#yeah i eyeballed lighting/color picks here as i went along and prayed

[n0maku]

[scribefindegil]

Cycle Eight--Week 2

[AO3] [Week 1]

Day 8

Merle has set himself up in the town center, telling all who will listen about the word of Pan. To our surprise, ‘all who will listen’ seems to be most of the town. It may just be the novelty that makes them stop and ask him questions about his faith, but it may be something deeper. He prayed and sang the scorch teams on their way again tonight, and this time there were more than a few hesitant voices that joined in.

“Some of them really don’t believe that we can just breathe the air where we come from,” he told us after dinner.

Taako looked at him askance. “We came here without masks on. What do they think we were doing?”

“Dunno.” Merle shrugged. “I mean, they know we were on the ship. It’s not that weird we could breathe there. It’s the thought that there’s whole worlds without poison death spores in the air that throws ‘em. And where nobody needs to wear masks! You know how weird they think it is that we’ve all seen each other’s faces?” He paused and waggled his eyebrows. “Probably assume there’s some really kinky—”

“Gross.” Lup threw her spoon at his head.

“Speaking of which.” Magnus glared at him. “I know you’ve got your whole weird plant thing but please for the sake of everyone’s sanity and eyeballs, no flirting with the death mushrooms.”

“Hmph,” said Merle. “Here I am, trying to give these poor people the first taste of hope they’ve ever felt in their lives and all you can focus on is whether or not I wanna fuck the death mushrooms.”

To no one’s surprise, the conversation ended quite abruptly after that.

Day 9

I was able to go out into the forest again today. Frelya grumbled about it—she hates the mushrooms and doesn’t understand why I find them so fascinating—but she agreed anyway. I think perhaps Nita talked her into it. I brought my paints with me this time, and a tarp of oiled cloth for protection.

I’ve never found this set of pigments lacking before, but no matter how hard I try to capture the hues of the mushrooms around me my drawings end up looking pale and lifeless in comparison. There’s a vibrancy to them that I find myself simply unable to portray.

Although it’s been only a few days since my last visit to the forest and Frelya took me along the same path, the landscape looks completely different. When we do set out on our mission to recover the Light, navigation will be challenging; it’s hard to find any landmarks that won’t be overgrown within a few weeks. Some of the smaller specimens that I had sketched now tower far above my head, and there are new growths—tall red fungi bursting out of their veils that look like tentacles unfurling, stands of delicate lacy orange mushrooms that a species of large spotted insects use as hives, and light blue tendrils that dangle like strands of rope from the caps and stems of other mushrooms.

(Three pages are filled with detailed watercolor sketches. Next to some of them are faintly glowing dots of color, and next to one is a black stain that has eaten through the paper. The note next to it reads “Orange lace mushrooms highly acidic! Beware!”)

I noticed some of the herbs that Nita had introduced me to. They grow larger in her greenhouses, and they are so small and easily hidden out here in the shadows of the giant mushrooms. I picked a sprig of Sparkweed and could smell the peppery scent of its bruised leaves through the layers of my mask.

Frelya sat silently for most of the day, but as we were heading back to the village she said, “Those colors . . . they don’t hurt you?”

“Well,” I said, “They would make you sick if you ate them, but the paint is safe to use, yes.”

It hadn’t truly occurred to me before, but nearly everything in the village is brown or white or gray. Colorful things are associated with the mushrooms and death. It must be so strange to see the seven of us in our bright red uniforms. They look like new now, as they do at the beginning of every cycle. Mine has already acquired some stains and tears, but the others are clean and bright and crisp. It’s no wonder it was so easy for the villagers to accept that we come from another world.

I attempted to express as much to Frelya. She shrugged and said, “It’s all right. You don’t glow.”

I listened more closely to Merle’s hymn when the scorch teams headed out. Like so many hymns, it sings praises of the light. I may need to have a word with him about symbolism. On this world, unexpected light can easily be an omen of death. They have so little darkness that they’ve learned to covet it, to love ashes and the dark spaces left after the passage of flames.

Day 11

Magnus is already impatient to leave. I caught him arguing with Davenport this morning.

“We don’t know how long it will take!” he was saying. “We have the whole Southern half of the planet to search; we can’t just sit around waiting or this world could die!”

Davenport is less than half of Magnus’s height, but he has an aura of command about him that can make even the biggest human take a step back.

“We’re not going to charge in blindly!” he said. “We need to prepare or the whole mission could be doomed! We know almost nothing about this world and it’s up to me to make sure we make it to the end of the year at all! Oh, ah . . . hello, Lucretia.”

I haven’t been able to convince any of my crewmates that they should ignore my presence and continue with their conversations; it’s my job to chronicle, not to interfere in other people’s arguments. But the sound of my quills does tend to put people off despite my best efforts, and so that was where the conversation ended for today.

The interest in Merle’s evangelizing is still growing. He leads them in song at every meal now, not just when the scorch teams head out in the evening. They didn’t sing much before he arrived. As far as I can tell, they didn’t really have music at all.

“We sing to babies,” Nita said when I went to find her in the greenhouse. “But no, it’s not something we ever gave much thought to. Always too many other things to do.”

“And now?”

