A Seedwasp is as long as a finger, slender-waisted, with a body banded in leaf-green and pollen-gold and wings that flash violet in the dappled light. Its sting is not a needle but a short, hollow, green tube, and a seed can sometimes be seen moving down it. It flies fast and straight through the canopy with a deep, rising hum that is one note in the plane’s endless chorus of insects. A wasp’s nest, a papery ball among the vines, smells of crushed stems and sweet sap.

They nest high in the canopy, in colonies of a few hundred, and hunt down to the jungle floor and along the rivers. They are everywhere the Expanse’s growth is thickest.

A Seedwasp does not sting to defend itself. It stings to sow. It lands on a warm, living body, picks a soft place, and drives its tube in, and the seed it leaves is the seed of whatever plant the wasp last fed on. A colony disturbed will sow everything near it at once. They take nectar and fruit for themselves and need living flesh only to plant.

The seed takes root in flesh as readily as in soil. On the Expanse, where wounds heal in seconds, the sting closes over it before the stung one has finished slapping at it, and the seed sprouts within hours, sending roots along the muscle and a shoot towards the skin. Outside the plane the seed grows far more slowly, but it grows.

The wasps live a season and breed like any wasp, from eggs laid in the nest. The plants they sow are their real offspring: a beast of the jungle may carry a whole small thicket rooted in its hide, scattering seed wherever it walks.

They are dangerous only if the sting is left. A seed cut out within the hour leaves a scar and nothing else, and old travellers carry a knife for nothing but that. Left, it grows into a hard green knot under the skin, then a shoot, and the healers of the Material Plane can cut out what has rooted only with care. Herbalists pay well for rare plants grown in the Expanse; a few, it is said, have paid for rarer ones grown in a traveller.

The Verdant think nothing of a sting and carry flowering shoots in their own bark. Travellers bring home the belief that a Seedwasp’s sting can be drawn out with salt, which does nothing. Tales of the Expanse confuse the wasps with the Spore-Clouds, which take a host’s will; the wasps take nothing but room.

Herb-hunters who come home from the Expanse are stripped and searched by their families for the swelling under the skin, and the tale of the hunter who cut the sprouting seed out of his own arm with a hunting knife is told to every apprentice who wants to go.