Weeping Caps
Dark, dripping mushrooms of the Roothollows' black-water margins that kill whoever eats them, and that children are taught to turn back from.
Overview
Weeping Caps grow at the edges of the still black water of the Roothollows, the water nobody drinks. They are dark, slick mushrooms that drip from their gills as if crying, and they are among the deadliest things that grow below. Every Dark Elf child learns them early, because they mark ground where a child should not be.
Appearance
Clusters of slender mushrooms a hand to a forearm high, with narrow, bell-shaped caps that never open flat, the colour of wet slate to inky black, glistening as if just out of the water. The gills underneath are close and dark, and they drip a slow, clear-to-grey fluid that runs down the stems and gathers in the hollow below each cluster. As a cap ages it softens from the rim upward into black ooze. In the gloam a cluster is only a darker shape against dark stone. It smells faintly of iron and stagnant water.
Habitat and Range
It grows only on the damp, soft margins of still black water, in chambers no house uses and in the low ends of hollows where water has lain for years, and nowhere along running water.
Life Cycle
The caps come up in clusters through much of the root-year and dissolve within days, so that a margin is never long without them. The black ooze of the dissolved caps carries their spores into the mud at the water's edge.
Uses and Dangers
They give nothing. A single cap eaten brings cramping, a drenching sweat, and a slowed heart within the hour, and death within a day for most, quicker for a child. They are sometimes mistaken in poor light for slender bed fungus, and fungus tenders keep any stray that looks like them out of the beds.
Lore and Belief
Dark Elf parents teach the rule in four words: "where caps weep, turn back." Children are told the caps weep for whoever went past them, and the margins where they grow are the margins of water no house draws from. Many Dark Elves will not say their name aloud near a reservoir. The connection the children draw is sound, if not for the reason they are given: the caps grow only where water has stood still long enough to be dangerous.
Where It Appears
- Overview: Plants and Fungi
In the Writers’ Guide
- Weeping Caps A Bestiary of Caeldon