They are the plants of the valley the river woke in, grown monstrous: dock and burdock with leaves the size of shields, nettles taller than a rider, reeds as thick as a wrist, and trees whose roots bulge out of the bank like veins. Everything is too green or too red. Stems are thick, glossy, and soft, and when broken they bleed a thin red sap. Their leaves are veined in crimson and shiver in time with the river’s beat. The banks smell of raw meat and blossom together.

They grow only on the river’s soft banks and in its shallows, as far as the flow reaches when the river swells with its breath. Beyond that line nothing grows at all.

They drink. Their roots run into the bank and the flow, and they grow while the river beats. The Hemophages make their hollows among them, and the web-spinning Blood-Spinners hang their webs between their stems.

They swell within days of the river waking and grow as long as it runs. When the river fails, they fail with it: leaves blacken, stems slump, and the whole bank falls into the same ash as the land around it. A leaf that falls into the river is not left to rot; the river breaks it down and makes it more river.

Little that grows there is safe to eat; its fruit and leaves taste of blood and are said to bring on the river’s thirst. Their danger is cover. The growth is tall and dense enough to hide what hunts the banks, and a traveller pushing through it towards the water may be walking into a web.

Valley folk say the swollen plants are the stolen life of their own fields, and they are not wrong: the river’s gifts are paid for by the land around it. Some cut the bank growth back in the belief that it starves the river. It does not; the river takes what it needs from the land whatever grows beside it.

Beast-hunters who go after the things that lie in the bank growth say the plants pulse faster when something under them is waiting, and that the trick is to watch the leaves, not the water.