Chapter 14: A Light in the Mushroom Forest
The smuggler’s cut eventually spilled them out into a cavern so vast its ceiling vanished into a haze of their own ragged breath. The air changed, becoming thick, damp, and sweetly rotten. Before them stretched a forest. Not of trees, but of fungi. Gigantic, bioluminescent mushrooms in pulsating shades of electric blue, sickly green, and deep, phasing violet towered like silent sentinels. Their caps were broad as banquet tables, their stalks thicker than Scoffer’s legs. The ground was a spongy, glowing carpet of lichen and smaller, blinking toadstools.
“Well, that’s no’ natural,” Minnie whispered, her tea trolley squeaking in protest as it sank slightly into the soft earth.
“Nothing here is,” Ulrika said, her voice tight. “Do not touch the caps. Do not breathe deeply if you can help it. The air is saturated with spores. We move quickly and quietly.”
They entered the forest. Light did not fall here; it emanated from every surface in a constant, silent throb. The silence was profound, broken only by the squelch of their footsteps and the distant, echoing drip of water. The path was not a path, but a winding series of clearings between the colossal fungal trunks. The sweet, cloying scent grew stronger, coating the back of their throats.
Polly felt it first. A lightness in her head, a tingling in her fingertips that had nothing to do with fear. The world’s edges softened. The pulsing lights began to swim and streak across her vision like radiant paint. She blinked, hard. “Something’s… off.”
Tulip giggled, a sound like wind chimes. She reached out and stroked a nearby stalk, her golden skin taking on a blue sheen from its glow. “It’s singing. Can’t you hear it? A low, lovely song about decay and rebirth.”
Brutehilde shook her head, but the motion made the cavern sway. Her immense strength meant nothing against the chemical invasion in her lungs. The iron balls on her plaits seemed to weigh a ton. “Keep moving,” she grunted, but her voice was slurry.
Dravion stumbled, his dramatics amplified tenfold. He fell against a giant azure mushroom, sliding down its stalk. “The melancholy! It is a physical vapor! It seeps into the soul and lays bare all one’s tragic poetry!” He looked across the clearing, his eyes wide and swimming. “Honeymuff! My tiny, winged muse! Why do you flutter away from my stanzas?”
Honeymuff was, in fact, fluttering in delirious circles around the cap of a gigantic, penis-shaped morel that throbbed with a particularly urgent orange light. “He’s so tall!” she squealed. “And so veiny! And look at his magnificent, spongy head! I must know him!”
“Adulteress!” Dravion wailed, tearing at his fine shirt. “You carry the orc’s bastard and now you proposition a fungus? My heart is a withered truffle!”
Scoffer just laughed, a great booming sound that shook loose a cloud of glowing spores from a canopy high above. They showered down like phosphorescent snow. He opened his mouth and caught some on his tongue. “Tingly.”
The effect was instantaneous. A wave of pure, uncomplicated euphoria washed through the group. Tanna sank to her knees, a beatific smile on her face as she clumsily unbuckled her breastplate. “It’s so heavy. I just want to feel the light on my skin.” The silver metal clattered to the spongy floor.
Ulrika tried to maintain order. “You must resist! This is a defence mechanism! It clouds the mind!” But her own words sounded distant. She saw not her motley charges, but the rigid, terrified recruits from the Tower of Unutterable Suffering on their first day. The memory was sharp, painful, and then softened by the spore-induced haze into something almost fond.
“I love you,” Tulip said suddenly, turning to Polly with eyes full of swirling green and blue light. “I love the grease in your mohawk and the scowl on your face and the way your knuckles are always split. I want to marry you right here inside this giant mushroom.”
Polly, her defences melted by the spores, didn’t offer a sarcastic retort. She grabbed Tulip’s face and kissed her, hard and deep. It tasted of earth and sugar and neon. “Shut up and fuck me, you hippie bitch,” she breathed, the command laced with a vulnerability she never showed.
They fell onto the glowing lichen, a tangle of fishnets and green hair. Polly yanked Tulip’s simple robes open, exposing her small, perfect breasts with nipples the colour of fresh buds. She fastened her mouth on one, sucking greedily, while her hand shoved roughly between Tulip’s thighs. The druidess was already soaking wet, her cunt hot and slick against Polly’s calloused fingers.
“Yes, oh, right there, you rough little bastard,” Tulip gasped, arching her back. The forest pulsed around them in time with her racing heart.
Polly worked two fingers inside her, curling them up to find that sweet, spongy spot. She fucked her with quick, ruthless strokes, the sound obscenely wet in the quiet cavern. She used her thumb to grind circles on Tulip’s clit, rough and insistent. “This your idea of a wedding?” Polly growled, watching Tulip’s face contort in pleasure. “Getting your cunt drilled in a mould forest?”
