Chapter 1: The Forest Awakening
kaelin finds beos adorable, just wants to protect that innocence. beos is just babbling but her common is terrible, kaelin just find it endearing
The world below smelled of cool stone and rich, living decay. Beos loved that smell. It smelled like home. The soft, blue-green light of the glowing mosses and crystalline formations seeped into the wide cavern, illuminating the silent, shuffling forms of the myconids. Their caps bobbed gently as they tended to phosphorescent fungal gardens or communed in quiet clusters, exchanging pulses of thought and emotion that hung in the air like fragrant mist.
Beos hummed a matching tone, feeling the sovereign’s gentle inquiry brush against her mind. It wasn’t words. It was a composite of warmth, concern, and an image of the world above—the bright, dangerous place.
I’m just going to look, she thought back, the way she’d been taught, shaping her intention and sending it outward. A sense of wet leaves. The tart promise of blackberries.
A wave of paternal caution washed over her, tinted with reluctant acceptance. The sovereign, a towering figure with a cap like a shelf of polished oak, touched her shoulder with a delicate, gilled hand. He clicked softly, a sound that meant careful.
“Careful,” Beos whispered aloud, delighting in the shape of the Common word on her tongue. She knew so few of them, mostly from old books waterlogged and left in a deeper cave. She practiced them when she was alone.
She moved through the winding tunnels, her bare feet silent on the smooth stone. The fungal growths on her body, the delicate shelf of chanterelles tracing her left ribcage, the soft pads of lichen on her right shoulder, they all drank in the humid air. The broad, cream-colored cap that fused seamlessly to the left side of her skull and forehead didn’t obscure her vision; it was just there, part of her, feeling the subtle drafts of the upper world long before she reached the exit.
She pushed through the final curtain of root and veined fungus, and the light changed.
It wasn’t the gentle bioluminescence of home. This light was assaultive, golden, and full of splintered shadows. It made her large, iridescent eyes water. She stood at the mouth of the cave, hidden by a thicket of hawthorn, and just breathed. She didn’t need to, not really, but she loved the process. The air here was a riot of information—pollen, animal musk, sun-warmed pine resin, and the profound, sweet rot of a fallen log.
With a grin that felt like it might split her face, she stepped into the clearing.
It was a small, perfect space. Moss cloaked everything in emerald velvet. A fallen oak, half consumed by the earth, cradled clusters of bright white mushrooms. And there, where the light pooled thickest, was the blackberry bush. The fruits were obscenely plump, near-black, each one a tiny nebula of flavor. She plucked one, and the juice stained her pale, glowing fingers a deep violet. She popped it in her mouth, and the burst of tart-sweetness was so intense it was almost a sound. A happy, trilling click escaped her throat, a myconid sound of pure joy.
She was reaching for another when the world snapped.
A sharp, dry crack split the air, followed by the shuddering crash of a branch falling through canopy leaves some twenty paces away. Beos froze, her head tilted. It was a new noise. Not a tree falling of its own accord. This had a different signature—violent, intentional.
Before she could process it, the undergrowth at the far edge of the clearing parted.
A human emerged.
Beos stared. She knew the shape from pictures, but the reality was… different. More angular. Smellier. Of sweat, oiled metal, and something sour like old fear. The human was tall, clad in rough, dun-colored clothes, with a long, dark tube of wood and metal held in its hands. A face, sharp and weathered under a battered hat, was turned toward the fallen branch.
Then the face turned, and saw her.
The human’s eyes—a flinty grey—widened. The tube in its hands swung up, the open end pointing directly at Beos’s chest. It trembled.
Beos didn’t know what the tube was. She focused on the eyes. They were wide with shock, yes, but there was something else flickering in there, beneath the alarm. A calculation. A re-evaluation. Beos took a hesitant step forward, curious. The blackberry juice was sticky on her chin.
“Don’t move!” The voice was a strained command, rough but unmistakably high. A woman’s voice.
A woman. Beos savored the word. Woman. Like in the books. She was looking at a woman.
“You…” the hunter breathed, the gun steadying slightly but still aimed. Her gaze swept over Beos, from the cascade of ink-black hair, over the rounded softness of her body draped in simple woven lichen-fiber, to the bare, dirty feet. It lingered on the large, luminous eyes, full of unguarded wonder. Then it jumped to the side of Beos’s head, to the wide, cream-colored cap. The hunter’s brow furrowed in utter confusion. “What in the seven hells are you supposed to be? Are you wearing a… a mushroom for a hat?”
