and it cannot maintain these shapes. It is weak blood harvested from a weak dragon.
Dragon's blood is still dragon's blood and continues to be tempting to steal. As always, this temptation will not be satisfied. Ménage the Blood Dragon will tolerate defending the Cruor Swamps from reckless dragons but is highly protective of her family's blood. On her last visit, she warned that she would unleash the wrath of Rancor the Power Dragon if it was discovered that blood had been hoarded for the swamps.
To preserve the delicate balance of peace between the swamps and mountains, the dragon's blood will remain untouched and guarded here for Ménage to retrieve.
The time of retrieval is uncertain as the dragons are in a state of excitation and Ménage occupied.
While the dragons mind themselves above, the Tarragon Monks, in their effervescent pursuit to reach the dragons, have discovered the alcove. They dare not approach; they see the alcove as a temple to their dragon gods.
Although having humans be aware of a semi-replenishing source of dragon's blood is concerning, the Tarragon Monks have proven themselves friendly folk. The swamp's involvement in sustaining the alcove has helped ease tensions between the monks and the swamp's ambassador. This has been particularly beneficial as the ambassador has been in negotiations with the monks regarding passage through the swamps so that some may view the upcoming Tournament.
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The Depths
Latitude 9.507281 Longitude 77.17314 Elevation -1532m
Geography: The swamps exist in layers. There are a few gargantuan trees that breach the surface of the swamp, their branches spidering out in every direction to create a blanket of solid ground for land dwellers.
Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.
Below, there is a separate marsh; waters dense with salt and sulphur form rivers kilometres below the surface of the river, rivers in rivers. Toxic vegetation thrives off the poisonous underwater flows, and an alien forest flourishes. Trees with leaves of corral, fishes that nest in trees, goliath monstrosities circle the skies, claws reach out of sulphur depths.
Every light, food or hunter, night always reigns; it is an abyssal place.
Climate: Underwater currents carry the volcanic spew of the western fissures into the forest. The currents collide with the freezing cold of a depth untouched by the day star and create violent columns of rushing water, hot jets flying upwards and chilling funnels plummeting down.
A cloud of warped plankton is swimming with the fissures, their digestive system illuminating the depths in a deep green. There is a forecast of heavy rains, perhaps 5mm per hour of volcanic slag, as the plankton feed on the volcanic nutrients and dispose of the leftover magma.
Sociocultural dynamics: The titanic battle that has been disrupting the entire ecosystem has finally ended. An aneurysm claimed the inverted whale. A reef of anemones instigated the cerebral failure when the opposing crustacean strategically sacrificed one of its limbs, still wielding the anemones and fed it to the inverted whale.
The life and history of the ancient whale will not be wasted. There will always be a mushroom to return what was taken back to the swamps.
From the crustacean, to the anemone, to the whale: there was one mushroom. Sequestered within the dying creature, mycelium arms reach out and wind through the whale's brain matter. The final neural cries of a failing brain are stolen by the fungal creep, and a memory is collected.
They are a millennium's worth of memories. They are memories of beyond the Cruor Swamps. They are not, however, memories of a whale but of a parasite hiding and leeching within the curls of its brains.
It remembers, three hundred years ago, when the parasite inhabited another creature that prowled upon the tree canopies and knew of the blue of the sky. It remembers the mountain residents energized over an announcement. Rancor, at the time just off from his legendary victory over Muse and touting its new title as the three-armed dragon, had been invited to compete in the third centennial Tournament. The skies, usually a serene canvas of stillness, had never seen such frenzied activity. Typically, the mountain dwellers kept to their caves, content with their trinkets and the quiet rhythms of their secluded lives.
The parasite had been curious by this infamous three-armed dragon and saw potential in acquiring an even greater host. With a few simple manipulations of its current host's endorphins, the parasite convinced the creature it inhabited to leave the safety of those murky waters it called home and go see the last few rounds of the Tournament.
What it saw was so much more terrifyingly destructive than it could imagine. From rumours, the Tournament was supposed to be an honourable duel of equals, but the 'fights' that the parasite saw had been so disturbingly one-sided that even it, a creature that thrived off the slow, painful cannibalism of life-long partners, found itself feeling queasy.
The three-armed dragon obviously won the Tournament, but the parasite was too afraid to try to infest it.
It headed home to the swamps, but not without drawing attention. The humans did not take too kindly to discovering the swamp creature's existence and were especially unhappy with the methods it had used to abscond into the Tournament arenas. Apparently, the wake of bodies it would leave was not taken as casually in the human world as it was in the swamps.
The humans immediately took it upon themselves to initiate a series of highly organized crusades against the swamps in an attempt to completely eradicate it. These assaults obviously went horribly as humans were ill-adapted for traversing the swamps. This had the small silver lining that at least their countless sacrifices supplied the swamps with many nutrients.
The parasite considered the human crusades as a bonus to the swamps and the consequences of its troublesome pilgrimage as a positive influence on its society. One mushroom was not such a selfish being; it saw the crusades for the malus that they were. It attracted more disdain from the humans, which would inevitably cause problems in the future, as was proven in the incident that would occur one hundred years later with the fruit.
