I’m sure some of the regulars here at the Spore of the Gray Cap remember the insanity of the war—there are certainly enough gray beards and grizzled voices among them. Even this green glass that provides my only light beyond candles—this glass that distorts the quick, rhythmic stride of walkers making floorboards creak, the random punctuation of a cane—has experience of the war: it was caused by clear glass fusing with a fungal bomb. The result is beautiful, if unintentional. (And since the glass seems to shift and re-form every so often, who knows if an end result has yet been reached? Perhaps it is transforming into something else altogether.)

But the intensity or scope of the conflict never gave me pause—it was the nature of the weapons. It was as if the gray caps had come aboveground in disguise and started to slaughter us. Guns now shot fungal bullets that, upon hitting flesh, burrowed deep into arteries and created thoroughfares of spores that hardened within seconds, making the victim as brittle as any coral from the Southern Isles. Certain special fungi could serve as bombs or mines or grenades, decomposing a body in seconds, or releasing spores that choked the victim to death. Telephones soon became dangerous, used as the emissaries of assassination—the victim would pick up the phone only to hear a high-pitched scream that burst the eardrums and the heart (said screams very similar to those attributed to the giant “gray whale” mushrooms that became common in Ambergris immediately prior to the Silence). Henry Hoegbotton’s brother Frederick died in this manner, as did several other merchants. (Did F&L realize what they were doing when they found a way to procure such weapons from the gray caps? Probably not. They probably didn’t have a clue. They just wanted results.)

One of our first joint reports dealt with the issue of the new weapons.