2
Ren
Look-alike, look-alike,
Do you think you guessed it right?
Sure, that mushroom does look tasty,
Better not to be too hasty!
Is it red-on-white or white-on-red?
Made a mistake, and now oops – you’re dead!
“MUSHROOM MISTAKES”, A GOBLIN NURSERY RHYME
There was a halfling outside the cottage.
And not just any halfling, Ren realized with a cold jolt of nascent dread. But the halfling from the forest, the one who would have baked enough Bloodletter Shrooms into a quiche to fell a full-grown dragon if left to her own devices.
Evidently, she’d taken Ren’s warning to heart, despite her less-than-grateful response at the time. Given how mule-headed halflings always were, especially about things they knew comparatively little about (becauseof coursethat made perfect sense), Ren wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d loaded those mushrooms right back into her basket the moment they’d turned their back on her. In some ways, that might’ve actually been preferable. Ren wasn’t particularly enamored with the thought of some halfling tramping around their garden, and quickly discovered they were evenlessenthusiastic about it in practice.
Leave those alone, they thought, eyes narrowing as they watched the halfling prod at the start of their mushroom farm, a number of narrow logs, all stacked in a grid-like formation. Judging from the halfling’s expression, she had no idea what she was looking at, rendering her insistence on messing with it all the more infuriating.Exactly. It’s not for you.
But the halfling couldn’t hear Ren – what with several paces’ worth of garden and a window and, you know, Ren’sskullseparating them. So, the inevitable happened: the logs fell over.
“Told you so,” they muttered under their breath, sour heat pooling beneath their skin. It had taken hours to put those logs together, and they didn’t relish having to repeat the process once more. At least she hadn’t broken anything that couldn’t be fixed.
Yet.
Abandoning the mess she’d created in typical halfling fashion, without even a shred of shame, the halfling clomped over to the other side of the garden, where she promptly vanished from Ren’s sight.
Smothering a curse between gritted teeth, Ren set down the fruits of today’s foraging on the kitchen counter – an impressive assortment of mushrooms, sweet chestnuts, wild garlic andblackberries – and went to find a new vantage point. Dinner would have to be a matter for later. No way were they going to let this halfling roam around unsupervised.
Slinking across the floorboards like a shadow, Ren crept towards the living-room window, a half-moon opening along the cottage’s front, framed in robin’s-egg blue. They carefully nudged aside the thick veins of ivy their family had grown to serve as curtains; enough that only a single, narrow sunbeam spilled across the sparsely furnished space. Just because they’d noticed the halfling didn’t mean the halfling needed to noticethem. In fact, Ren would greatly prefer it if she didn’t. Or, better yet, the halfling could just turn around and leave.
Sadly, things couldn’t be so easy.
The halfling went right up to the front door and, after digging around in a vast array of bags and satchels that couldn’t possibly mean anything good, produced a key.
A key!Not even Ren had a key, and their clan had been taking care of this place for decades!
Too bad, the indignation searing its way up Ren’s throat would have to wait. The halfling had inserted the key into the lock and, discovering it unnecessary, had settled for simply turning the knob. A low creak then followed, unmistakable in its origin. If Ren was going to have any hope of keeping this halfling out of their house, they were going to have to act now.
“Oh, wow,” the halfling said, near-breathless with wonder as she stepped into the entry hall, its exposed beam ceilings, each inlaid with loose swirls of living moss, unfurling overhead in a precise geometric pattern. “This place has held up really well. I was expecting some holes in the roof. Maybe some missing floorboards. But this—”
With teeth bared and arms raised, Ren leapt from the shadows and roared. It wasn’t the fiercest of sounds – frankly, Ren had heard wolf cubs produce better – but it nonetheless had the intended effect. The halfling screamed, scrambling backwards without a second thought. Unfortunately, instead of racing out of the cottage like Ren had wanted, she slammed into the wall behind her at full-force, hard enough to send the beams overhead rattling and loose the carefully cultivated moss from its inlays.
Years of work, ruined in an instant.
“Stop! You’re destroying it!” Ren shouted, dropping into a far less aggressive posture. It was one thing for the halfling to break the things they’d made. But the work of Ren’s clan – well, that was something else entirely.
The halfling, however, wasn’t listening. “Get out of my house!” she cried, kicking at a nearby cluster of moss. Perhaps she’d meant to launch it at Ren’s face, but she only managed to send it fluttering weakly into the air.
“Yourhouse?” Ren repeated, incredulous, their ears flattening with displeasure. “No. This ismyhouse.”
“Then why do I have a, uh…?” The halfling fumbled for something, temporarily lost in the eye-searingly yellow tangle of her skirts. “A key!” She raised it in a moment of triumph, holding it high for Ren to see.