“Perfect wedding,” Tulip panted. “Now make me come. Make your wife come.”
Meanwhile, Honeymuff had landed upon the gigantic morel. She pressed her entire body against its spongy, orange head, writhing in ecstasy. “I take you, O Stalwart Shroom, as my lawful wedded husband!” she proclaimed. She guided the tip of the massive fungus between her tiny legs. With a cry of joy, she sank down onto it, impaling herself on a smooth, yielding protrusion the size of her own torso. She rode it fervently, her wings a blur.
Dravion sobbed into his hands. Scoffer lay back and wanked as he watched, guffawing and shouting, "That's it! Cuck me, baby! Make me cry!"
Brutehilde sat heavily, watching the scene with a bleary, affectionate smile. Minnie patted her knee and poured a cup of tea that shimmered with floating spores. “It’ll all look better after a nice cuppa, dear.”
Ulrika stood over them all, her discipline warring with the spores. The hallucinations twisted her memories. She saw Brutehilde not as a bawdy tavern keeper, but as a steadfast general holding a crumbling line. She saw Polly and Tulip not as debauched lovers, but as elite shock troops, fierce and loyal. The respect was real, earned in the mud and blood of their journey, now unveiled by the fungal truth-gas.
“You are all… remarkably resilient,” Ulrika said, her voice uncharacteristically soft. “In the Tower, we broke spirits with precision tools. Whips, clamps, psychological barbs. You… you have been broken by the world itself, repeatedly. And yet you remain. You adapt. You fuck fungi and marry them.” She almost smiled. “It is a different kind of strength. A messier one. I find I prefer it.”
Tanna stumbled over, her naked body gleaming with sweat and spore-dust. She wrapped her arms around Ulrika’s waist, nuzzling her sternum. “I love you, Mistress. You’re so strict and it makes my pussy ache.”
Ulrika stiffened, then gently put a hand on the knight’s head. The confession, born of spores, held a kernel of the truth Tanna could never soberly articulate.
Polly drove Tulip over the edge with a final, deep thrust and a vicious rub of her thumb. Tulip screamed, her body seizing, her channel clamping rhythmically around Polly’s fingers. As Tulip trembled through her climax, Polly pulled her soaked fingers free and shoved them into her own mouth, tasting her lover’s essence mixed with the tang of the forest.
The lights around them began to pulse erratically. A deep, subsonic tremor ran through the cavern floor. The euphoria started to fray at the edges, sharpening into something like anxious clarity. The spores were thinning, or their bodies were adapting. The moment of vulnerable truth was passing.
Scoffer lurched to his feet, his clown shoes sinking deep. “Fun’s over,” he rumbled, his eyes clearing. “The forest doesn’t like the noise. We need to move. Now.”
From the depths between the glowing giants, multiple pairs of chitinous, reflective eyes clicked open.
From the depths between the glowing giants, multiple pairs of chitinous, reflective eyes clicked open.
A skittering sound followed, a dry rustle of countless legs moving in unison. The closest beetle hauled itself into the pulsing light, its body the size of a warhound. Its carapace was a slick, oily black that drank the bioluminescence. Two serrated mandibles, each as long as Tanna’s arm, clacked together with a sound like cracking stone.
“Move!” Brutehilde bellowed, the last of the spore-fog burning from her system by pure adrenaline. She hauled Tulip upright with one hand and snatched up Tanna’s breastplate with the other, shoving it at the stunned knight. Polly was already on her feet, brass knuckles snapping onto her fists with a metallic click-click.
They ran. The forest, once a dreamscape, became a labyrinth of hostile shadows. The beetles gave chase, their movements startlingly fast for their bulk, scrambling over the spongy ground and fungal trunks with terrifying agility. The air filled with the screech of chitin on stone and their hungry, chittering cries.
“Left!” Ulrika commanded, her voice a whip-crack of authority. She’d drawn a long, thin blade that hummed with a violet energy. A beetle lunged from a side passage, mandibles snapping for her leg. Tanna, half-armoured, moved with instinctual grace. Her silver sword flashed in an arc, severing one pincer with a wet crunch. Ichor, phosphorescent green and stinking of ammonia, sprayed across the lichen.
Scoffer didn’t bother with weapons. He turned, planted his clown shoes, and caught the next charging beetle by its massive head. Muscles corded in his arms and back as he roared, lifting the squirming, clicking horror clean off the ground. He brought it down across his knee with a catastrophic snap of its plastron. Guts spilled out, glowing vilely.
