Ten thousand candles lined the inside of the Roseroot temple. As they melted down, the wax ran into the cracks of the rocks and spilled onto the floor, moving like sheets of magma forming new strata atop the old.
One acolyte attended to the flames. Three more broke up chunks of floor wax with shovels and hauled them away to be recycled into the next batch of candles.
Hypha felt for the poor colts. “Almost done,” he said, giving them each an encouraging pat on the shoulder. “The floor looks great.”
Wax patrol was a menial task. All the same, it was vital these colts did their time. Buried within the labor was a lesson: the temple was a sacred place, and keeping it clean was a kind of prayer.
He went deeper into the temple, passing cavernous meditation rooms full of silent figures holding poses. The hallway shrunk. The light grew dim. A sudden wave of heat pouring from a room up ahead signaled that he’d arrived.
Inside, a fire crackled happily in a clay firebox in the corner. Wide-wicked candles lined the periphery. Two monks, elder Cumulus and the stout elder Hirruck, sat hunched over a book in one corner.
Without looking up, elder Hirruck said, “You’re early.”
“Just excited to train,” Hypha said. It wasn’t exactly a lie. But if he got done with his training early, there was a slim chance the elders would let him do a little exploring of the temple. No one, not even elder Cumulus, knew exactly how far down the temple tunnels went. Rumor had it they went straight down to the center of the earth, where the weight of the earth was so intense that no one could escape.
Hypha didn’t want to go that deep. Just until the light stopped. Then maybe a little further. Then he’d turn around.
The book was open to a page titled, “Foundational Movements: Internalization of External Realities.” Hypha felt a frown worming its way onto his face. This was a copy of one of the textbooks he’d been studying.
“Have you done your readings?” Hirruck asked.
“Yes. Sort of.” Hypha pursed his lips. “The last chapter is still giving me some trouble.”
“Aah” Hirruck chuckled, “‘Flight Mechanics’. Cumulus told me about the crater you dug outside the temple.” Hypha could only offer a sheepish smile in reply. “It’s okay. You’ll have the rest of your life to practice flying. You can only learn something new once. For now, put flying out of your mind. We’re going to focus everything we have on this next chapter.”
Hirruck stepped into the center of the room. The faint hiss of candlefire seemed to quiet as he raised his hoof to the ceiling. Then he flicked it down. A sharp crack left Hypha’s ears ringing. A blue ball of energy materialized on Hirruck’s hooftip.
“Magic is latent,” Hirruck said. “It follows predetermined paths. It flows through some places and pools in others. We can tap into those pools and flows and redirect it for our own uses.”
The words had come straight from the text. Hypha was more interested in the glowing ball of magic. The power. The potential. It awed him.
With a flourish, Hirruck threw the orb up. It swung around the room like a boomerang and blew out the rows of candles. When the orb remained as the only source of light in the room, it too went out, casting Hypha and the two elders into darkness. A moment later, Hypha heard another crack as Hirruck summoned a new orb. He drew a circle in the air. The magic lingered in the air as a pulsing light. Hirruck drew a series of complex runes within the circle. The whole room filled with an electric blue glow.
He touched the center of the rune with his hoof. The rune vanished. The next moment, every candle reignited simultaneously.
Hirruck smirked. Cumulus rolled his eyes and muttered, “That’s not in the curriculum.”
Hypha beamed. “How’d you do that?”
“We’re magical creatures by nature.” He set his stance and motioned for Hypha to do the same. “Start with summoning some magic. Feel it. Receive it.” He repeated the motion of lifting his hoof up then bringing it down to his chest. Another orb appeared. “Let it go.” The magic dissipated.
Hypha raised his hoof and felt around. “I don’t feel anything.”
“Think of strings. Find one, then pull it.”
Hypha practiced the motion a few times, but nothing happened. “I think I’m doing it wrong.” He tried again, muttering, “Feel it, receive it. Feel it, receive it. Feel it, recieve it.”
“Don’t forget, let it go. Letting go is equally as important. If you don’t let go, the magic will feed back into you and hurt you.” A smile graced Hirruck’s face. “It’s also an important skill for those who wish to participate in the mushroom ritual.”
