Lichen

A story about the Lanicine and the Svepparine

One day, after the world was made, the Lanicine was playing at building things to live on her Parents' Earth. She worked and reworked her clay and stones until she had created two plants, one low and spreading and one tall and straight. Each one feasted on the fertile ground that her father and mother had made for her, and made their own seeds and spores to spread their green leaves and white roots across the dirt.

The Svepparine came to visit her, hair damp and clumped together, and said, "How beautiful these things are that you've created! What wonderful colors, and shapes - and such good food for my children, the worms and growing fungi. May I have some?" But the Lanicine didn't want her opulent works of jade-green and firery gold to become food for her sibling's slimy, slithering, eyeless brood, and she shooed them away.

She watched her new creations sip on the sunlight and sink tendrils deep into the Earth, and she was content, and turned to other things - butterflies to feast on the leaves, sparrows and shrikes to swoop at the caterpillars, and hawks to fall upon the smaller birds below.

Again, the Svepparine came to her, eyes ringed round with the black dirt of the rot-beds, and said, in their gentle, low voice, "Your caterpillars are not so unlike my own creations! Now you must understand why I love the worms and the burrowing beetles so." But the Lanicine did not understand, and she did not want to hear any more of pulsing slugs and the dark things the Svepparine hid below the dirt, and she shooed them away again, and cast a spell upon her garden that the Svepparine's creations could not enter it, for it was a place of color and light.

But, as she worked, not all was well. The roots of the new plants went so deep, their leaves so broad and high, that they began to exhaust the dirt in which they lived. The roots shrank, the leaves browned and fell, and eventually a circle of stagnation began to spread. She tried new plants, hardier and more economical with the soil, but even so, the blanket of dead leaves and stems grew and grew.

The sparrows kept the caterpillars in check, but only delayed the day when they began to run out of fresh leaves to chew. The butterflies dwindled, then the shrikes and sparrows, and finally the hawks cried out to her in hunger. Weeping, she returned to the house of her Parent, the Calycine, where she sat weaving the patterns of the Earth.

"My child," said the Calycine, "what grieves you so?"

In tears, the Lanicine said, "All of my creations are dying. The leaves wither and fall, the caterpillars shrivel before they can metamorphose, and the birds cry out to me in hunger."

The Calycine furrowed her brow, and looked upon the face of the Earth and saw the spreading brown in her daughter's garden. She looked into the barren dirt that had once been so fertile, and the drifts and mounds of drying leaves that covered the surface, and she said, "Child, you have all that you need - we have given you fertile land, and rain, and sunlight for your work. Go, and trust the Earth."

So, her spirits somewhat lifted, the Lanicine returned to her garden and set about raking the leaves away into great hills and building the hardiest, sturdiest plants she could muster. Mosses sprung on the wet rocks and iceplant blanketed the ground, and for a time, the caterpillars came back - but then, again, the leaves began to wither, and no amount of rain could sate the mosses' need for soil.

As the Lanicine worked, the small birds that still lived flew further and further afield looking for food, and one wise bird followed the tracks of the Svepparine, for he had heard his mother talk of worms and slugs and other delicious-sounding things when she spoke to them. He flew and flew, and finally when he thought he could fly no longer, his eyes lit upon a cave where the Svepparine and the Samosine were talking. The walls of the cave were burned, and charred, and the Samosine was painting them - and the Svepparine was tending the dirt floor, carefully stretching a new kind of worm to the perfect length.

The bird thought that he would not be welcome, so he approached from above. With all the cunning of a born hunter, he swooped, and grabbed, and came away with a worm in his mouth, and as he ate he felt sated as he had not for months. So, he swooped down again - but this time, the Samosine was ready, and snatched him from the air.

The bird, terrified of the Samosine's huge, featherless hands, said, "I'm sorry, oh Cousins, for taking your worms and disturbing your cave - only, I am so hungry, I can hardly fly!"

The Samosine looked to his sibling and said, "Look at this poor, gaunt bird. Is he not one of our sister's creations? Is she so unkind to her children that they must journey here for food?"

So the bird explained to them what had happened, and how the birds had no caterpillars to feed on, because the plants were dying. The Samosine sympathized with the bird, but had no advice except to band together and look for food as a pack, which scared him, because where sparrows flocked together, the hawk was sure to follow.

At length, the Svepparine looked up from their work and held out a long, fat worm, wiggling and covered in the blackest mud the bird had ever seen. They said, "I cannot come to my sister's garden, nor can I send my children. But she will not deny you entry, because she finds you beautiful. Take this worm, and drop him in the great hill of leaves."

