Thirstroot
Thirstroot is the plant of the Parched, if a plant is what it is: a mass of root under the cracked ground with almost nothing above it. On a plane where the land itself seems to drink, it does the drinking. By night its roots rise through the cracks to draw moisture from whatever lies still above them, and a traveller who sleeps on the wrong ground wakes, if at all, dried and bleeding from a hundred small wounds.
Appearance
By day there is little to see: a few grey, leathery, finger-long leaves pressed flat to the ground in a star, and a web of fine cracks around them a few paces across. At night the roots come up through those cracks, pale and thread-thin at first, thickening to the width of a cord as they feed, tipped with fine, hard hairs that work into skin. They move slowly and without sound, and a patch of ground that has fed shows as a darker, softer circle in the morning. It smells of nothing until it feeds; then of wet clay.
Habitat and Range
It grows in the mud flats, dry riverbeds, and hollows where any trace of moisture was last held, and it is commonest at the edges of the salt flats left behind when a portal flood has come and gone. A wide patch of it may lie under a single stretch of ground for as long as anyone has crossed it.
Behaviour and Temperament
It feeds on what lies still. Roots rise towards warmth and damp and fasten wherever they touch skin, hide, or anything wet, and they draw slowly, through the hours of dark, sinking back as the plane’s pale sun rises. A moving body shakes them off; a sleeping one, or one too weak to rise, is drunk from all night.
Abilities
Its roots find moisture through the ground by the faintest damp of a breath or a skin, and their hairs draw blood and water from the body through countless small wounds that hardly hurt. It can feed from a carcass for days.
Life Cycle
It seems to grow only after it has fed, a patch spreading a little after each kill. It flowers, rarely, in a burst of small grey-white bells that last one night after a portal flood, and its seed lies in the dust for years.
Uses and Dangers
The Dust-Eaters know its ground and dig the thick roots of a well-fed patch for the water they hold, a dangerous harvest, since a patch that has fed recently is strong. To travellers it is a slow killer. Those who sleep on the Parched sleep on stone, on packs, or in turns, and wake one another at the first tug.
Lore and Belief
Travellers say the ground of the Parched is alive and hungry, and in thirstroot country they are right. They also say that it drinks the blood of the dead so that no corpse lies whole on the plane for long, which is partly so; bone-cleaning is the work of other beings. A tale goes round of a crosser who found a patch of fresh green leaves in the morning and knew a companion had slept there; it is the kind of tale the Parched breeds.
Delvers who cross to the Parched for its minerals sleep sitting up, back to back, and the tale of the camp that slept lying down is the first thing an old hand tells a new one.