The Strands that Bind by AdmirableMonster

The Hyphae of Destiny

The flame of the little kerosene heater burned too high.  The cellar was warm enough, but it was not well-ventilated, and the too-ravenous fire began to devour the breathable air almost immediately.  Chalcedony still had two brown beads clutched in one sleeping hand, and she shivered and clutched them tighter.

Within those little beads lay wrapped a queer power—fairy-sight, the hobbits called it; foresight, the Elves.  A young Dunlendish mother, looking into her (as she thought) daughter’s eyes long ago in Lond Daer, called it the White Lady’s Gift.  Lilóteo, when he called it anything, called it a nuisance.

Whatever it was, the beads themselves were soaked in it, passed from the hands of one skilled prophet to another, connected by the hyphae of destiny and shared understanding; two outsiders, two unfitted puzzle pieces, staring into a society that didn’t quite suit.  The strands of sight burned like fire in the darkness of space and time, and perhaps it was only that, or perhaps it was Chalcedony’s own despair soaking the threads, as she whimpered and coughed, or perhaps it was simply His presence in the little fungi and the poisonous air, but somewhere beyond the Doors of Night, a great dark malice raised its head and looked towards the connecting strands.

Annamir, dozing in Celebrimbor’s lap in an inn just down the road from Brandybuck Hall, raised his head.  He felt that terrible gaze, and for an instant, it made him freeze and hiss, raise his hackles like the cat he was and perhaps would ever be, made all things but cat flee from his burning soul.  His claws went into Celebrimbor’s knees, and the Elf woke with a shout.  “Annamírë, what—”

The sound of Celebrimbor’s voice in pain brought back a little of the mind that inhabited the cat’s body, but he was still fuzzy and far away.  The only thing he knew was that the girl was in danger, somehow, the girl who did those careful experiments with the mushrooms, who hid herself behind the body of a young male for no reason that Annamir could determine.  She could shine through if she chose.

She was in danger.  The mushroom girl was in danger.

He did not stop to try to communicate with Celebrimbor; he did not really have enough rational thought left for that.  Instead, he leapt from his husband’s lap and shot like a streak towards the door.  It was shut, and as a cat, he ought not have been able to open it, but some blind half-remembered instinct knew how to work metal, and the hinges and bolt suffered a sudden catastrophic sublimation.  The subsequent explosion blew the door clean outward and let him through. 

Fortunately, a traveler was entering the inn, so he was not forced to destroy the outer door as well.  He slipped between their feet, leaving behind a startled oath, and ran full-tilt down the path towards Brandybuck Hall.

As he ran, he felt his way down the tendrils that burned and warped, stealthy as a cat, trying to avoid the terrible gaze that swept down them.  The mushroom girl twitched and gasped.  At the other side of the web, he found another mind that felt faintly familiar.  Mumbled, half-remembered words from another life whispered in his ear, Not by the hand of man shall you fall!

The web touched him in many places.  Thunder rumbled and lightning rattled across the sky here and there and across the knotted mycelium.  Flames beneath the ocean boiled uneasily.  A boy ran from the girl his father wanted him to be.  Too young; no help to be found there.  A man watched an island and her queen fall to the dark.  No—no, any touch of the cat’s would be rebuffed there, and rightly so.  There—an older man, hair shot with grey, whose meticulous work and inexorable care more than his innate talents were beginning to heal a land poisoned by a dying empire.

That man had seen a girl sleeping, once; had seen a pair of startled brown eyes reflected in an ancient broken mirror.  Annamir tried, urgently, to project a cry for help along that thread, a tiny quiver in the web that might go undetected by the deadly malice whose naked gaze had not yet spied him.

The sky above boils with a deadly storm; the earth beneath Nimruzimir’s feet rumbles, but the air is very clear.  He is climbing, his feet following a winding, tortuous path upward, by the side of which the grey and wiry grass surrounds shards of sparkling black glass.

The Meneltarma is just a memory, now, but something inside him tells him insistently that he must reach the top.  Twining hyphae urge him onwards and upwards, and a ripple of mycelium beneath the earth puts out a series of questing fruiting bodies that show him the path like a series of breadcrumbs, their frilled caps glowing with an unearthly, phantasmic light.  The earth seems to breathe and writhe beneath his feet.

At the very top of the ancient volcano, the storm swirls about a quiescent center, a round patch of black sky with stars scattered across it.  When he looks down and around, he can see the bright lights of the Empire shining brighter than any star, but he knows they will wink out in the blink of the gods’ eyes.

He has seen the stars before, never here on the brightly-lit island, but in the old forests of his home, with his mother beside him to show him how to find his way.  They are not faded and distant as the Númenoreans seem to think, but close companions, jewels spilled across the rim of the sky by the generous hand of the Lord in Black.

Beyond even the stars lurks a heavy presence, an ambush predator lying in wait.  For an instant something writhing beneath the earth calls its attention; for an instant that formless gaze finds the tiny sensors that sense it in turn, and it is not just Nimruzimir who is hooked into that rich network of information—brown eyes.  Brown eyes he saw once, years ago, in an ancient city become an ancient tomb.

The girl cries out, soft and afraid. 

“No,” Nimruzimir says. He is not and has never been a brave man, but before that ancient terrible nightmare, that blind idiot appetite that poisons and perverts even from beyond the bounds of the night sky—he does not flinch, not when a child needs to be protected.  The child who might have been his own little sister, in another world, another life.

He knows he will fail, because no human could prevail here, but he does not see a choice.  

“Let me help,” says a burning whisper, and a hand is slipped into his.  Fire blazes at his shoulder, and he half-turns to see a not-quite-stranger, garbed in white robes with the flames of his hair bleeding into fiery wings beating behind him.  He cannot think why this other seems familiar, but that face like a porcelain gold-limned mask with the upper left-hand corner smashed out turns to his.

“Bad luck,” says the creature of fire.  “But he is far away beyond the bounds of the world, and you have put yourself between them.  I will get her out, and he will not have her body or her soul.  Wake, prophet of the sunset land.  You have done well.”

As Nimruzimir blinks his way back to consciousness, he hears the echo of a voice whisper, “And tell your lover that I am sorry for how his shoulder pains him.”

Chapter End Notes

NEVER leave a kerosene lamp or heater unattended inside and quite possibly don’t use them indoors at all; they very much can kill you.

“Hyphae” are like roots for fungi; “mycelium” is the underground network created by many entwining hyphae, and the mushroom part is also referred to as a “fruiting body”

Nimruzimir and Annamir have a little shared history, some of which is alluded to in “Steampunk Númenor,” some of which remains unfortunately unpublished. I’ll have to get on that.

“Númenor” (also referred to as Westernesse in LOTR) means “sunset land/land of the sunset”

For more information on propagation of information/signals/sensing in fungi, here’s an interesting paper: Bahn, Y.-S., Xue, C., Idnurm, A., Rutherford, J. C., Heitman, J., & Cardenas, M. E. (2007). Sensing the environment: lessons from fungi. Nature Reviews Microbiology, 5(1), 57–69. doi:10.1038/nrmicro1578