So the bird took up the worm in his beak, and, careful not to hurt it, flew back to the Lanicine's garden where she still sat in the dirt, working to keep her last few plants alive. She was so busy that she hardly noticed as he flew to the very top of the pile of dead leaves, damp from the latest storm, and dropped the worm. It burrowed into the pile and was lost.

For a long time, the bird thought that his trip had been a waste of time. Things were hard in the garden, and the birds took to harassing each other and fighting over food, until one day, a young sparrow fell into the great pile of dead leaves and came out with a worm! The other birds fluffed their feathers and screeched at her, but she dropped the worm and said, "Do not worry, my friends - there is plenty to share. The whole mountain of leaves is full of these tasty children of our cousin the Svepparine! Come, eat!"

The birds feasted that day, and the next, and even as the worms became more scarce, there were always plenty to find. The Lanicine was happy to see the birds were thriving, and paid little mind to their plunging and diving into the pile of leaves. Her newest plants could feed many caterpillars on little soil, and with the worms to feed the birds, the caterpillars grew and grew, so much that she had to make some of her plants bitter poison, just to keep her own children in check.

One day, though, she began to notice that the pile of leaves was getting smaller, and around the edges, her ferns and leafy plants had begun to spring up again - plants she had not worked on for many months. So, she pulled aside the leaves of the pile to see what had given them new life.

Inside, the Lanicine found a nightmare of twisting worms and rot. The wet leaves were full of holes, and fell apart at the touch, and the whole pile had become hot from the decay. She fell back, crying, and when she had gathered herself again she threw down her tools and stormed off to confront her sibling.

When she reached the Svepparine's cave, she found them playing with something she could not see. She shouted their name, and they turned, and this time their face was not mottled with black mud, but instead covered in a hundred colors of twisting, fruiting fungi - more beautiful than anything she had seen them make. In the corner was a small pile of dead leaves - her leaves! - that was bound and twisted through with white mycelium.

She was speechless, but her sibling had known that she would come eventually, and had prepared. "Sister." he said, "I know why you did not want my children in your garden. Your domain is the sunny surface, not the dark caves and tunnels where my creations thrive. But look! Some of your birds have brought me the dead leaves of your many plants, and my children have found a perfect home in them!" They poked the pile of leaves, and a dozen worms of different kinds slithered out.

The Lanicine nearly retched in disgust, but as looked on her sibling again, her heart softened. All that she had endured, all that her garden had suffered, was not because of her sibling, but because of her own pride, and her spite of them.

"Sibling," she said, "Your children have brought my garden back to life, but I fear they will consume everything I create."

"Sister," said the Svepparine, "You are right that my worms and mushrooms would consume the world if they could - that is their nature. I cannot make them any other way."

Then the Lanicine thought back to her newest plants, with special leaves that were bitter poison to her caterpillars, and she told her sibling of them. Together, they found what the worms and beetles would not eat, and what kept them away altogether, and the Lanicine shared the secrets of her own poisons with her sibling, which the Svepparine built into some of their most beautiful mushrooms to keep them safe from birds and caterpillars.

Once they were both satisfied, the Lanicine and Svepparine walked back to the garden together, hand in hand, and the Lanicine erased her protective magics. She led her sibling around, showing them each beautiful flower and trick of leaf and root that had kept them alive in the dwindling soil, and wherever the Svepparine stepped, spores fell from their hair and worms wriggled from the dirt between their toes, filling the garden with the harbingers of rot and renewal.

Then, the Lanicine stooped and pulled a pitted rock from the wet ground and handed it to her sibling. "This," she said, pointing to a tiny pool of water on the upper face of the rock, "is my proudest creation - algae. It lives on only water, and the tiniest bits of floating soil."

The Svepparine took the rock and turned it in their hand. "Beautiful," they said, and ran their fingers gently over the green flecks that rested in the nooks and crevices. From their fingertips came spores, and as the algae and fungi intertwined and began to grow, the first lichen was born.

And, like the lichen, the Lanicine and the Svepparine have been close ever since. You can see them in earth-worms after a rain-storm, in fallen logs of the Lanicine's great trees, and in the way flowers sprout from even the foulest decay, after enough time. And the Lanicine never forgot her sibling's lesson - that nothing that is only beautiful can last, and that there is beauty and life everywhere, if you are willing to look.