The Longest Journey - Stones and Shrooms

Vitugár stretched his legs before he continued his travel alongside the small road. His initial plan had worked up to this point and there was no reason that it could fail.

His plan was to travel to the Pebblekin dwarves and their settlement where he hoped to write about their stone mushroom. He had only heard whispers about it because they rarely shared information about it. Except that it was grown with honour and a great taste. A thing he wanted to witness personally.

The main problem was: the area surrounding the Pebblekin and their "mountain" was not really hospitable. The road was more like a series of marking from one open spot to another. Mostly those were runes, sometimes it was just a carving on some surface to indicated where the road was going. Not that it would matter, but it was the best way to navigate the petrified area surrounding the mountain the dwarves call "Fiery Father", in dwarvish Eldurfaðir.

The closer one got to the sleeping volcano the more one notices the hot air, the steam coming out of cracks, the sulphuric smell of rotten eggs. And the dead husks of petrified trees, covered in magma long ago. Fir and oaks and birches and everything in between was petrified, a mixture of brown, grey, black and swirly figures. In this chaos were the markings really helpful.

There were no animals except for a few birds, mainly crows. Plants, beside the petrified ones, were not to see. The last inn was two days behind him and Vitugár had only rations left for four days. The spring had just started, in some holes and indentions one could still see the frost of the night and sometimes even snow.

On some trees, mainly on birches, Vitugár could see the sprouting mushrooms, the Grey Everleaf. It did look like a very specific leaf, their scent resembled fresh mint with a pinch of thyme. One mushroom consists of a colony with up to six single leaves. It looks a bit like a moving carpet since the mushrooms do wander if they can't find any nutritions. And in the area around the volcano they couldn't find a single crack to thrive, so they died over time.

Like basically everything else. The earth itself and the lava was rich on nutrition, but the layer on top of that way too hard to break, even for the resilient mushroom.

Vitugár drank a bit of his tea and looked at the slightly smoking mountain. His new, fresh and shiny green robe with the silvery hood was the only patch of colour in this hellscape and he started to follow a different road, marked with a small flame, leading to the Fiery Father, still in the far distance.

After the second day his robe was torn, dirty from the everpresent grey dust, his beard dry - even with the oil - and everything he ate had a distinct flavour of ash with it. During the third day he managed to tear his one shoe open at a sharp edge and shortly after that stepped into a hole which had no ground and the other shoe was lost forever. The everypresent wind, a mix of hot and cold and ash, did its best to annoy him to bits.

So at the dawn of the fourth day, with only a bit of tea and an apple left, he stood without shoes, bloody and ashen feet, and a grumpy mood in front of the dwarven gate of the settlement. The gate was interesting, it looked like it was made out of lava, but the dark grey stone formed dwarvish runes if one knows to what look out for.

"Oi", shouted someone from somewhere above the huge gate, "who goes there?"

"Me, Vitugár!"

"Who is Vitugár?"

"That is me!"

"That is ya?"

"As me said!"

"What do ya want?" The dwarf from above had an interesting dialect. Still Dwarven Speech, but with a twist.

"Me wrote a letter to ya leader! Me is a Formulist for studying shrooms and ya Everleaf is on da list!"

"Why didn't ya told me so from the start?", laughed the other dwarf Vitugár couldn't see. "Open da gate, he was foretold!"

Shouting arose muffled from the inside, then with a deep groan the gate swung slowly to the side, opened up into a well-lit hallway. Half a dozen dwarves with crossbows and axes greeted Vitugár and a dwarf with a huge black beard stepped into the front.

"Ya look shabby, ma Vitugár. Where did ya shoe go?"

"A hole and some spikes."

"Sad. Lets us make ya new ones. Come in, we got tea and mead. Or something stronger?"

"Ya leader and something stronger."

"Ya got it, ma Formulist, ya got it!"

Behind Vitugár the gate closed with a loud banging sound, chains rattled somewhere. It smelled like pork, mushrooms, a burning fire and mineral-rich stone and earth. A bit like home.

Good thing he was out of this hellish zone.