The stone is warm under the palm and gives slightly, like a loaf a day out of the oven. In Rundlet Hollow, a village of coopers, that is how a cellar announces it. Candle flames lean toward one wall and stay leaning. The air tastes of raw flour and wet pennies. A spoon left in a crock of porridge comes up furred by evening. A household that finds two of these signs stops using its lower cellar and does what is done.
What is done is small. Nothing is carried down. At dusk a shallow saucer of barley water goes on the bottom stair, and whoever sets it out climbs away without speaking and without looking back, because a myconid is said to refuse any saucer it saw being set. The saucer is never washed, never lifted, never reused once it has been touched. Odalric Venn, who keeps the cellars under the old gauging house at Gauger's Reach, calls the saucer rent and will not discuss the landlord.
The creature itself stands about five feet, stooped, the color of tallow, with a cap like an upturned washtub and gills that hang to the collarbone. I measured the cap with a cooper's caliper borrowed in Rundlet Hollow: twenty-six inches across. It rarely walks. It shuffles on rootlike feet and then stops for hours, and where it stops it leaves a ring of small gray caps and a rust-colored dust that stains cuffs and stair rails. It eats rotted oak staves, dead roots and spilled mash. The rings are how it is tracked. The one on the third cellar floor under Venn's gauging house was nine feet across when I laid a cooper's rod over it. On my return two winters later it was thirteen and had closed over the drain.
The locals misread its manner. The puff of spores that rises when someone comes down the stair is taken for an attack, and people tie wet cloths over their faces. The cloths change nothing. The puff is speech, a sentence carried the way smoke carries a smell, and the week of identical dreams that follows in a house, everyone dreaming the same low ceiling, is the sentence settling, not a sickness. The saucer is misread too. Rundlet Hollow calls it a bribe. In every cellar I have entered, the barley water is gone by morning and the saucer holds a single gray print, fingers spread, dry as flour.
- Classification
- Fungal humanoid, spore-speaking
- Habitat
- Cellars, caves, rotting forest floors
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 5 ft tall, cap 26 in. across
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Underground fungal groves
- Binomial
- Sporanthropus cellaris
- Diet
- Rotted wood, dead roots, spilled mash
- Temperament
- Placid, communal, slow to answer