Cavern’s Dream

Appledance’s Guide to Culinary Excellence Entry VII · Cavern’s Dream: The Deep-Dark Morel’s Double Edge

By Delilah Appledance, Eth Dreythna’s Wandering Hearthkeeper

La-la-la… I’ll never forget the soft glow of my lantern wobbling against slick tunnel walls the first time I saw a cluster of Deep-Dark Morels. These mushrooms carpet the endless caverns of the Deep Dark—twisted subterranean passages that spiderweb beneath every continent, popping up in dank hollows and grotto crevices. Their caps run from inky obsidian to smoky grey, dotted with crater-like pits, and each gleams as though it’s still damp with the earth’s last breath.

Though wild morels can be found anywhere in the Deep Dark, only at the distant dwarven capital of Irrn-No Gezza did I learn the true art of rendering them safe. There, salt-masters wrap the mushrooms in bundles with ten or so blue-spotted millipedes, an underground arthropod whose hardy gut microbes devour the morel’s psychotropic spores. As the little creatures crawl across each cap, they strip away the worst of the toxins, ensuring that by the time the mushrooms emerge, they smell only of rich earth and faint smoke. After which, the salt-masters bring treated caps to a boiling broth infused with crushed ironstone to clean any detritus left by the millipedes.

Eat an untreated morel, however, and you gamble with Cavern’s Dream: a creeping psychosis that twists reality in velvet shadows. Within an hour of tasting raw spores, a surface-dweller feels sleep slip away—eyes widen as walls pulse and whispers curl through empty rooms. Hallucinations bloom unchecked until exhaustion drags you under; in a safe homestead, you lie comatose for days, but in a monster-haunted tunnel, you risk becoming someone’s midnight supper.

Symptoms range from gentle distortions, pulsing floorboards and dancing embers to full-blown delirium: lost hours, babbled half-prayers, and the dreadful inability to close one’s eyes. Best case, two dawns later you awaken, mind fogged but intact; worst case, you collapse into fevered sweats and nightmares that linger for weeks.

Dwarven healers insist on prompt emesis, an induced stomach purge, accomplished with a cup of heated ash-filtered water and a pinch of Salt. Follow it with a warming draught of rosemary and mint tea, sweetened with orchard honey, and sleep usually returns by the next sunset. For stubborn cases, they bind a poultice of basalt dust and crushed peppermint to the temples ’til the world rights itself and the last spores work their way out.

To dwarves, Deep-Dark Morels are a symbol of resilience, lucky finds at autumn’s forge-lit feasts in Irrn-No Gezza. Surface folk covet them as daring delicacies, trading silver for cured caps and humming with delight at their smoky-honey flavour. Yet every cook knows that without the millipede’s quiet labour and the salt-master’s patient art, these mushrooms remain a perilous indulgence.

I’ve adapted my own riff on the dwarven classic: after three days of curing, I slice the caps thin and fold them into a Moonroot and Ember Berry Ragout. The stew simmers low, turning creamy and amber, each bite yielding a whisper of subterranean warmth and orchard sweetness, and thankfully never a hint of madness.

So if you ever venture into the Deep Dark, mind your steps and mind your recipes. Let kindness guide your hands as much as caution guides your knife, and may every shared meal keep you safely tethered to the light above. tra-la…

~ Mrs. A