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At the bottom of the world
Latitude 9.522916 Longitude 77.187757 Elevation -5395m
Geography: The Serpentine Mountains funnels the Cruor Swamps into a spiral, the mountains ever rising and the swamps ever sinking. The spiral delves so profoundly deep that it scarcely resembles a swamp anymore. It tunnels so deep that none of the impossibly tall trees can reach high enough to even approach its surface. Similarly, the depths are so heavy with pressure that not even the underwater swamps can survive. Yet, at the very end of this winding descent—at what was said to be the lowest point on the entire continent—a small mound protrudes from the water's surface.
It is a quaint mound dressed with light evergreen grass. On this island, at the bottom of everything, there is a tree.
The tree has long since passed its prime. Its bark, once vibrant, is now a sickly grey, and its limbs hang so brittle that, were it not for the protection of the surrounding mountains, the wind would have surely torn them asunder. There was a time, though, when this tree had been the crown jewel of Trammel, a towering beauty that outshone all others. In its prime, it had even borne a fruit, and all were confident that the fruit would be a boon for the swamps, a catalyst for change.
The fruit had been entrusted to a caretaker, but that caretaker had failed, and now both the fruit and its guardian were gone. A human, of course, had stolen itself into the swamps. Against all odds, this human had accomplished a feat no other had ever before—traversed all the way to the tip of the swamp's spiral, to the bottom of the world.
Certainly, the human was not expecting to be rewarded with such a wonderous existence at the end of its horrific trek, but the human was; and, without hesitation, they took it with them as they departed.
Climate: Still skies. This small nook of reality is so ensconced within the surrounding mountains that there is never any weather for which to be concerned. The forecast here is told in the attention it garners from the mountains.
As the Tournament nears, the dragons have become too inwardly focused for any more to try and kill the tree once and for all.
One mushroom can happily report: Clear skies.
Sociocultural dynamic: Lonely.
Here, so far from anything else in the world, there is only a single tree and the one mushroom that tries to keep it alive. Their roots are intimately entwined, but the tree does not speak anymore.
They, together, long for the return of a stolen fruit. Sometimes, the mushroom even wishes to leave the swamp and seek the fruit, just as the caretaker had done, but alas, it has too many responsibilities and too many other children that still need its care and attention. The fruit's mother—this once beautiful tree—was one of those children. Once the pride of the entire swamp, it has become a frail, geriatric burden requiring constant tending. Lately, most of the mushroom's efforts have been devoted to keeping the tree alive. Without its child blissfully tied to its branches, the tree was self-destructing in sorrow.
The mushroom is doing all it can to ease the tree's suffering, but even it is starting to doubt the chances of the fruit ever returning. It had been two hundred years since the fruit left the swamps, and the caretaker ventured off to find it. Two hundred years without anyone to share a conversation with. Two hundred years without the brilliant insights of the fruit. Two hundred years without the kindly pleasantries of the caretaker.
There was, of course, the rest of its family, the other swamp denizens, but they were not the same. The fruit and caretaker were not just kin; they were friends. They had been the sole beings capable of engaging with one mushroom on an honest level. Well, them and the tree, but the tree was a shadow of its former self.
Instead of being out and exploring the wider world with its friends, the mushroom has to suffer the disapproving gazes of the mountains while labouring for a wholly unappreciative tree.
As time tolls, it becomes clear that without the fruit, the swamp's current equilibrium is but a temporary affair. The fruit was the swamp's last chance to break out of its desolate confines, to reach out and become a true faction and respected member of Trammel. One mushroom can try what it can, but it is no longer the young sporeling it used to be. It is no longer just one mushroom.
A new authority is needed to watch over the Cruor Swamps, an authority that could enact more change and instill more of its will to manipulate the waves of the soul sea, more so than one mushroom ever could.
Compared to the fruit, one mushroom is past its prime, one mushroom is old, one mushroom is stagnant, one mushroom is weak, and one mushroom is hearing the chime of a bell.
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There was a pink rhombus. One rhombus, an incomprehensible otherworldly thing, unforgettable. One rhombus, under a sickened tree: it appeared. One rhombus, in the office of a tired knight: it appeared. One rhombus, at the bottom of a well by the edge of the world: it appeared. One rhombus, in a temple of gold: it appeared.
In a single moment of time, one snapshot of history, the pink rhombus appeared: this is its story.
Everywhere, all around the world, sixty-four times over
Geography: N/A
Climate: N/A
Sociocultural dynamic: What seemed to be a small pink rhombus grows out of thin air, or it was a rhombus, but its body would reject any stable state. It shifts and transforms, shrinks and grows, continuously morphing into other shapes. The pink shape finally locks into a form resembling that of a featureless human with sixty-four limbs. Every single arm reaches all throughout the universe and arrives exactly where it needs to be.
One limb in particular ends in front of only one mushroom holding a glowing parchment: It reads.
You have been invited to The Tournament You are The Mire