They fought in ragged, desperate bursts. Polly ducked under a slicing pincer and drove her brass-knuckled fist directly into a beetle’s compound eye. It popped, spraying viscous fluid. “Fuck you looking at?” she spat, kicking its shuddering body aside. Tulip summoned thorny vines from the very fungus beneath them, which tangled and slowed a pursuing pair, giving Brutehilde the opening to crush their heads with two mighty swings of a fetched fungal stalk.
The chase was relentless. Minnie’s trolley squealed in protest as she wheeled it furiously, somehow keeping pace. “Almost… out… of… the… breakfast blend!” she panted.
Pulling themselves together, they hurried forward, occasionally having to stop to fight and kill pursuing beetles, huge and pincered. After several hours, they at last had outpaced the beetles and discovered a raised mound. The spores were thinner at its peak.
They stumbled onto the rocky incline gasping. The constant, sweet pressure of the spores lessened with each step upward. The mound was a barren island of rough grey stone in the sea of glowing fungus, and at its peak, the air was almost clear. They collapsed, heaving, listening as the skittering sounds faded back into the deep forest below. They were scratched, splattered with glowing ichor, and trembling with exhaustion.
Honeymuff wailed tragically about her lost mushroom husband. “He was so virile! So spongy! Our union was brief but radiant! I am a widow, a tragic, dripping widow!”
Dravion hesitated, then opened his pack to reveal that he had plucked it and brought it along for her. The giant morel, now slightly wilted, lay within his pack like a stolen relic. His face was a mask of profound misery. “I could not bear… to see your joy left to rot in that damnable grove. Even if it was… floral.”
Honeymuff’s wailing ceased instantly. She zipped over, her tiny face alight. “You sentimental bastard!” She seized the mushroom, which was nearly as long as she was tall, and hugged it. “My darling! Reunited!”
Without a moment’s shame, she laid upon the cool stone, spread her tiny legs, and positioned the broad, spongy head of the morel against her slick opening. She rode it with cheerful vigour, her moans high and buzzing. The group watched, too tired to react. The mushroom’s porous flesh absorbed her juices as she ground against it, her climax quick and shattering, leaving her sighing with contentment on the stone.
Dravion watched glumly as she cheerfully masturbated with it, then submissively agreed to continue carrying it for her after she had finished. "Alas, I too am a humiliated cuckold. I must write a poem about it."
“It’s… damp,” he murmured, staring at the moisture-smeared fungus as Honeymuff handed it back.
“That’s love, you miserable ponce,” Polly croaked, lying flat on her back. She then rolled her head toward Ulrika. The fight had left a hot, restless energy crackling under her skin. “Mistress. I need to feel something else. Something sharp and clean.”
Ulrika looked down at her, the strict governess fully returned. She saw the challenge, the need for punishment and release in Polly’s eyes. “You are filthy from battle and that fungal whore.”
“Yeah,” Polly said, a feral grin spreading. “So fucking clean me up.”
Ulrika nodded. She unbuckled her belt, a thick strap of black leather. “On your hands and knees. Now.” Polly obeyed, the rough stone scraping her palms. Ulrika’s movements were methodical. She pulled Polly’s plaid skirt up, yanked her underwear down to her thighs, and exposed her pale, battle-marked ass with its onyx stud. Tulip watched, breath catching, her own hand drifting between her legs.
The first lash of the belt was a crack that echoed off the mound. A bright red line bloomed across Polly’s skin. She hissed, pushing back against the pain. “That all you got?”
Ulrika’s next strike was lower, catching the tender crease where thigh met buttock. Polly grunted, her knuckles whitening. Ulrika laid down a rhythm, not a frenzy, but a precise, brutal calibration of sting and throb. Each stroke layered a new line of fire, crisscrossing until Polly’s ass was a heated canvas of welts. Her cunt, accessible and dripping, clenched visibly with each impact.
“You fight like a gutter rat,” Ulrika stated, delivering a searing blow to the undercurve of Polly’s left cheek. “You fuck like a starving beast. You are undisciplined and crude.”
“Fuck… yes…” Polly panted, sweat dripping from her nose. The pain was clarifying, forging the chaotic adrenaline into a single, white-hot point of focus between her legs.
Ulrika dropped the belt. She knelt behind Polly, one hand gripping the back of her neck, pushing her face to the stone. With the other, she spit directly onto Polly’s swollen, exposed clit. Then she drove two fingers inside her, rough and deep. Polly cried out, a raw, unfiltered sound. Ulrika fucked her with hard, punishing thrusts, her fingers curling to press relentlessly against Polly’s front wall. Her thumb mashed circles on Polly’s clit, the pressure brutal and direct.
