Sword & Spore: A Tor.com Original

By Dominica Phetteplace

A fascinating fantasy short story from Dominica Phetteplace, "Sword & Spore," A Tor.com Original.

This is how magic left the Kingdom and made room for democracy. Three supernatural beings created by an Omnipotent Mushroom God travel the multiverse until they are abandoned on a planet of stunning ecological diversity. They use their magic to rule over humans, but as their powers wane and a climate disaster looms, a young illiterate man is able to take the throne.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Apr 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9781250849007

Book preview

1. The Queen

Before I could embark on my revenge, I taught the forest to sing.

It wasn’t a simple matter. A particular vibration was required. A sustained flow.

The grasses found it easiest. They could catch a breeze and buzz their stalks.

Beware, beware.

Their song was faint; they were on the edge of the forest, weak. Far from the glowing ruby on the hilt of the King’s Sword, where I used to be trapped. Far from my blossom, far from my vines. Far from the indestructible blade thrust into the dirt, where my roots were tangled with the roots of many others. Far from the soil that I spoke to and drank from.

I trained the beings closest to my heart to sing the loudest.

Snow-in-Summer was the first flower on the forest floor to find the friction in her petals. From her pure white blossoms, she sang the song I taught her.

Beware, beware.

The song kept the humans away. At least until the drought.

Complaints of thirst traveled from root tip to root tip. The reservoirs of the cobra lilies emptied, the pitcher plants’, too. Ferns died at the forest edge, then farther inside. Leaves shriveled before their season and the forest floor became a heavy mat of those that succumbed.

I dug my roots down, farther than any of them could. Beneath everything, there was water. You had to be strong enough to summon it. When I found it, I shared. Nothing is apart from anything else in this forest. Our roots intertwine.

Before the King was a king, he had been a god. Wicked magic had trapped me in a jewel, but there was always a way out. I used to be a god, too.

The Wizard has a theory of energetic currents, a theory that is true, as it happens. Shortly after being buried, I made contact with a grain of pollen the size of dust. And so I became that pollen. All orchids are fed by fungi when they are young. My father made it so.

I wasn’t just a flower, though. I was the language that the forest spoke, I was its secret. I set down roots. I sprouted, then budded.

Once a year, I bloomed. A sticky red flower, seven petals, each taller than a man. My scent was of my own anger, but multiplied tenfold. The bark mushrooms loved my fragrance and spored while I stank.

The animals stayed away, even the scavengers. Nematodes and earthworms dug away from my heart, sometimes fainting from exhaustion. Whatever died in the soil decomposed and was repurposed to made me stronger. Plenty died in the dirt that spring. I bloomed larger than ever in the drought. Through the tangle of fungi that connected our roots, I passed sugar and water to Snow-in-Summer so that she might continue to