Mitsel

Before the Fading, Mitsel grew mushrooms in the cellars under the shift town on the Great Dam. Long damp vaults, racks up to the ceiling, sacks of sawdust on the racks and oyster mushrooms climbing out of the sacks. A lightline ran along the wall and lit the mycelium a little, so the mushrooms grew twice as fast. The work was done in rubber aprons and respirators: spores settle in the lungs, and old mushroom growers cough for the rest of their lives. Mitsel never took her respirator off from her very first shift

When Eru went out, the gardens above dried up in a single winter, but nothing changed in the cellar: mushrooms do not need the sun. For almost all the dark years the town ate her mushrooms. Only the lightline in the wall went dark, and the mycelium that had drunk its light for two hundred years began to look for a new one. It found it in Mitsel, since mana is light in the blood. The spores grew right through her filters, and her first caps were the two filters of her mask. Mycelium grows slowly and in every direction at once, and soon Mitsel could hear every step above through it

The Haze is heavier than air and flows down into cellars. When it came to the town, people climbed down to Mitsel, there was nowhere else to go. She let the mycelium run over every wall and vault, the cellar glowed like rotten wood in a night forest, and the Haze broke on the threshold. They sat out the whole winter like that on her mushrooms, and in spring they left for the west. Mitsel could no longer leave: over the winter she had grown into the walls. Her body stayed in the cellar, and her light followed her people under the ground, along the trench of a dead lightline, forty versts to the Lull, and rose into the Lantern from below, through the boards of the platform. Glowing mushrooms grow under the platform now, and the archivists leave them alone

She is quiet and unhurried and speaks muffled from under her mask, and her filters whistle softly on every breath. She measures time in flushes, the way growers count harvests: “two flushes from now”, “last flush”. She loves darkness and damp, squints in the light and hides her caps in the shade. She hears the earth: by the footsteps she can tell who walks behind a wall and which leg they limp on. She speaks of death tenderly, like a good housekeeper: everything that falls becomes earth, and the earth is mycelium. She feeds everyone mushrooms and is hurt if they don't eat

Seyvar calls everyone in the squad plants, but her he calls by name and with respect: a mushroom is not a plant. He sows, and she helps many of his seeds come up. Tobrin tapped her with his wrench and was silent for a long time: she answers dull all over, from head to boots. “I'm not grey, I'm loose soil”, Mitsel laughs into her mask. Marta asks her at every meeting whether caps like hers can be fried, and Mitsel always answers: “They can. Just not mine”