Hypha threw himself into letting go. He let go repeatedly and with great enthusiasm. But as much as he tried, he found nothing to let go of. There was simply nothing there. Whatever latent energy Hirruck had just tapped into was gone.
Hypha let out an irritated huff. “How long’s it supposed to take?”
“As long as it needs to. Again.”
After an exhausting half hour of trying and failing to summon even the simplest spell, Elder Cumulus stopped Hypha.
“Let’s try a different approach. What do you think of when you’re flying?”
“I don’t know. I just kinda do it. If I think too hard, I get distracted and fall.”
“I see. It sounds like you may need to change the way you learn if you want to find success.”
Hypha let out a groan. “I gotta learn how to learn, too?”
Cumulus chuckled. “I’ll be willing to bet the hours you’ll spend retraining your mind will pay dividends with your flight as much as with your rune magic.”
“Hours?”
Hirruck gave him an encouraging smile. “Keep practicing the motion. That’s good enough for now. Cumulus and I have some kilning to take care of. Practice for another thirty minutes, then we’ll reconvene outside. Okay?”
Hypha nodded dutifully. “Okay.”
As the two elders headed towards the entrance, Hypha cast a sidelong glance down the hallway. Further down, the ceiling was so low Hypha would have to hunch over just to fit through. Darkness swallowed the rest of the way.
A shiver snaked its way up Hypha’s legs. The urge to run headlong into the darkness collided with the urge to cower in the light of the firebox. Who could say if those tunnels didn’t really go all the way down to the center of the earth?
Feel it, receive it, let it go. Feel it, receive it, let it go. Hypha was twenty minutes in and ready to collapse with boredom. Learning flight had at least been dangerous. He got to race to the tippy tops of mountains and leap off the edge and try to figure things out before he hit the ground. That was fun learning. This felt rote, like learning to read a language he didn’t understand, sounding the words out but failing to grasp their meaning.
He heard hoofsteps coming from the hallway outside. Wrender—of course it had to be Wrender—poked his head in.
“I think you’re doing it wrong.”
“No I’m not,” Hypha replied.
“You sure?”
“Yes.”
“Because if you do it right, there should be a blue light, and—”
“Shut up. Like you’re any better.” Wrender opened his mouth to say something, but Hypha cut him off. “And don’t get to say you won mushroom collecting, either. I almost got eaten by a snow leopard.”
“Why do you have to lie? Why can’t you just admit I’m finally beating you?”
“Because you’re not.”
“Yuh-huh.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Whatever. How much longer are you in here?”
“I was just about to leave.”
“Good. More practice time for me.”
The two held a fierce stare-down as they circled the room, Wrender coming in, Hypha going out. Only once Hypha stepped outside and felt the warmth of the room slip away did he start to relax.
Leaving Wrender behind, Hypha retraced his steps up the widening hallway until he emerged onto the temple’s main covered dias. He saw Cumulus and Hirrick standing near the main staircase. They were looking out on the expanse of the temple grounds where a few of the other acolytes tended to the monastery's modest crop of wheat and barley. Monks could not live on mushrooms alone, and where fungi were a rare commodity, barley and wheat had never been more plentiful.
“Feel anything?” Cumulus asked.
“Frustrated.”
The older monks laughed. Together the three walked along the fence separating the farmland from the main thoroughfare.
Cumulus said, “I have a question for you, Hypha.”
“Anything.”
“Our farm’s been doing well lately. Too well, in fact. Even with all the monks and acolytes working around the clock, we can’t harvest all the wheat. Some monks have proposed letting in outside help from the surrounding villages. Others feel more comfortable simply letting the harvest rot and adjusting the size and seeding habits of the next planting rotation.” He turned to Hypha. “What do you think we should do?”
The question took Hypha off-guard. “Uh. I’m not great with farming stuff.”
“I’m asking because the other elders and I have been struggling over this question all week. We’re hoping you might see something our old eyes have missed.”
Hypha nodded. “Well, it would be a shame to let the crops go to waste. But if the alternative is letting outsiders in...” He shrugged. “We’re not facing a food shortage or anything. No great loss.”
Cumulus seemed unsatisfied with his answer. Hirruck jumped in, asking, “What’s your reservation with bringing outsiders in?”
“Uh.” Hypha frowned. “Is that a trick question?”
