There is almost nothing to see by day: a log gone soft and pale, its wood threaded with fine white strands, sometimes a few small honey-coloured caps on its bark in autumn. At night, away from any fire and with no moon, the rotted wood shows a cold green-white glow, as faint as the afterimage of a candle, in streaks along the grain and in the soft heart of a broken stump. Broken open, a piece glows in the hand for a while and then fades. It smells of damp wood and mushrooms.

It needs fallen wood, shade, and a long wet season, and it is found on the floor of the old forests, thickest in the deep weald where deadfall is never cleared, and in the damp ravines of the Briarreach. It grows above ground only; below, in the Roothollows, the gloam of the living root is the only light.

It glows brightest in the warm, wet end of summer and in autumn, and fades as the wood dries or freezes. A log can shine for several years as the fungus works through it, and then go dark as the wood falls to mould.

It gives no useful light, and its uses are small: forest folk lay a glowing chip on a path to mark a turn at night, and children carry pieces home. It harms nothing. Its danger is to the lost, who take a glow between the trees for a lamp or a door and walk towards it off the path.

Basin and forest-edge folk call it foxfire and say foxes light it to lead hunters astray. Wood Elves say it is the light of a fallen tree going back to the ground, and do not take it home from a grove; wood that is cleared away, they say, takes its light with it, and the cut-over basin woods have none. Some at the forest edge confuse it with the pale lights said to draw travellers into drift at thin places, the Wayward Lights, which move; foxfire never does.

Poachers and outlaws of the forest edge say foxfire has led more lords' foresters into the bog than any lantern of theirs.