Beos processed the stream of sounds. She recognized “you” and “hat.” She touched the cap gently. “Not hat,” she said, her voice softer, more melodic than the hunter’s, unused to the air. “Is me.”
The hunter blinked. The initial shock was thawing, replaced by a dawning, bewildered curiosity. The gun’s muzzle dipped another inch. She was a practical woman, used to the stark realities of the forest—blood, fur, and survival. This… this was something else entirely. This was a short, chubby girl with skin that seemed to hold a faint moonlight, staring at her with the open fascination of a fawn, claiming a giant fungus was part of her face. It was absurd. It should have been terrifying.
But it wasn’t. The girl’s round face was profoundly innocent, and the way she stood, slightly leaning forward as if pulled by curiosity, triggered a deep, latent instinct in the hunter. An instinct that had nothing to do with tracking or killing. She had a type, always had—the soft, kind ones, the ones built for hugs and laughter, not the sharp-edged town girls who simpered at her. This wild thing in the clearing was the most extreme version of that type she could have ever imagined.
“It’s… part of you?” the hunter asked, her own voice lowering, losing its edge.
Beos nodded vigorously. She took another step, now only a few paces away. She could smell the hunter properly now—the sharp tang of adrenaline fading, leaving the scent of leather, green sap, and a faint, underlying warmth. It was a good smell. Complex. “You are woman,” Beos stated, proud of her identification.
A startled laugh burst from the hunter’s lips.“Yeah. Yeah, I am. Name’s Kaelin.” She slowly, deliberately, moved her thumb to a piece of metal on the gun. There was a soft click. She lowered the weapon entirely, letting it point at the ground. Her shoulders relaxed. “What’s your name? Where did you come from?”
“Beos,” she said. She pointed a violet-stained finger back toward the cave mouth, hidden in shadow. “Home is there.” She looked at the long tube in Kaelin’s hands. “What is?”
“This? It’s a gun,” Kaelin said. She hefted it. “For hunting.”
“Hunting,” Beos repeated. The concept was familiar—the myconids gathered nutrients, took what was offered by the forest’s decay. But this felt different. The violence of the earlier crack echoed in the word. She looked from the gun to Kaelin’s face, to the fading alarm in her grey eyes, now replaced by a searching, intense look Beos didn’t understand. The woman was staring at her mouth, at the berry stain, then back to her eyes.
Kaelin cleared her throat, shifting her weight. “You shouldn’t be out here alone. It’s not safe. There are… other things. Worse than me.”
Beos just smiled, a radiant, uncomplicated expression. “You are first. First woman I see.”
Kaelin’s breath caught. The statement, delivered with such pristine honesty, dismantled the last of her defenses. This wasn’t a forest spirit or a monster. This was a lost woman, a strangely overgrown, utterly captivating innocent. Her heart, a hardened muscle from seasons of solitude, gave a peculiar, heavy thud.
She slung the gun over her shoulder by a strap, making a show of it being harmless. “Well,” Kaelin said, her voice gone strangely soft. “The first one you see, and I come out pointing a firearm at you. Hell of an introduction.” She managed a lopsided grin. “You like those blackberries?”
Beos looked at the bush, then back at Kaelin, nodding eagerly.
“Here,” Kaelin said, stepping slowly closer. She moved to the opposite side of the bush, her movements careful, non-threatening. She plucked a perfect berry from a high cane and held it out across the foliage. “A peace offering.”
Beos reached out. Her pale, glowing fingers brushed against Kaelin’s calloused, sun-browned ones as she took the fruit. The contact sent a jolt through Beos—a synaptic storm of new sensation. The rough texture of skin, the living warmth, the pulse of blood so close to the surface. It was overwhelming. A sharp, delighted gasp escaped her, and her iridescent eyes flashed with a light that didn’t come from the sun.
Kaelin watched, mesmerized, as Beos put the berry in her mouth, as she shuddered with the sheer pleasure of the taste combined with the echo of that touch. The hunter’s throat went dry. She’d come out for deer, for pelts and meat. She had not come out for this.
The silence between them wasn’t empty. It was full of the clearing’s hum, the distant call of a jay, and the sheer, vibrating novelty of each other. Kaelin watched the play of emotion on Beos’s face—the unguarded delight, the confusion, the open curiosity—and felt something in her chest soften and then clench protectively. This woman, or whatever she was, had clearly never been warned about anything. She was like a bright, shiny thing left out in the woods, begging to be stolen or broken.
