We keep the register of the Wraithwood's glowing fungi — the species that burn cold and green in the understory, seen only by those who sit long enough for their eyes to forget the sun.
↓ the glow follows you — scroll into the register
Each entry records the wavelength of the light, the faint lux it throws at arm's length, and the night it was first set down in the ledger.
A thimble-sized cap on a hair-thin stem. In full dark a colony reads like a spilled constellation an inch above the leaf litter. Goes out if touched — which is why it took the Institute three winters to prove it was there at all.
The only warm light in the wood. Its gills hold a low amber that deepens after rain, as if the fungus were remembering a fire it never saw.
You never see the fungus, only its work: a mycelium that lights the underside of fallen trunks so the whole log breathes a dim green from beneath the bark.
Each cap wears a bead of its own moisture that catches and doubles the glow — a lamp with a lens grown over it. Brightest in the hour before dawn.
A honeycomb of pores on the cap's underside, each one lit. Held to the eye it is a tiny stained-glass window with the light coming from inside the glass.
There is no shortcut for measuring a light this faint. You dark-adapt, you wait, and you let the night write on the plate for as long as it needs.
No lamp, no screen. The recorder sits until the rods in the eye recover and the wood stops being black and starts being green.
A cooled plate is opened to the specimen for up to nine minutes. The glow is too weak to see move, but it is not too weak to accumulate.
Wavelength, luminance, weather, and hour are set down under a red lamp — the one light that will not blind the eye for the next specimen.