Drowning Garden Fauna
The fish, shrimp, whales, anemones, and glowing creatures of the Drowning Garden, a submerged forest where breathing runs backwards and life grows, heals, and ages too fast.
Overview
The animals of the Drowning Garden live inside a pocket of the Material Plane where the flow of the Surging Deep has been turned on breathing itself: the water sustains, and air-breathers breathe it as easily as air. Fish swim between the kelp branches like birds, shrimp click on the moss, whales sing somewhere below, and anemones crowd the sand. They have stopped fighting the inversion, and under the Garden's quickening they grow, heal, breed, and age far faster than their kin outside.
Appearance
Fish
The Garden's fish move through the forest as birds move through trees, perching in the lee of a kelp stem, flocking between the coral branches, darting up through the falling beams of light. Most are small and bright: emerald, turquoise, sandy gold, the Garden's own colours worn as scales. In the deeper water they glow a soft blue-green from within, and a shoal turning in the dark is a cloud of faint lights.
Shrimp
Small, near-clear shrimp swarm over the moss and sand, so many that the clicking of their claws fills the water like crickets in a summer field. Visitors hear them long before they see them.
Whales
The singing of whales carries through the Garden muffled and distant, as if heard through a shell. The whales themselves keep to the deep water and are seldom seen close: long, slow, pale shapes passing beneath the forest. They breathe the water like everything else here and never rise to the surface.
Anemones and Sea Flowers
The floor is dotted with anemones in every colour the water holds, soft as velvet and yielding under a hand, opening and closing with the current. Among them the line between animal and flower is hard to draw, and the Garden does not draw it.
Habitat and Range
They live only in the Garden, in its warm, clear, nutrient-rich water among towering kelp, coral trees, and flowering water plants. The Garden opens in deep lakes, flooded forests, and coastal caves reached through Depth-Gates, so its creatures are found wherever it is, and nowhere outside it. The deeper the water, the stronger the quickening and the stranger the life.
Behaviour and Temperament
Nothing in the Garden hurries away. Fish drift close to a visitor and turn aside only at the last moment, and the shrimp go on clicking under a hand laid among them. The current carries everything gently and constantly, and the creatures move with it rather than against it, so that a whole shoal will lean together in the flow like grass in wind.
Abilities
The Garden's quickening is in every body. Its creatures grow fast, heal fast, and breed fast, and a wound that would kill a fish outside closes in a day. Under the reduced weight of the place everything floats, and even the heaviest creatures move with an ease they could not have elsewhere. Many in the deep water make their own light.
Life Cycle
Lives here are short and full. A fish hatched in the morning may be grown by the end of a visitor's stay, and old before the visitor is home. Generations turn over so quickly that the Garden's animals change as visitors watch: shoal patterns, colours, and sizes shift from one visit to the next. The deeper they live, the shorter their span.
Uses and Dangers
The fish are food: the Gill-Folk, the Garden's own people, live on its plants and fish, and harvest both as gardeners rather than hunters. Visitors come mostly for the plants and the healing water, not for the animals. The creatures themselves are harmless. The cost of watching them is the cost of the Garden: every hour spent among them ages the watcher with them, faster the deeper one follows.
Lore and Belief
The Gill-Folk see the Garden's creatures as part of the gift of the Surging Deep, and tend the shoals as they tend the kelp. Outside, herbalists and travellers bring back tales of fish that fly and whales that never breathe air, and of shoals that are old by evening. People who live near a Depth-Gate know the Garden as a place with known dangers and disputed causes: some call its creatures blessed and some cursed, and the schools argue over why life there runs fast at all.