The Silence Beneath the Spores
In the green depths of the eastern woodlands, where sunbeams rarely touch the earth and the wind carries old songs, there walks a woman known as Twill. Her skin is the dark loam of the forest floor after rain; her long red hair, braided with oak twigs and threads of moss, drapes down her back like ivy on stone. She wears robes the color of living things—green, soft, and unassuming. Yet wherever she steps, the land listens.
She is a druid, perhaps the last of a forgotten circle, or the first of a new one. None can say. What is known is this: when the Haggii Valley bloomed with rot—when spores filled the air and children dreamed of teeth growing in the trees—it was Twill who answered the call.
She walked into the plague-mist alone.
And when she returned, the sickness had vanished.
No cure was found. No monsters slain. No healers triumphant. Only her quiet, cryptic words:
“The land is appeased. It will lash out no more.”
The Mychodial Plague
It began subtly. Mushrooms of unfamiliar hue—sickly purples, bone-white fronds, dripping black ichor—sprouted where none had grown before. Goats bled from their eyes. Men began to sleepwalk into the trees, their dreams writhing with fungal limbs. Then the wind turned wet and heavy, thick with invisible spores, and entire villages fell silent overnight.
The source was buried deep: a Mycelial Conclave, a sentient fungal colony that had evolved far beyond instinct. Beneath the valley stretched a lattice of living fungus—spore-minds that remembered, that dreamed, that feared. Their colony had grown in silence for centuries, but recent foragers and alchemists had begun to steal from their sacred caverns. The fungus had not lashed out in hatred—it had defended itself.
The colony’s children were terrifying in form. Hollow tenders with waxy limbs and mouths like blooming lilies. Dream-rooters that could enter the minds of sleepers and reroute memory. Sporesworn, fungal mockeries of dead animals, animated by hyphae strung through bone.
The land was not sick. It was angry.
Twill understood this.
Her Communion
She descended into the valley without blade or flame, but with something more rare: intent. She spoke to the roots in the language of growth, the tongue of lichen and rainfall. What she offered to the Mycelial Conclave is unknown. But the druids of the old ways know this truth: to speak with something truly alien, you must allow it to change you.
She did not resist.
Twill offered her thoughts as fertile ground, and in return, the colony granted understanding. In silence and stillness, a pact was made. She wove a living glamour over the mouth of the fungal caves, an enchantment of such depth that even the stars above forget the place exists.
And when she emerged, blinking in the dawn light, the plague retreated with her.
“The land is appeased. It will lash out no more.”
Her Companion: Carordearg
Not all fey beasts are small and sly. Some are ancient, massive, and unknowable.
Carordearg is such a creature.
A feline shape the size of a great wolf or a small, slender horse, Carordearg walks at Twill’s side with the silence of falling snow. Its fur shifts color with the seasons—spring green, summer gold, autumn rust, winter gray—and glows faintly when the moon is full. Its paws leave no prints, yet its presence can be felt like pressure in the chest.
Its eyes are deep pools of swirling starlight—amber, endless, watching more than they should. Carordearg is not a pet, nor a mount, though Twill rides it through tangled wood and bog when the need arises. It is her shield, her shadow, and some say her soul made manifest.
When angered, Carordearg ‘s mane bristles with phosphorescent thorns, and its growl causes plants to bow or wither. It can vanish into trees like mist, reappearing where the light is least expected. It speaks only through gesture and sensation: warmth, rustling leaves, sudden cold.
Some say Carordearg is a child of the Archfey, a prince exiled in feline skin. Others believe it was shaped by the same fungal dreams that changed Twill. Either way, it follows her willingly—and gods help any who threaten her.
Journey to Taurdain
Now, something stirs in Taurdain—something old and hungry. Twill has felt it in the way rivers flow wrong and birds fly too low. A new plague, perhaps. Another wound in the land. She has not been summoned. She has heard.
And so she comes, staff in hand, the great shadow of Carordearg pacing beside her. She will not demand trust. She will offer no proof. Only a quiet promise:
“The land remembers kindness. I will speak with it.”
Shermans fantasy world 