Ageless Spring Flora

Overview

The plants that ring an Ageless Spring are ordinary moss, wildflowers, and trees of their valley, caught in the moment the stillness reached them. They do not grow, fade, or change. To a visitor they are the first sign of the place: a glade where nothing has moved for longer than anyone can say.

Appearance

A short, close moss covers the ground to the edge of the pool, green with a faint silver sheen, never taller than a fingernail. Flowers stand in it, each open at its best, with no bud and no faded head anywhere among them. The trees are whatever grew there, oak or ash or valley pine, every leaf whole and green, none yellowing and none on the ground beneath. In the unchanging golden twilight the leaves cast shadows that never move.

Nothing stirs. There is no wind in the leaves, no insect in the flowers, and the plants give off no scent at all. Touched, a leaf is cool and hard, and a stem does not bend: it is like touching glass.

Habitat and Range

The flora grows only within the bounds of a spring, from the pool's edge to where the stillness ends, often a few dozen paces. The boundary shows plainly where dead leaves begin.

Behaviour and Temperament

These plants do nothing. They take nothing from the soil, set no seed, and draw no bees, since no insect lives in the glade. A spring's moss is the moss it had on the day the stillness came.

Abilities

Inside the zone a plant cannot be changed, only broken. A stem snaps cleanly like a glass rod, and both pieces stay exactly as they were, the cut end neither healing nor drying. Carried out of the zone, a picked flower meets the time it missed all at once and withers within the hour; a branch from an old spring may crumble to dust in the hand.

Life Cycle

None, while the spring lasts. If the spring is destroyed or covered, time rushes back into the glade, and its plants live out their missing years in moments: leaves yellow and drop, flowers brown, and old trees can slump and rot where they stand.

Uses and Dangers

The flora is harmless and nearly useless, since nothing taken from it lasts outside. To the Lingerers, a broken stem in the glade means someone has been there.

Lore and Belief

Valley folk say a flower from the spring keeps its bloom for ever and give the tale to lovers. It does not: the flower withers on the way home, and the tale survives because nobody likes to say so.

Thieves still go for the flowers, and the spring-villages that live by the Spring's water deal with them as they deal with any raider; the song of the lover who went in for a bloom and came out to find his betrothed forty years married is sung at weddings in the valley as a warning.

Where It Appears

• The Ageless Spring