Ember Moss
Ember Moss grows on the furnace scars of the Glassbelt Interior, where the glassed ground of the dead furnace zones is said to hold the fire’s heat still. It lives on that warmth and a little dew, and it burns as no other plant does: lit, it smoulders for days. Workers of Crucible Magic prize it as tinder, and the salvagers who gather it keep strict rules about where it may go.
Appearance
A low, dense moss that crusts the cracks and pits of the glass in cushions the size of a hand, dark red to rust-brown, with a shine on its tips when the light is low. Dry, it is brittle and crumbles to a reddish dust; after a dewy night it softens and darkens nearly to black. Laid on the back of a hand it feels faintly warm. It smells of hot stone and, when crushed, of something sharp like a struck flint.
Habitat and Range
It grows only on warm glassed ground, so it marks the deep furnace scars where the heat still lingers and is absent from the cooled glass and the pans. Crossers read a red crust on the glass as a warning that the ground underfoot is the kind they go over only when they must.
Abilities
It holds heat in its dense cushions and gives it back slowly. A spark or a fingertip of flame sets it smouldering, and a cushion burns low and red for days without flame, giving a steady warmth and very little smoke, nearly impossible to put out short of burying it.
Life Cycle
It spreads by spores across warm glass and by pieces carried in the wind, and grows very slowly, a crust taking many years to cover a crack. On glass that cools, it dies back and is gone in a season.
Uses and Dangers
The Salvage Peoples gather a little to carry fire across the desert: a pinch in a closed tin keeps an ember alive from one camp to the next, and a Crucible worker can draw on its stored heat. Its danger is that it catches too easily. A spark on a crust sets the scar smouldering for days, and a pack with loose moss in it can burn through on the march.
Lore and Belief
The salvagers who work the furnace scars count it with the ash and slag: it is not carried out of the deep scars, and moss gathered there is burnt before the crossing ends, under the same old warning that keeps ash and slag in the desert (see Furnace-Ash Sickness). Crossers say the moss is the old fire still alive and hungry, and that it grows where the furnaces were worked hardest. Nobody says the fire’s name near it.
Salvagers tell of the crew that brought a sack of moss out of the scars to sell as tinder and burned with their camp the first night outside.