“Come,” Ulrika commanded, her voice a whisper in Polly’s ear. “Come on the hand of your mistress, you cheap, sharp little tool.”
Polly shattered. Her body bucked against Ulrika’s imprisoning hand, her cunt pulsing violently around the invading fingers. A guttural, continuous shout was torn from her throat as the orgasm ripped through her, part punishment, part reward, total possession. Ulrika held her through it, until Polly’s cries subsided into shaky gasps against the rock.
Ulrika withdrew her glistening fingers, wiping them calmly on Polly’s discarded skirt. “Clean enough.”
Breathing heavily, Polly slumped onto her side, a spent and satisfied smile on her face. Tulip immediately crawled over, kissing her shoulder.
"Now there's something you don't see every day ... more's the pity," grinned Scoffer, admiringly.
From their vantage, Brutehilde scanned the darkness beyond the mound. The forest’s glow thinned ahead, giving way to a new geography of jagged, wind-scoured rock and the distant, hollow sound of a vast, empty space. A cold, scentless draft now lifted the hairs on her arm.
“The Fungal Forest ends there,” Ulrika said, following her gaze and fastening her belt. “What lies beyond is older. It does not grow. It merely… exists.”
The darkness there looked hungry.
The darkness there looked hungry. It was a different quality of dark than the forest’s pulsating glow—a pure, absorbent void that promised depth and cold. The draft that issued from it carried the taste of stone dust and absolute stillness.
"We halt here," Brutehilde declared, her voice final. She dropped her pack with a thud that echoed dully off the mound. "My clogs are full of glowing beetle shit and my skull feels like a spore-riddled gourd. We camp."
No one argued. The mound’s peak was perhaps thirty feet across, a precarious island but a defensible one. Minnie, with a practicality that defied all realms, was already unpacking a small spirit-stove from her trolley. The blue flame hissed to life, a tiny, sane point of light against the vast, breathing dark of the cavern beyond. The smell of cooking oats and a peppermint tea blend began to gently war with the lingering sweetness of the fungi and the coppery scent of dried ichor.
They ate in worn-out silence, the simple food anchoring them. Scoffer devoured his portion in two gulps and lay back, his massive hand resting on his belly, the leather posing pouch straining. Honeymuff, the wilted mushroom husband resting beside her, nibbled on a crumb and hummed. Dravion scribbled in a journal, stealing glances at the pixie and sighing.
Ulrika stood at the mound’s edge, her silhouette sharp against the nothingness. She did not eat. She watched. After a long while, she turned. The firelight caught the planes of her face, softening nothing.
"You fight well," she said, not to anyone, to the group. "For a scattered band of surface-dwelling misfits." She walked back into their circle, the sound of her boots on rock deliberate. She sat, spine straight, on a flat stone. "In the Tower of Unutterable Suffering, we are taught that strength is a quantifiable currency. It is measured in obedience extracted, in pain inflicted without flinching, in the perfection of a controlled scream."
She picked up a discarded beetle pincer, turning the chitinous curve in her hands.
"I was the seventh daughter of House Grimquim. A spare of a spare. My options were the cloister, the breeding hall, or the military. I chose the blade." Her voice was matter-of-fact, a tactical report. "I was good at it. Better than my brothers. I won my first command not on merit, but by seducing a general’s wife and using the resulting scandal as leverage. I cemented it by personally flaying the former commander, a rival cousin, for the crime of tactical incompetence. The skin made a useful map case."
The fire popped. No one moved.
"My appointment as Governess of Agonies came after I pacified the Ghoul-Gnome uprising in the Vermicular Vaults. The official report cites ‘exemplary use of psychological terraforming.’ I buried their king alive in a tomb filled with his own still-living courtiers. Their chittering drove him insane before the air ran out." She dropped the pincer. It clattered on the stone. "This is the currency of my people. Stratified, polished, and utterly devoid of warmth."
She looked at Brutehilde, who was methodically cleaning beetle gore from her iron-ball plaits. "You lead because they follow you. Not from fear of your title, but from trust in your size and your sheer, stubborn will to get back to a tavern." Her gaze shifted to Polly and Tulip, curled together like feral cats. "You love without protocol. You fuck without strategy. It is messy. It is inefficient." A pause. "It is alive."
Finally, she looked at Tanna, whose blue eyes were wide in the firelight. "You were given to me as a punishment, a simpering surface knight to break. Your innocence was a project. But your devotion... it is not manufactured. It is given. That is a weakness in the Tower. Here, it is a strange, solid thing."