“You live in a cave?” Kaelin asked, keeping her voice gentle, as if talking to a skittish animal. Or a child.
“Home is… under. Soft dark. Song is nice. Clicks.” Beos’s face lit up as she struggled for the words, her hands painting vague, lovely shapes in the air. “The Sovereign… he… thinks warm. Like sun-on-stone. But in here.” She patted her own chest, over a small cluster of pale oyster mushrooms that clung to her collarbone.
Kaelin didn’t understand half of it. Sovereign? Song-clicks? But the way Beos babbled, her large eyes earnest, her sentences falling apart and rebuilding themselves in charmingly wrong ways, was utterly endearing. It wasn’t stupidity. It was a whole different way of being, tumbled out into a language it was never meant for.
“Right,” Kaelin said, nodding as if it made perfect sense. “Sounds… cozy.”
Beos beamed, taking the word as a great compliment. “Cozy! Yes! The glow-moss is cozy.” She abruptly looked worried. “Your home? Not cozy?”
“My shack’s about as cozy as a wood box,” Kaelin chuckled. “But it’s dry. Has a door. Keeps things out.” She gestured vaguely at the deeper woods.
Beos followed her gesture, her expression turning to wonder. “Things? Many things are good. The moss-deer are soft. Their thoughts are… quiet grass.”
Moss-deer. Kaelin had a sudden, vivid image of the elegant, lichen-dappled forest elk, and the memory of her gun’s report minutes ago felt like a vulgar shout. This girl didn’t just live in the forest; she conversed with it. The protective urge swelled, sharp and anxious.
“Some things aren’t so good, Beos. Men with guns. Wolves, sometimes. The… the things that come with the deeper dark.” She wasn’t sure why she added that last part. Superstition. But in these woods, superstition often walked on real feet.
Beos just blinked, absorbing. “Dark is friend. Dark is safe.”
“Not up here,” Kaelin said firmly. The simplicity was terrifying. She made a decision, one that bypassed her usual cautious logic entirely. “You shouldn’t stay out here alone. Not now. It’s going to storm.” She glanced at the sky; it was true. The light was taking on a bruised, yellow cast.
“Storm,” Beos repeated, tasting the word. She looked thrilled. “Water from the sky! Loud song!”
“Yeah, a real loud song that soaks you to the bone and can hide other noises.” Kaelin shouldered her gun fully, the movement practical, final. “Come on. You can… see my home. The wood box. It’s closer than your cave from here.” She didn’t actually know that, but the cave mouth looked like nothing but a shadow in rock, and she couldn’t bear the thought of turning her back and leaving this luminous, chattering creature here.
Beos’s iridescent eyes widened. “See your home?” She said it with the reverence of someone offered a sacred relic. Then a flicker of something like duty passed over her face. “I must… tell. The Sovereign. He thinks worry. I feel it.” She touched her temple.
Kaelin had no framework for telepathic mushroom fathers, but the concern was clear. “Okay. You go tell him. Then come back. I’ll wait here.” She leaned against the mossy log, trying to look casual, non-threatening. “Be quick, yeah?”
Beos nodded, a serious little dip of her head that made the broad cap sway. She turned and practically skipped to the cave mouth, her movements silent and fluid. She disappeared into the shadow without a backward glance.
Kaelin let out a long, shaky breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Her hands were trembling. What in the seven hells was she doing? Inviting a forest sprite home? She scrubbed a hand over her face. Not a sprite. A woman. A strange, overgrown, partially fungal woman who spoke like a three-year-old poet and looked at the world as if it had just been painted.
She was adorable. And so profoundly vulnerable it made Kaelin’s teeth ache.
A few minutes later, Beos emerged, a smile on her face. “He thinks… caution. But also… curiosity. Like a new root finding stone.” She bounded back to the blackberry bush, picking one last berry. “I told him I go see wood box. He… sends this.” She concentrated, and a faint, sweet, earthy smell of loam and reassurance emanated from her. It was clearly meant as comfort.
“Great,” Kaelin said, pushing off the log. “That’s… good.” She started leading the way out of the clearing, onto a narrow game trail. “Stay close. And step where I step. Fewer snaps.”
Beos followed with intense concentration, meticulously placing her bare feet in Kaelin’s footprints. “Why fewer snaps?”
“So nothing hears us.”
“Oh.” Beos was silent for two whole paces. “The moss-deer hear always. They know my step. It is… friend-step.”
