Chapter 9: Chapter Nine – The Black Mushrooms

With a groan, Calamitous awoke. He felt as though he had been run over by a herd of elephants. Struggling to understand where he was, he felt the soft, thick fur of the massive cat that still lay upon him.

The Lion's pelt was comfortable and warm, and he would have liked to stay under it if he had not felt as though he was being slowly crushed.

With straining muscles, Calamitous pushed the Lion's limp corpse off himself and then crawled away backwards a few paces. Once he was on his feet, the gray-Ancient could see that Wrath-bringer was buried deep into the beast’s breast, and it took great effort for him to free the lithic blade.

After Calamitous had drawn his sword from the great cat’s chest, a thought came into his mind which he would have never entertained before. As he reflected upon how warm he had been under the Lion, he began to imagine how much warmer he would be if he wore his pelt.

With the idea of harvesting the huge cat’s fur, Calamitous took out the clam-shaped tool he had made months before and approached the lifeless body of the Lion. He set to work cutting away the beast's skin, and it proved to be a bloody task that he did not enjoy in the least.

When he was done, he started to drag the carcass out of the cave. However, he suddenly noticed a blackening around the place where Wrath-bringer had entered the great cat's breast.

With his curiosity piqued, he took his stone tool and began to open the Lion. To his utter astonishment, he found that the animal’s chest cavity was full of small black mushrooms, and they looked somewhat appealing to his empty stomach.

Calamitous was well past hungry, and so, without much more thought, he took and ate one of the black mushrooms. They were not exactly delicious, for they had a slightly rotten taste, but they did help to satiate his hunger.

After eating, he felt a little better, so he harvested all the rest of the mushrooms and then set about the task of burying the Lion's corpse. However, after less than an hour, his head began to swim, and minutes later, he fell into a delirious stupor.

Many hours passed, and still Calamitous sat dazed and drooling upon himself. In this state, he felt his body go numb, and he saw all manner of strange things. At one point, he even felt as though he had left his body for a time. The universe suddenly seemed to make sense to him, and he felt as though he was a part of everything, and everything was a part of him. Above all this, he felt utterly euphoric.

However, when he awoke the next day, everything he thought he had understood during his time in a trance was now just a distant and vague memory that he could never quite bring back into focus. It was as though he knew all the mysteries of the cosmos, and then forgot them as quickly as they had been learned. Yet worse than this was that he felt extremely nauseous, his head pounded with every beat of his heart, and his mouth felt as though it was full of dry dust.

With these miseries, there came into his mind a blaring question: “What caused me to feel so strange and now leaves me with such suffering?”

After pondering this for a while, he slowly realized that the only thing he had done differently was eating the black mushrooms. There was just one way for him to be sure. Besides, he was beginning to feel hungry anew, and so he took a handful of the mushrooms and ate them yet again.

This time, he was far more delirious, and when he finally came out of this second euphoric stupor, he did not know how long he had been in the trance. Yet, there was one thing he was sure of: the mushrooms were definitely the cause, and they had made him sick all over again.

It was then that he first asked himself where the small black mushrooms had come from. They had been growing within the Lion’s chest cavity, but surely, they did not have their beginning there.

Then he recalled the idea that had caused him to open up the beast in the first place. The blackened flesh had been around the wound where Wrath-bringer had pierced the Lion's breast.

Calamitous investigated the stone sword's blade. Wiping it with his fingers, he found that a fine black dust clung to the lithic weapon. Suddenly, with horror, he remembered that the sword had been stabbed into the ground near the Tree of Deepshadows.

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Though these mushrooms were nothing like the oozing fungus he had seen before, they most certainly had the same source. Of this there was no doubt: the fine dust was actually tiny spores from the mushrooms that grew near the evil tree, and they seemed to thrive and grow in anything that was dead.

With this knowledge, Calamitous vowed to never eat the mushrooms again. He had eaten them out of hunger, and though they had certainly made him forget the pain in his belly, in the end, the sickness they caused outweighed their benefit.

Thus, he went south to gather food from the northern forests, but he quickly realized that the light of the sun now burned him, and so he only went gathering at night.

After a month, Calamitous had made many improvements to his new home. He had let the Lion's pelt dry in the open air of the desert, and from it, made a simple tunic with a hole in the center. His head went in the hole, and the skin draped over his shoulders and down to his knees. Underneath, he still wore his tattered and faded swathe.

What little scraps remained, he wrapped around his feet making a pair of crude boots. The garment and the boots were made with the fur facing inward, for he found it warmer to have the Lion’s shimmering coat against his gray skin.

Also, he went far to the south and gathered wood and the fluff from many cattail plants. With these he made a bed and a mattress for himself. The bed consisted of a wooden frame placed upon a flat boulder that was within the cave. He then filled the wooden frame with the cattail fluff.

Calamitous also found a large flat stone, and balancing it upon a rectangular rock, he made a table within his cave. On either side of the crudely constructed table, he placed two other stones to serve as stools upon which to sit.

Just outside of his cave, the once-Ancient gathered six huge black stones and stacked them in such a way that they formed what looked like a crude throne. Thus, from time to time, he would sit upon it and survey his kingdom of solitude.

Once Calamitous had made all these improvements to his new home, he sat down in his din and began to flint knap using one of the gray rocks he had gathered from the river. However, no matter how hard he tried, he could not make a blade anywhere near the same quality as his stone sword. In the end, he only managed to create crude razor-sharp shards of rock.

With every attempt to flint knap, he found only discouragement and frustration, and in the midst of it all, a single desire kept creeping into his mind: The desire to eat more of the black mushrooms. For many days, he withstood the temptation, but every effort to knap was fruitless.

Finally, he gave in to the desire, and after eating the black mushrooms, he set to work. Now, under the influence of the mushrooms, he saw a beautiful tool emerging from the rock core as he tapped away with a hammer stone. So it was that he worked furiously making one tool after another, and it felt so good to be creative again.

When the effects of the mushrooms began to wear off and his sober mind returned, he looked around for the beautiful tools that he had made, but sadly, he found only a pile of shards. It had all been an illusion! Moreover, in his altered state of mind, he had not been as careful while working the stones, and so his blackened and benumbed fingers bore many bleeding and painful looking gashes, but still, he could not feel them. And to his surprise, he found that even his blood was now a colorless gray.

Angry and full of despair, Calamitous sat in the darkest shadows of his cave and stewed in his own misery. He thought of how he had been looked up to, he thought of how talented he had been, and he thought of how lonely he felt, but most of all, he felt terribly sorry for himself.

Because of his terrible loneliness, he began to seek some small comfort from eating the black mushrooms despite the vow he had made to himself. Thus, he often sat within the darkness of his den drooling into his beard while bizarre visions passed before his strange eyes.

 

 

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