Page 71 of The Blight of Hollowmire

Firstly, discussion of what transpired in the night. Why can’t I remember anything? How did he speak with the Blight Mother if I don’t recall it? Then, we must restock our supplies and figure out where to go next. After that, simply try to find the source of the famine while not turning into a mindless destructive force that wipes out everything within reach.

Perfect. Simple. No trouble at all.

Nibblebones creeps silently down from the rafters where she’s made her den and curls up against my neck. She, too, does not wish to wake Renard any earlier than we must, and her soft warmth is such a comfort to me, I nearly weep.

How am I to save a world that’s only ever sought to shun me—to push me to the outer edges because of the way I was born? More importantly, why should I bother?

Renard may have honor, but he also has the entitlement and privilege of a man who exists in a world he expects to bend to his whims. As is the belief of many humans—and nearly all men. I am not lesser because I am a woman. I am not lesser because I possess certain abilities or lack others. I simply am—through no fault or triumph of anyone, save the gods.

If Renard’s regent in Valehar is a man whose impetus is to send a single, ill-equipped exile into a foreign land while he schemes to drag his neighbors into the starving curse he cannot privilege his way out of… well. Perhaps the world does need a rebalancing, after all.

Something dark and seductive thrills in me at that, rearing up like a snake about to strike. My magic itches beneath my skin, frustrated being tethered in the bounds of this civilized village. I shall take inspiration from my confusing companion, and sneak out for a breath of air and some respite from such heavy expectations.

Creeping silently out of bed, I snag my cloak from the wall and make my way downstairs. Already the kitchen in the back of the inn is bustling with preparations for a morning meal, and I inhale the familiar comforting smells of baking bread, oat porridge, and frying bacon. Though we ate reasonably well yesterday—better than we had in days—my stomach seems to believe otherwise, and gives a ravenous growl. Throughout this journey, I have apparently become a woman obsessed by my appetites—hunger, lust, hope, despair, rage. Everything in me seems to be yearning for some kind of release.

The streets outside are slick with mud and piles of dingy, melting snow. Villagers are beginning to leave their homes for their early chores—feeding livestock, fetching water, collecting firewood. I try to tug the hood of my cloak over my antlers, but at some point in the night they grew again, and now they are too tall to be hidden by hood or by hair. Strangely, most I pass on the street avert their eyes after an alarmed, cursory glance.

I reach the back of our inn, which butts up against the alpine forest between the mountain pass, and continue on. I walk through the towering pines that creak as they sway in the breeze, until the shadows deepen and the village disappears between the encroaching growth. At last, I feel like I can breathe.

Stripping off my cloak and tossing it over a fallen log nearby, I sink to my knees and plunge my fingers into the dirt. Rot-hungry life explodes out of me with scarcely a thought, clamoring deeper and deeper in the soil until I feel the very earth quicken with an abundance of mushrooms, insects, molds, and lichens. Worms and larvae writhe from below—awakened from unnatural slumber. Why do you sleep? I ask them. It is not yet the season for that. Winter has yet to come, even here in the mountains.

They do not answer, but they heed my call. Fields of mushrooms—every variety I know and many I don’t—erupt from the filaments that branch out from my fingertips. I sigh with the pleasure of it, of this unfettered exercise of my power, and marvel at how much broader I can reach, how much more I can sense from the land, and the satisfaction that settles in when it feels like some small part of this world has bent to my will and returned to its cycle.

Perhaps this is it—this is my calling. Perhaps this is how I can end the famine. I close my eyes and reach out with my senses again, looking for the root of the corruption here. Kneeling beneath a stand of pine and fir, I press my hands deeper into the damp forest floor and allow my breathing to settle into the slow rhythm the work requires.