She laughed. “Well, there’s still too many other things to do! But it’s . . . nice. It’s like your stories.” She raised one of her canes and tapped my journals. “You don’t need it to live, but it makes being alive feel more important.”

Mico seems especially taken by the word of Pan. Whenever I walk past they’re sitting with Merle, plying him with questions. If Pan is a god of nature, why would he allow a world like this to happen? Was it a punishment? Why should they believe?

Strangely enough, it isn’t the great theological queries that are the sticking point. It’s the pipes.

Merle doesn’t play them much, but he carries a set with him, and he uses them to gesture sometimes when he’s praying. Mico simply can’t grasp the idea of them.

“But you couldn’t play them with a mask,” they said over and over.

“I know, kid,” said Merle. “That’s what I’m telling you. When you sit at the arm of Pan you won’t need a mask. You can breathe free!”

Mico laughed and shook their head, like that was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.

Day 12

Never mind Pan. Fungston is going to start worshiping Lup.

She and Taako have mostly been keeping to themselves and working on new cooking techniques that the residents can use to spice things up, but apparently Lup’s been getting bored.

She volunteered to go out with one of the scorch teams.

They were reluctant to let her at first; it’s a very important job and they’re more cautious about letting outsiders assist with that than with anything else, but with some cajoling and a frankly over-the-top blessing from Merle they agreed.

It’s important to remember that while magic is important to the Fungston life, they mostly use cantrips and they mostly use them for crafting. I’m not sure why higher-level spells are so uncommon, if it has something to do with the mushrooms or if they just never developed them, but regardless of the reason these people have never seen a truly powerful magic-user before.

Usually the scorch teams can burn the mushrooms back for a few hundred feet. When Lup sauntered back into town blowing dramatically on her fingertips, a full quarter-mile of forest to the South of the village had been reduced to smoking rubble.

It was chaos. She stood in the center of town and used Prestidigitation to cast sparks for everyone who wanted to see, and between the people drawing away and the people who wanted to get closer (Vetch used her influence with Magnus to make him carry her over so she could hold Lup’s hand) it was a mob scene. Lup loved it, of course. There are vague plans for her to tutor the townsfolk on Evocation magic, but for now she’s content to bask in her glory.

Day 13

For the first morning since we��ve been here, the first morning in a long time, the mushroom forest hadn’t reached the first ring of sentry fires by dawn. The villagers stood and stared out at the cleared earth.

Most of them were silent, but Nita actually laughed.

“There’s so much of it!” she said. “The biggest open space I’ve ever seen!”

Merle met my eyes, and I could tell it broke his heart as much as it did mine. He nodded slowly to himself, and then looked up at the assembled villagers.

“Oh yeah?” he said with a wink. “Well I can show you something better.”

He strode out to the center of the blasted ground and raised his pipes in one hand and his holy book in the other. He closed his eyes and muttered a prayer under his breath, then stamped his foot on the ground.

The villagers muttered and drew back as the earth around him cracked and shoots began to emerge. Soon they realized that none of the things that were sprouting glowed at all—they were just brown and grey and soft, fresh green, and the murmurs of fear turned to wonder.

I had seen no grass in the forest. Only a few herbs. Hardly any flowers.

It was like watching the whole world turn green. Grass sprang up, and wood sorrel and thyme and clover. Bushes of blueberries and lingonberries grew and flowered and fruited before our eyes.

“Show-off,” muttered Lup. I could tell that she was grinning under her mask.

The villagers froze for a moment. Then Vetch, brave girl, took one step onto the grass, then two, and then ran laughing into Merle’s arms. The rest of them followed, stepping as if in a trance beyond the outer ring of bonfires. They knelt on the grass, ran their hands through the soft leaves, picked the berries and held them in their hands as if they were unsure what to do with them.

“You can eat ‘em,” Merle explained. “Gotta take them back to camp and clean them off, but I bet our favorite chefs here could whip up something—”

“It’ll be divine. Don’t even worry about it.” Taako had pulled his boots off and was digging his toes into the grass. Hesitantly, some of the villagers followed suit.

I felt a tug at my arm.

“I need these plants,” Nita gasped. She was crying and laughing at the same time. “I need—help me get them to the greenhouse, please!”

She and Gully and I dug up samples and carried them inside. There was barely room in the soil for them, but we made do—“The sageweed can keep in water, nettles were getting overgrown anyway . . .” Nita muttered, frantically digging.

When we finally sat back I had green stains on my robe and my fingernails. Gully was staring hungrily at the blueberries.

“Here,” I said, pulling a handful I’d picked outside from my pocket and quickly casting Prestidigitation to clean them. The other two removed their outer masks and loosened their veils, and they each took six berries.

Gully savored hers, eating them one at a times as slowly as she could. Nita put all six into her mouth at once. Her eyes shone with joy and tears, and after she swallowed she threw her arms around Gully and then, after a moment of hesitation, around me.

Day 14

Not much time to write. Have been drafted by Nita to keep moving samples of the plants Merle creates indoors. Village in joyful chaos; talk of expanding borders for the first time in living memory. Lup and the scorch teams working to burn the forest even further back. Everyone knows the green sward can’t be permanent, but for now it exists. The children are grass-stained from head to foot, and though everyone’s faces are still covered the villagers walk like they’re smiling.