Ash-Thistle

Overview

The Ash-Thistle is the one flowering plant that still grows on the grey plains of the Ashen Wastes. On a plane where heat dies within moments it lives by taking heat from whatever burns near it, and when it goes to seed its down settles on a fire and puts it out. To a traveller who has carried fuel across the ash, that is the worst thing a plant can do.

Appearance

A thistle about knee-high, stiff and branching, the colour of old ash: grey stem, grey leaves deeply cut and spined at every point, and the whole plant dusted so that it seems to have been burnt and left standing. The flower heads are small, tight, and a dull rust colour, the only colour on the plain for a day's walk. In seed each head opens into a ball of grey down that hangs in the heavy air and drifts very slowly. Crushed, the stem is dry inside and smells faintly of cold smoke. It makes no sound; even its seed-heads break without a crackle.

Habitat and Range

It grows scattered across the ash plains, one plant to a wide stretch of ground, thickest in the lee of the eroded ridges where the ash storms drop less. It is never found far from where something once burned: an old hearth-ring, a lightning-scar, the bones of a camp.

Behaviour and Temperament

The Ash-Thistle grows towards heat. A plant near a warm stone leans to it over a season, and its roots run under any hearth-ring left in the ash. The down does the same on the air: a fire's draught draws it in, and wherever it settles the flame shrinks, goes dull red, and dies, while the seed it carried lies in the warm ash and waits.

Abilities

Its tissues take in warmth and keep it, which no other thing on the plane can do for long. The seed-down carries that hunger: a drift of it on a fire takes the fire's heat into itself as a sponge takes water, and a camp can lose its fire in a few breaths when the thistles are seeding upwind.

Life Cycle

The seed sprouts only in ash that has been warm. A plant grows slowly over many seasons, flowers once, seeds, and stands dead and grey for years afterwards, crumbling at a touch. Where a fire has been put out by its down, a ring of young thistles comes up later around the dead hearth.

Uses and Dangers

The Ash-Walkers cut the green heads before seeding and burn them, for they give back some of the heat they have hoarded, and a dried stem smoulders longer than any other fuel on the plane. The danger is the down. Travellers who camp downwind of a seeding stand wake beside a dead fire in a cold that kills.

Lore and Belief

Travellers call it the fire-thief and say it is the plane's way of taking back what visitors bring. The Ash-Walkers count it among the few things on the plane that do not waste, and will not tread one down. Travellers who come back from the Wastes say that a thistle head pushed into a pot of embers keeps the embers alive longer; the Ash-Walkers say it keeps only the thistle alive.

Delvers into the Wastes tell of the camp that bedded down in a thistle stand and woke in the dark with its fire smothered by drifting down; only those who had kept a coal sealed in a pot lived to walk home.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Plants and Fungi