Precious Moments Nex

[Zee Palmer]

Iremove a vial from my harvester's satchel and swirl the moss-green elixir around until it glows in the moonlight. I turn it over and let a single drop fall from the dispenser onto the mushroom cap. It sits there for a moment, like a perfect dew drop, then a web of white tendrils grows out, encasing the fungus in a magical cocoon that will preserve it for next season's plantings. I test the casing's hardness with a quick tap of my pincers, then add it to a carefully marked compartment in my satchel.

Insect song echoes off the crumbling canal walls that border our farmstead, opening up into the night sky high above. A symphony of crickets, cicadas, and katydids sing in chorus with the deep throaty bellows of a deadbridge goliath in the distance. Even a few of my siblings join in. I hear the melodic trill of Razi's wings rising above them all. She's the best singer in our family. Mother's favorite from the day we hatched, though she would never admit this out loud.

"Why do you want to work for an elf?" Razi says later that night after the fields have all been tended and we've returned to Mother's safe embrace. "They wear bits and pieces of us in their hair, paint eyes on their faces so they look like insects, and yet when it comes time to lead. . .who do they choose again and again?"

I wring my wings together, producing a sour note of displeasure. I know Razi doesn't mean that about Mazirek. She's just upset about the thought of me leaving our farmstead. I'd be mad, too, if she'd told me she was going off to sing for Vraska's court.

"You're the best at singing," I say. "I can barely hold a tune. Ellin is the best at flying," I flex my wings, one of them malformed. "I can't even get airborne. I know a lot about mushrooms, but that's only because Kuurik is a great teacher. Necromancy could be that special thing that I do with my life. A profession that would make Mother proud of me."

"Till death," I say, bidding her not only a good sleep, but a fond farewell. As soon as the noon sun shines upon the murky depths of our canal, I pack my maps, my journals, my vials, and my harvester's satchel and sneak away while my siblings lie dreaming.

The majesty of the undercity is overwhelming, with vast stone tunnels shrouded in mist and giant circular entryways, like open maws begging to swallow us whole. My fellow competitors have come wearing their finest robes ribbed with mushroom gills in oranges and teals and bejeweled in shiny pieces of carapace that had once belonged to my brethren. I clench my staff close, feeling inadequately dressed in a bronzed head plate, a modest decorative chest plate, and nothing more. The lich appraises each of us, a deathly pall spread across his skin. His eyes have gone milky, including the moodmark enchantments on his forehead. His gown is a work of art, flowing black webbing with thirty-one different species of fungus worked into a mosaic pattern that compliments his slender, nearly skeletal frame.

There are twenty-six of us brave (or foolish) enough to attempt to identify and retrieve four of the most dangerous mushrooms in all of Ravnica. I stand tall, keep my antenna erect, all my knees locked. . .ready to be the first one back with all four specimens. I packed extra elixirs to seal them in, since exposure to some of the spores can lead to paralysis, asphyxiation, death, or worse.

"Only one of you will be deemed skillful enough to serve as my apprentice," the lich says. "You must be thorough, cunning, and quick. If you should perish, take comfort that your body will give life to generations of decomposers whose spawn will rot the bodies of the undercity for millennia to come." Then he drops a kerchief woven from the finest spider's silk to signal the start of the competition.

This is my first time away from the farmstead, and I'm unfamiliar with the layout of the undercity, but the lich has graciously provided us with a map. Most of the other competitors hustle off, but a moment spent surveying the lay of the land will save two moments lost in the swamps. As I plot my course, an elf shoulder checks me as he passes, causing the brittle parchment to split in two. "Watch where you're going!" I scream out and strum a kraul cuss on my wings. He glances back at me, barely able to see over the bulk of the mushroom cap shoulder pads adorning his gaudy blue robes. His mouth is obscured from view, but from the smirk his moodmarks are projecting, I'm sure he bumped me on purpose. Never mind.

"Woodwraiths!" I scream, drawing the attention of the gorgon running past me. We both stop, turn, and start running in the opposite direction, warning off the two elves and another kraul coming up behind us.

"Well, we definitely can't trust the map," the gorgon says. Her hair is riled up, but I risk a glance in her direction, just to see who I'm dealing with. She's young, skin a deep olive green. Eyes wise like someone three times her age.

