Deathroot Voices
Two short drabbles featuring the sorta-characters of Deathborn: the fungi! Fern can hear them talking but they don't say anything interesting until later on...
Very mild spoilers for Deathborn ahead.
There was the first death alley Fern had ever encountered. It loomed ominously overhead, the shadows of petrified bugs clinging to plant stems warning them of the danger ahead. It didn’t look all that special, though, just the normal amount of horrible and foul smelling. Not the deathroots from Kingdom Wren, then.
As the swarm moved to avoid the dead and dying insects, Fern heard them whispering amongst each other.
“And so, now we die.”
“Starv’ed.”
“Noble deaths, we all succumb to.”
“Aye true. Look at that ant down there, it stares so strangely.”
“We’ll ne’er know what it thinks. Sad.”
“The next iterations may tell us. Should any of us be favored by the Lucelua.”
“Should we be! If these jaws still worked to pray with…”
Iteration? Lucelua? Prayer! Fern had no idea what they were talking about and wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Still, she had heard that rooted ants could sometimes be heard babbling to themselves when they were on the brink of death. It must have been deathroot-tongue then… And oh! The thought that deathroots were silently talking about their victims made sense in hindsight, but was frightening nonetheless. Was she really the only one hearing this?
The swarm had moved on before Fern could hear much else.
“Scared?” blue-shell teased her as they passed it, “Is it your first time seeing one of those?”
“It’s awful,” Fern said.
“Of course. I may have been a little mean just now. You learn to pay your respects from a safe distance and continue work.”
“I guess it’s all you can do.”
“It is.”
“It is the deathant! Strange creature, listen! Listen!”
How could Fern resist? She paused and angled her antennae towards them.
“That villain,” one of the fungi seemed to sneer, “So they claim to be working in Lucelua’s name, but they work against us! If that cluster of misery gets its way, many of Lucelua’s children will perish, and many ants of course. The great-decayer would never wish such fate on even our prey.”
And then it spoke no more.
Lucelua, Fern thought, I still have no idea what—who that is. But she sounds important. Is it a she? It might not even be a mushroom. And, most importantly, what was she supposed to do with this information? What fate would make a “great-decayer” shudder?
In truth, the mushrooms had no idea what Fern had heard from the strangeroot, and whether she’d believed what she’d heard. They thought it best to warn her either way. Not that she needed the warning that it was bad news, but they’re fungi, how should they know what an ant knows?
So Fern left, unsure of what to do, and growing steadily more convinced she ought to tell someone about what she was hearing.