“Yeah, well, I’m not worried about the moss-deer,” Kaelin muttered. She navigated them around a patch of brambles, holding a thorny branch back for Beos. Beos stared at her hand holding the branch, then at her face, as if this simple act of courtesy was a profound magic.
“Thank you,” Beos said, so softly it was almost part of the forest sigh.
They walked. Beos babbled. She named things, but with her own words. A squirrel was a “chitter-tail in the coat-tree.” A creek they crossed was “laughing water over shiny teeth-stones.” Her Common was a catastrophic, beautiful wreck. Kaelin just nodded, asking a few questions, letting the melodic, broken words wash over her. Each mispronunciation, each oddly poetic construction, only wired her protective instinct tighter. This innocence was a flickering candle in a wide, dark wind. She just wanted to cup her hands around it.
After half an hour, the trees thinned. The rough timber wall of Kaelin’s shack came into view, nestled against a rocky outcrop. Smoke curled from its stone chimney. It looked grim and solid.
“Your wood box!” Beos announced, delighted.
“Home sweet home,” Kaelin said, wryly. She reached the heavy door, unlatched it, and pushed it open. The interior was one room: a hearth, a rough table, a bed, hunting gear, and shelves of preserves. It smelled of woodsmoke, dried herbs, and leather.
Beos stopped at the threshold, her large eyes taking it all in with awe. She pointed a trembling finger at the fire crackling in the hearth. “You keep a tiny, angry sun inside?”
Kaelin barked a laugh, the sound strange in her own ears. “Yeah. Something like that. Come in. You’re letting the draft in.”
Beos stepped inside, her head tilting back to look at the smoke-blackened rafters. She was a creature of luminous caves and glowing moss, now standing on worn plank floors. The contrast was shocking. Kaelin saw her own world through new eyes—it was harsh, utilitarian, and deeply lonely.
“Sit,” Kaelin said, pulling a stool out by the fire. “I’ll get you some water. Real water. In a cup.”
Beos sat, perching on the stool as if it might bite. She watched Kaelin’s every move—the filling of a tin cup from a bucket, the way she placed it on the table. Beos reached for it, her movements reverent, and took a small sip. Her eyes flew wide.
“It is… different. Still. Not laughing. But… good.” She took another sip. “Your home has many hard things. And the angry sun.” She looked at Kaelin, her gaze impossibly open. “It is a good home. It holds your smell. Safe-smell.”
Kaelin felt a flush creep up her neck. She busied herself hanging her gun on the wall pegs. The first fat raindrop hit the roof with a definitive plink. Then another. Soon, a steady drumming began, sealing them in.
The storm had arrived. The world outside was a wash of grey noise and wet violence.
In here, it was warm. Kaelin turned to find Beos still watching her, a serene, trusting smile on her face, the firelight dancing on the creamy curve of her mushroom cap and glinting in her endless eyes. The urge to protect wasn’t just an impulse anymore. It had settled into a decision, solid as the stone at her back.
beos get startled by a loud crack of thunder and practically launches herself into the hunters arms, terrified. beos had only ever heard thunder from deep in the caves. kaelin learns beos is extremely soft and plush in all the right spots. from the proximity kaelin unintentionally breathes in some of the spores and she gets high. funnily enough kaelin usually gets horny when she’s high
The rain’s rhythm on the roof was a constant, soothing tattoo. Kaelin busied herself with the mundane, just to have something to do with her hands. She added a small log to the fire, the sparks fleeing upwards in a frantic orange swarm. She wiped the table down with a rag, though it wasn’t dirty. All the while, she was hyper-aware of the quiet woman on the stool, who sat observing the flames as if reading prophecies in their dance.
“You eat… things?” Beos asked suddenly, her nose wrinkling as she looked at a string of dried rabbits hanging from a beam.
“I do. Meat. Plants. Soup.” Kaelin gestured to a pot hanging over the fire. “Keeps me going.”
“The mycelium eats the old log. It is a slow thank you,” Beos said, nodding as if this explained everything. She wiggled her toes near the hearth, her pale skin pinkening from the heat. “Your angry sun is good.”
Before Kaelin could formulate a response to that, the world outside tore open.
It wasn’t a rumble. It was a concussive, instantaneous CRACK that slammed against the cabin walls, a sound so vast and violent it felt like the sky had shattered. The timbers groaned. The fire flinched.
