Carnivorous Plants
Carnivorous plants catch living prey and feed on it. A few grow wild on Caeldon, from the tiny sundews of the bogs to the fen pitchers of the Reedmere, which drown frogs and small birds, and larger ones may grow in fens and deep woods nobody has walked. The ones people speak of are mostly made: nature mages can turn ordinary marsh growth into hunting plants for a while with the Nature Magic working called Predator Bloom. In the Verdant Expanse they need no mage. Many of its plants eat meat, and count a traveller as fertilizer.
Appearance
Bloomed Marsh Growth
A patch under Predator Bloom looks at first like the marsh around it, reed, sedge, and trailing vine, but thicker and darker green, glossy as if wet. Then it moves. Vines lift from the water and lengthen into tendrils as thick as a thumb, with a sticky sheen along their undersides; leaf-bases swell into cups; the whole cluster leans towards warmth like a dog towards a fire. It smells of crushed stems and, once fed, of meat.
Plants of the Expanse
The Expanse’s meat-eaters come in every form its riot allows: pitchers big enough to drown a goat, lips of bright pink and purple that close on a hand, sticky-haired fronds that fold over a sleeping body, vines that coil, tighten, and pull. Their colours are the plane’s own, saturated and pulsing, and their nectar is sweet enough to turn the stomach.
Habitat and Range
The bloomed growth lasts only where it was cast, a small patch or cluster, and only for a while; it needs living plant mass, moisture, and fertile ground, so it is a working of marshes, river margins, and wet woods. In the Expanse such plants are everywhere, and grow back faster than they can be cut.
Behaviour and Temperament
Bloomed growth hunts what is near and alive. It cannot tell friend from foe, and once fed it grows harder to control, so a mage who sets it round an intruders' camp keeps their own people well back. It goes for the still before the moving: a sleeper, a sentry, a hobbled horse.
The Expanse’s plants hunt by lure and patience, with scent, colour, and nectar, and many work in step with the whole jungle through the root-network that links its life.
Abilities
They grip, hold, and digest. A tendril can drag a grown man off his feet; a cup or pitcher dissolves flesh in its pool. In the Expanse, where growth is fast beyond measure, a trap closes and a body is taken down to soil within hours.
Life Cycle
Bloomed growth returns to being ordinary marsh plants when the working ends, often withered and spent, since the working feeds on the plants themselves and on the ground. The Expanse’s carnivores sprout, feed, seed, and die in a span of days, and each is replaced before it has finished dying.
Uses and Dangers
Predator Bloom guards a camp, a ford, or a marsh path, and turns a hiding place into a trap. It is dangerous to allies and hard to stop once fed, and forcing it on poor ground costs the land and the caster dearly. In the Expanse such plants are one of the plane’s chief dangers, beside the growth that buries a traveller in minutes; travellers are told to touch nothing and to cut any root they feel closing on them.
Lore and Belief
Marsh folk tell of drowning-vines in every bog, waiting for children, and most of the tales are older than any mage who could have bloomed one; the fen pitchers, which drown what falls into them, may be where the tales began. Many believe a bloomed patch can be talked down by its maker; it can only be let wither. Travellers' tales of the Expanse make every flower a mouth. That is not quite so, but near enough to keep a traveller’s hands in their sleeves. The plants that mimic blossoms there, the Flower-Stalkers, are counted by those who know the plane as hunters in their own right rather than as plants.
Battle tales tell of a nature mage who bloomed the marsh behind a retreating warband and let its pursuers ride into it; the drowning-vines took horse and rider, and the marsh is still called after the lord who led them in.