She fell silent. The confession hung in the air, more intimate than any sexual act they’d shared. It was the raw bedrock of her, exposed.
Polly uncurled herself from Tulip. She stood, stretched, and the firelight gleamed off the fresh welts on her ass. She walked over to Ulrika, not with submission, but with a predator’s casual grace. Tulip and Tanna followed, rising as one.
"Cool story, Mistress," Polly said, her voice low. "Now shut up and take your thanks."
Ulrika’s stern expression didn’t change, but a flicker of something—anticipation, challenge—passed through her eyes. Polly nudged her boot. "On your hands and knees. Turn around."
For a heartbeat, Ulrika, the Colonel of the Tower, hesitated. Then, with a slow exhalation, she complied. The stiff leather of her uniform creaked as she assumed the position, her back to the trio, her ass presented toward the fire’s warmth. Polly knelt behind her, pulling Ulrika’s trousers and underclothes down to her knees in one rough motion. The dark, perfect spheres of her ass were revealed, unmarked, a stark contrast to Polly’s own ruined skin.
"Pristine," Polly murmured, almost a taunt. She spat onto her fingers, the glob landing on Ulrika’s tight pucker. "Let’s fix that."
Tanna knelt to Ulrika’s left, her face reverent. Tulip took the right, her expression one of druidic curiosity. Polly leaned in first, her tongue flat and broad as a cat’s, and licked a thick, wet stripe from Ulrika’s perineum up the cleft of her ass. She zeroed in on the dark, clenched star of Ulrika’s anus, circling it with blunt pressure before spearing the tip of her tongue inside.
Ulrika gasped, a sharp intake of breath. Her spine remained rigid, but her head dropped.
Tanna moaned as if she were the one being touched. She buried her face in Ulrika’s left cheek, kissing and nipping at the flesh before her own tongue sought out the same hole Polly was working. Their tongues met, slick and sliding over Ulrika’s opening, pushing against the tight ring of muscle together. The sound was wet, obscene, and utterly focused.
Tulip joined, her approach more languorous. She licked and suckled at Ulrika’s outer lips, gathering the moisture that had begun to seep from her cunt, before dragging her tongue up to join the others. Three tongues lapped and probed at Ulrika’s asshole, stretching it, fucking it with slow, relentless insistence. Saliva dripped down Ulrika’s thighs.
"Fuck," Ulrika hissed, the word forced through clenched teeth. Her controlled composure was cracking. Her hips gave a minute, involuntary thrust back against the triple assault.
Polly pulled back, her mouth glistening. "She’s opening up. Tanna, get in there. Really taste your Mistress."
Tanna, eager and worshipful, pressed her face deep. She flattened her tongue and pushed, breaching Ulrika’s sphincter with a soft, popping sensation. She fucked her with her tongue, in and out, shallow then deep, humming with pleasure. Ulrika’s hands scraped against the stone. A low, ragged groan escaped her.
Tulip moved lower, her mouth finding Ulrika’s cunt. She sucked the swollen clit into her mouth, flicking it with her tongue while two of her fingers slid easily into the soaking channel. She fucked her in time with Tanna’s tongue in her ass.
The duality of sensations—the rough, invasive penetration of her ass and the sweet, rhythmic fucking of her cunt—unmade Ulrika Grimquim. Her body began to shake. Controlled, precise breaths became ragged gasps. "Yes... you... filthy animals..." she choked out, the insult a benediction.
Polly watched, then shoved Tanna’s face aside. "My turn." She replaced Tanna’s tongue with her own, driving it deeper, harder, scraping with a roughness that bordered on pain. She rimmed Ulrika with a brutal, claiming intensity, as if trying to scour the Dark Elf’s entire history from her insides.
Ulrika came with a sound like a breaking cord. Her body arched, then convulsed, a violent, shuddering release that milked Tulip’s fingers and shook against Polly’s relentless tongue. She screamed, a raw, unfettered sound that echoed out into the waiting darkness, utterly unlike the controlled screams of her Tower. It was a real sound. A messy one.
She collapsed forward onto her elbows, breathing in shattered gulps. Polly, Tulip, and Tanna pulled back, their mouths and chins slick. They stayed kneeling around her, a silent guard of honour.
After a long moment, Ulrika pushed herself up. She pulled her clothes up with hands that trembled only slightly. She did not look at them. She looked past the fire, toward the hungry dark, and a ghost of something like a smile touched her lips.
"Tomorrow," she said, her voice regaining its steel, but warmer now, annealed. "Tomorrow, we walk into that."