Beos made a sound—a sharp, truncated click of pure terror. One second she was on the stool, the next she was across the room, a blur of movement. She collided with Kaelin, her arms locking around the hunter’s waist, her face buried hard against Kaelin’s leather tunic. The impact nearly knocked Kaelin off balance.
“Whoa! Hey, it’s just—“
Beos trembled, a full-body vibration that Kaelin felt straight through her own bones. “The sky is breaking!” Beos’s voice was muffled, horrified. “It never breaks so loud! In the deep caves, it is only a… a tired grumble. This is… it is violence!”
Instinctively, Kaelin’s arms came up around her. One hand found the curve of Beos’s shoulder, the other settled between the strange, silken fall of her hair and the smooth, cool surface of her mushroom cap. The protective urge ignited into a blaze. She held her close. “It’s just thunder. It’s loud, but it can’t hurt you in here. The roof is strong.”
Beos clung tighter. And Kaelin’s brain, so focused on comfort, abruptly short-circuited on the physical reality of the woman in her arms.
Beos was soft. Not just gentle, but physically, overwhelmingly plush. Where Kaelin was all corded muscle and angular frame, Beos was a collection of generous curves. Her body yielded against Kaelin’s, pillowy and warm. The swell of her chest, the roundness of her hips, the softness of her belly—every place Kaelin touched gave way in a way that was profoundly, disorientingly pleasant. She smelled of rain-damp earth, of crushed green things, and something else, a sweet, powdery scent that was suddenly very strong.
Kaelin, trying to breathe steadily to calm them both, inhaled deeply.
The sweet, earthy scent flooded her sinuses. It was pleasant, like the forest floor after a spring shower, but richer, with an almost spicy undertone. She felt it travel down her throat, a cool, tingling path.
A few seconds passed. The thunder rolled away, a distant grumble. Beos’s shaking began to subside, though she didn’t let go. “It… goes away?”
“It comes back,” Kaelin said, and her own voice sounded a bit distant, a bit thicker. The warmth from the fire seemed to intensify, soaking into her skin. The weight of Beos in her arms felt less like a burden and more like… a wonderful anchor. The rough texture of her own tunic against her cheek began to feel abrasive, and the smoothness of Beos’s cap under her palm became fascinating.
A slow, syrupy warmth was spreading out from her chest. Her thoughts, usually sharp and sequential, began to soften at the edges. The concern was still there, but it was wrapped in a cozy, buzzing blanket. The drumming of the rain transformed into a complex, fascinating rhythm.
And then the other, more familiar effect hit her.
Oh.
Oh no.
It started as a low, electric hum in her bloodstream, a familiar loosening in her limbs. A sudden, hyper-awareness of touch. The plush softness of Beos against her became not just a fact, but a focal point of immense, magnetic attraction. Every point of contact—the way Beos’s side fitted against her abdomen, the pressure of Beos’s forehead against her collarbone—sang with a heightened, tactile clarity. Her own skin felt too tight, too sensitive. The latent loneliness of the shack, the quiet isolation of her life, yawned like a chasm inside her, and the warm, living creature clinging to her felt like the only possible bridge across it.
Funny. The last time she’d gotten high off smuggled dream-weed in a town tavern, the exact same thing had happened. This wasn't a dream-weed fuzzyheadedness, though. This was clearer, sharper in its sensory focus, and all that focus was zeroing in on the incredibly soft, strangely fragrant woman in her embrace.
Beos finally loosened her grip, leaning back just enough to look up at Kaelin’s face. Her large, iridescent eyes were wide with fading fear and dawning apology. “I am sorry. I broke your… stillness. The loud sky scared the quiet from me.”
Kaelin looked down at her. The firelight caught in Beos’s eyes, making them shimmer like oil on water. Her lips, still stained faintly purple, were parted. She was so close. The sweet, spore-laden air seemed to pulse between them.
Kaelin’s hand, seemingly of its own volition, slid from Beos’s cap to cradle the back of her head, her fingers tangling in that impossibly silken black hair. The movement was possessive, gentler than she’d intended. Her voice came out a low rasp, stripped of its usual grit. “It’s okay. I’ve got you. You’re safe.”
But the words felt loaded, dangerous. She wasn’t just talking about the thunder. She was fighting a sudden, visceral impulse to find out if Beos’s lips tasted like blackberries and terror, or something else entirely. The warm, plush body against hers was an unspoken question, and every nerve, buzzed on that strange, sweet air, was screaming the same, relentless answer.