Immediately, the forest answers. Not like a command or a summoning, and not because it knows me or loves me any more than it loves the beetles chewing through a rotted stump nearby or the mushrooms pushing through last year's leaf litter. Nature has never struck me as particularly sentimental. Rather, it recognizes me in the same way one river recognizes another when they eventually converge. We belong to the same cycle—we speak the same language. It’s a language I’ve spoken since my powers bloomed, and one that my family has never understood.

What comes back to me isn’t formed of words, but of sensations—moisture gathered beneath moss, the delicate lacework of fungal threads stretching through the dark beneath my palms. Roots drinking greedily from underground streams swollen by mountain snowmelt. Tiny lives moving through the rich black loam in numbers so vast they become impossible to separate into individual creatures. Everywhere I look there is life and death, hunger and satisfaction, and always transformation.

My lingering, relentless headache blessedly eases a fraction as I drift deeper down into the earth. I sense fungal networks spreading outward in vast pale webs, connecting root to root and tree to tree in ways most people never suspect. Through them, I can feel the forest stretching away in all directions, an unseen kingdom hidden beneath the visible one. Perhaps that’s why I prefer mushrooms to flowers. Flowers are ostentatious in their quest for admiration, but mushrooms simply tunnel through the earth, doing the work of holding the world together.

My lips curve in a small smile.

Nibblebones, who has been rooting industriously through a nearby patch of leaf litter in search of something unpleasant to eat, pauses long enough to glance in my direction before resuming her work. Wind stirs the canopy, sending shafts of honey-colored sunlight dancing across the forest floor.

Gods, at any other time, I might remain here for hours.

Slowly, carefully, I extend my awareness farther from my body, following the hidden pathways beneath the forest floor. The sensation requires concentration because distance makes things more… complicated. The details blur and the farther I reach, the more difficult it becomes to distinguish one forest from the next. At first, everything seems to be as it should. The earth is mostly healthy here. I sense a fox den beneath an exposed root system, a fallen cedar in the final stages of collapse, a patch of mold consuming a dead rabbit somewhere beyond the next ridge. Life and death continue their endless exchange without interruption.

Then something catches—the sensation so faint I nearly dismiss it as my imagination. My brow furrows and my smile fades. Again I reach toward it, and again I find it. It isn’t quite a presence, but more of an absence—a place where the natural flow of things becomes distorted.

Heart racing, I press farther, and the mycelium respond almost instantly. Everything seems to bend and warp around this absence in a pattern that repeats itself again and again. I keep following it, and eventually the shape of the thing begins to emerge.

Concern and suspicion make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, as does the thrill of discovery. This isn’t a thing in itself. It is an absence, an outline. A place where things are where they should not be.

Unbidden, a memory surfaces unexpectedly. When I was a youngling, I discovered an iron nail embedded in the trunk of an ancient oak near the western edge of Hollowmire. Someone had hammered it there generations before my birth and forgotten it entirely. The tree survived, of course—trees are stubborn things. Yet every year thereafter, the wood grew around the nail, twisting subtly over it like a scab, and then a scar.

The absence reminds me of that nail. It isn’t rot, or disease, or poison, even—those things all have a natural signature to them. This is unnatural, and frankly, unsettling. Despite what my kith and kin would have me believe, decay belongs—even at its most destructive, it remains part of the natural order.

This, however, does not. The sensation settles heavily in my stomach, churning with the hunger that I cannot seem to sate lately.

I continue following the feeling of wrongness eastward until I find myself skirting up against a kingdom I recognize only from its rumored stagnation.

Valehar.

The distortion in the soil converges there in the same way rivers eventually converge upon the sea. A chill passes through me, and I shudder involuntarily. The capital lies many days away, and I shouldn’t be able to feel anything there. But nevertheless, I am certain. With absolute surety, I know that whatever waits beneath Valehar is large enough, powerful enough, wrong enough that even the earth has begun adjusting itself around the wound.

Suddenly I am aware of my own body again—of pine needles beneath my knees, damp soil beneath my palms, the cold morning air filling my lungs. Despite the chill of the morning, sweat beads on my forehead and slicks my palms.