“I, for one, think outside help would be mutually beneficial. We have plenty of barley and wheat to go around. What we really need is—”
“If we need more hooves, why not take some of the acolytes off other chores?”
“Our order isn’t growing like the wheat is, unfortunately.”
“Still. There’s gotta be a better way.” Hypha’s eyes lit up. “Oh! Wait. I’m being silly. We could totally let the outsiders in to help us with the wheat.”
The elders’ faces brightened. “Yes?”
“Yeah! All we’d have to do is shackle them and keep them under armed guard. That way they can’t cause trouble.”
Cumulus looked like he was about to faint. Hirruck let out a long sigh. “We will take your advice to heart, Hypha. Thank you. One more thing.”
“Yes?”
“If we decide to involve outsiders in helping clear the fields, would you be willing to take a leadership role in overseeing its execution?”
“Execution? I didn’t say we should go that far.”
Neither elder answered. They walked in stilted silence, following the path as it sloped up a natural ridge before depositing them by a cluster of acolyte hovels. From this vantage point, they could see the entire monastery complex spread out before them.
Life sprouted from every crack. Far from the spartan mountainside dwellings of the other order monasteries, the Roseroot complex was bursting with life. Flowering vines snaked up the low exterior walls. Beyond the plots of fenced farmland, a few monks knotted themselves into complex yoga poses on a small grassy knoll. Further out, all manner of monks and acolytes moved through the complex. A few made their way along the winding dirt paths. Most simply flew. On one side was the mountain, vertically sheer, grey as pre-dawn, and dominating in its presence. The other side was a sheer drop, cloaked in perpetual mist.
The monastery was a nest for all the strange mountain birds. Seeing it all made Hypha’s heart swell with pride.
“I love it here,” Cumulus said. Hypha noticed a twinge of sadness on the old monk’s face. Before he could inquire about it, Cumulus abruptly turned away. “Come on, Hirruck. There’s work to be done at the temple.”
The two monks started off, leaving Hypha with the sneaking suspicion they were keeping something from him. “Wait,” he called after them, “Did I give you the wrong answer?”
“There was no right or wrong answer,” Cumulus said.
“Okay.” Hypha dragged a hoof through the dirt. “I wanna help the order. I wanna be good.”
Cumulus gave Hypha an assuaging smile. “Your heart’s in the right place. With time, I think you’ll come to see—”
“You can’t let them in,” Hypha blurted. “They hate us.”
A grim, deep-seeded silence settled over the elders. Hypha covered his mouth. Shame and fear sent needles racing up his spine. He’d ruined a precious moment.
“They don’t hate us,” Cumulus finally said. His tone was casual, but the look in his eyes betrayed some deeper emotion running beneath the mask. “We maintain a friendly relationship with almost all the local towns in the greater Stonewood range.”
“Why else would we need to put up walls in the first place? If we let them in, they’ll try to hurt us or break into the temple. We can’t trust them.”
Cumulus took a step towards Hypha and put a hand on his shoulder. “Hypha, do you trust us?”
The question derailed Hypha’s train of thought. “Yes. Of course.”
“We trust you, too. We trust you so much that we’re going to put you in charge of the outsiders when they arrive at the end of the week.”
Every instinct in Hypha’s head screamed at him to fly away. Letting in outsiders was dangerous. An open invitation to discord. But this was an order straight from elder Cumulus’s mouth. He couldn’t say no. Worry grew like weeds. He couldn’t let that seed spread. He had to be solid. He had to fight the worry snaking its way deep into his heart. He had to.
The elder monks were waiting for him to respond. “Do you really trust me?” Hypha asked.
Cumulus nodded. “With all my heart.”
Hypha took a deep breath. “Then I’ll do it.”
“Good.” Cumulus squeezed his shoulder reassuringly. “We’ll fill you in with the details soon. For now, keep your focus on your work.” With that, both elders turned and walked back towards the temple, leaving Hypha alone on the trail.
Outsiders. Inside. His head spun. He wanted to punch something, to fly away, to do something. Anything. He was almost certain he wouldn’t cry, but he wasn’t certain enough.
In the end, he settled on running straight back to his hovel and staring at the wall for the rest of the evening, fighting hard to keep from crying.
Coward, he thought. What kind of leader was so quick to tears?