Drowning Garden Flora

Overview

The flora of the Drowning Garden is a whole forest under water: kelp, coral trees, and flowering plants, with a floor of moss and sand. Its breathing runs backwards. The plants breathe the water as air-breathers do there, and the open air above would suffocate them. They grow faster than anything on land, and they yield plants with alchemical virtues found nowhere else, which is why herbalists risk the Garden at all.

Appearance

The tallest growth is kelp, rising in olive-gold columns towards the light and moving in the current like a wood in wind. Between it stand coral trees, branching shapes of rose, white, and orange, hard at the trunk and soft at the tips, in whose limbs the fish move like birds. Below them grow flowering water plants: broad-leafed stems with blossoms of turquoise, crimson, and yellow that open towards the beams of light, and sea flowers scattered over the moss among the anemones. In the deeper water many plants glow, a soft blue-green that is the only light at the bottom.

Everything is soft. A leaf feels like velvet, a stem gives under the hand, and the whole forest rustles in the current with a muffled sound. The water around it tastes of salt and minerals and something green.

Habitat and Range

The forest fills the Garden from its sunlit shallows to its floor. The kelp stands thickest towards the surface, the coral trees in the middle depths, and the glowing plants deepest, where time runs fastest. The flora grows only in the Garden's own water.

Behaviour and Temperament

It grows. Under the Garden's law, plants put on inches in an hour, and a cleared path closes behind a swimmer. The Gill-Folk prune the kelp and keep the forest in balance as gardeners, and without them it would choke itself. Fronds and runners settle on whatever stays still, and grow round it.

Abilities

The plants breathe as nothing on land does. They draw their life from the water itself and cannot bear air: a plant lifted out of the Garden suffocates and dies, which is why its herbs travel in sealed jars of Garden water. Their speed is their danger. A traveller who rests too long in one place may wake held by fronds, and a slow swimmer in a thick stand can be trapped or crushed.

Life Cycle

Everything in the Garden lives fast, and its plants sprout, bloom, fruit, and die in days rather than seasons. The deeper they grow, the faster they turn over. Dead fronds and fallen blossoms drift down to feed the moss and sand. Visitors who stay too long are claimed in the same way, sprouting plants and coral until they become part of the forest.

Uses and Dangers

The Gill-Folk live by the forest, harvesting its fruit as well as its fish. Herbalists and alchemists come for its rare plants, whose potency is prized and whose names are guarded by those who gather them. The cost is the Garden's: every hour among the plants ages the gatherer, and the most potent grow deepest, where an hour may cost a lifetime.

Lore and Belief

Herbalists hold that a Garden herb is stronger for every year it cost its gatherer, and price it so. The Gill-Folk see the forest as a gift of the deep water and tend it accordingly. Shore folk believe the coral trees are drowned travellers, and in a few cases they are right: the Overgrown are visitors the Garden has grown into its forest.

Herb-hunters who dive for the deepest Garden herbs are paid in gold, and the divers still toast the young one who went down to the bottom for a cure for a plague-struck town and came up grey-haired with the cure in her hand.

Where It Appears

• The Drowning Garden