Chamber-Grey

Overview

Chamber-Grey is a mould that settles on the living root of the Roothollows when the root has begun to fail. Dead root goes grey of itself, but the mould comes first, a bloom on root that still looks alive. A house that finds it knows that the chamber behind it may lose its bracing and its air within years.

Appearance

It is a soft, close bloom like frost on a window, pale grey to the colour of ash, spreading in patches the size of a palm and then in broad sheets along a root wall. Up close it is a fur of fine threads, and it smears to a grey dust under a finger. In the gloam it shows as a dull place where the root's glow should be. It smells of cold stone and stale bread, and a chamber thick with it smells of nothing else.

Habitat and Range

It grows on root walls in still air, where living root is weakening, most often at the outer edges of a house's chambers and along the eastern hollows where the root thins towards bare stone. Dwarves of the Stonewake Deeps meet it on the root edge of their country, where the caverns meet the hollows.

Behaviour and Temperament

It does not kill root by itself. It follows weakness, taking hold where the root's sap has slowed, and moves across a wall as the dying spreads. Where the root recovers, the bloom thins and goes; where it does not, the mould gives way in turn to the dead grey of the root itself and to the bed fungus that lives on dead root.

Uses and Dangers

Its use is its warning. Every Dark Elf child is taught to look for it, and route keepers and root-watchers walk the chamber walls on the threshold watch and note every new patch. Its danger is what it foretells: a chamber that loses its root loses its air and its bracing together, and with them the fungus beds and the dead that count in its chamber-right. Its dust in a closed chamber brings a dry cough.

Lore and Belief

"A wall going grey" is a house's slow emergency, spoken of in low voices: a house watches its wall go grey for years before it gives, as the small house of Sapfall is watching now. Some houses scrape the bloom away and burn fungus oil before the patch in the hope of warming the root back, which seldom helps. Others hold that the root goes grey first in the wall of whoever in the house has done the most wrong, and a patch found in a sleeping chamber can start a quarrel that outlasts the chamber.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Plants and Fungi