Mother Morel, Grandmother of the Hollow

Glowcap Hollow is the kind of place where you whisper without meaning to. The mushrooms there are as tall as trees and glow softly in blues and purples, and little spores drift through the air like slow snow.

Every sporeling in the hollow, every puffball and every little glowing cap, is related to one great mushroom: Mother Morel, as tall as a house, with a wrinkled, honeycombed cap and a stem as wide as a barn door.

Morel the Toad (no relation, he always says, though he's very proud of the name) keeps the trading posts in the Glowcap towns.

"You think a mushroom is just the bit you can see," he croaks. "It isn't. The bit you can see is only the fruit, like an apple on a tree. The real mushroom is underground: a great web of threads, thinner than hair, running for miles under the soil. Mother Morel's threads run under the whole hollow. Every mushroom here grew from them. That's why we call her the grandmother."

The threads, Morel says, carry messages. When one corner of the hollow is dry, the threads send water there. When a tree is sick, the threads bring it food from its neighbours. Mother Morel used to hum through them at night, a low slow hum you could feel in your feet, and all the mushrooms would glow a little brighter.

Then the Gloom soaked down into the soil. It crept along the threads, and it reached Mother Morel. She stopped humming. She pulled herself up out of the ground on great spongy roots, and now she stomps round the hollow, thumping the ground with her arms so hard that everything nearby goes wobbly and slow.

"Step out of the ring when she raises her arms," says Morel. "And bring fire. Mushrooms don't like it one bit. Earth magic won't do anything; she's been in the earth forever."

Calm her and she settles back down, and for a moment the whole hollow glows brighter. She leaves behind glowing spores and soft mushroom fibre, moth wings from the moths that always circle her, and now and then a ring that shines like a sporelight.

"She's still humming, you know," Morel says. "Very quietly. Put your ear to the ground."

"And if you ever hear the hum grow loud," he adds, "that's not Mother Morel. That's Queen Morel, on the far side of the hollow: the mother of every mother. When she stirs, the whole glen lights up at once. Take friends. Lots of friends."