"We must eat only the seeds of the pure white fungus—that's the least dangerous. We must walk and walk to keep our bodies so tired and hungry that they use it all. We must keep to a straight line."
"We'll live," he said. "Outside among our people, with our minds whole. We'll alternate left and right each time we round a tree, to hold our straight line. We'll come out somewhere."
"I will follow. May Morwenna go with us."
The fantastic journey wound over great gnarled roots and buttresses fusing and intermingling until it seemed that the root-complex was one unthinkably vast organism with many trunks soaring half-seen into endless darkness. Time had no feeling there. Space was a bubble of ghostly light a man could leap across.
Could leap and did, over and over, the woman following. The man climbed a curiously regular, whitish root higher than his head and it writhed. Then, swaying back along its length, came a great serpent head with luminous ovoid eyes. While the man crouched in horror, waving the woman back, the monstrous jaws gaped and the teeth were blunt choppers and grinders, weirdly human looking. They bit hugely into a bracket fungus and worried at it. Man and woman hurried on.
Strength waned. The woman fell behind. The man turned back to her and the light was failing. The blue mold was black, the luminous panels more ghostly.
"It's night. Shall we sleep?" he asked.