"Don't worry about them," the kraul says. "Zegodonis was the only elf in this competition who was worth anything, and his bones are picking the flesh out of a woodwraith's teeth right about now. Complete ass. Even for an elf."

"From death, life," I repeat the Golgari mantra, trying to soothe my nerves. But I can't stop thinking about all those people. . .dead. It happened so fast. If I hadn't taken that moment to look the map over, my bones would be at the bottom of that bog, too.

"I'm Limin." He grins. He's got the most amazing gossamer wings, but they barely twitch when he speaks. Without them, his words sound so flat. So elven. He must sense my unease and offers up an explanation. "I grew up in the heart of the undercity. There, you have to fit in to survive."

But she's right, not twenty feet away, a small patch of the fungus grows up against a sewer grate. We each carefully collect a specimen and douse it with a casing elixir. Once the cocoon has hardened, I douse my specimen again, just to be safe.

"You saved our lives," Kata says to me when she's done. "I'm grateful, but don't get any ideas that we're working together. Only one of us is going to win this competition." She runs off, leaving Limin and me alone.

"She has a point. But that doesn't mean we can't make a temporary truce. If we share information and resources, we can all but guarantee a kraul will win. What do you say?" He sticks his hand out, the way elves do to seal a deal. I hold back my grimace as I press my hand into his. Where I'm from, a deal between kraul is sealed with the touching of mandibles. Maybe this makes him feel like he's fitting in, but it leaves me feeling like a stranger in my own body.

Together, we harvest young death caps, barely emerged from their veils, and pull firmly ahead of Kata and one of the elves. The other is not too far ahead. He looks back, tries to run faster, but he trips over a raised tree root and falls flat on his satchel.

"It's too late." He's stopped moaning already. He stands up, and we see the stick impaled through his canvas bag, leading right into his chest cavity. He looks up, admiring the trees around him as blood drips down his robes. It's like the pain doesn't even bother him.

"Which of these trees looks the highest to you?" he says, speech slurred. There are several varieties of the zombie fungus, but this one is the most aggressive and the quickest acting. It's already rewiring his brain, programming him to do the mushroom's bidding. His body is now an involuntary host to the next generation.

The elf chooses a tree and scales it like his body had been built for this sole purpose. He goes right to the very tip, then clamps down. A few hours from now, mushrooms will erupt from his eyes, nostrils, ears. . .feeding slowly upon his body tissue until they're ready to rain down spores upon the marshlands. I don't feel sorry for him. It's the way of life. . .not much different than how my siblings and I came to our mother. She was the one who'd nurtured us, who'd given of herself, but she wasn't our biological mother. We never knew her. She'd deposited her eggs into the giant beetle and spared not a single thought toward us again. I know that Mother's mind had been compromised, whispers of the invaders there prompting her to defend us. I know her screams were not really lullabies, but she loves us. And we love her. No family is perfect.

I'm so caught up in the memories of home that Limin has to drag me away. We work together to get the wolf's fang fungus growing from a rotting stump perched up high on a treacherous cliff face in Selesnyan territory. Limin's wings glisten as he flies up effortlessly to retrieve them while I pitch stones at the adolescent wurm trying to make a snack of him. Finally, we come to the last specimen on the list.

We're back in the belly of the undercity, my legs covered knee-high in brilliant green moss. I press deeper through the marsh, slowing down now as the insect song goes quiet, a warning from my kin that something dangerous is afoot. There's a mossdog den ahead, entrance covered in vines, bioluminescent lichen, and the devouring angel mushrooms we seek. A quick dip under the water, and I've hidden my scent from the dogs. I motion to Limin to do the same. If they're sleeping, we'll have a chance.

The caps are white along the top and feathered like angels' wings with rubbery black rims beneath. They're not poisonous like the death cap and wolf's fang. These cause severe hallucinations that drive you to kill everyone in sight, and then you snap to an hour later, feeling perfectly fine, no side effects except the blood of twenty-eight people on your hands.

One of the mossdog's tentacles shifts, and I instantly stop what I'm doing. I hold my breath until the tentacle settles. Limin's buzzing overhead, right outside the cave, gossamer wings glistening, but all I can think about is how he's spreading his scent around and any second the mossdogs are going to notice.

"I'm sure," I whisper back. Griffin's paw looks so similar to devouring angel that even some seasoned spore druids have trouble telling them apart, but my brother had taught me to spot the slight difference in the shape of their caps.

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