Fen Pitchers
Knee-high pitcher plants of the Reedmere's deep fens that drown frogs, mice, and small birds in their rain-filled cups: the largest plants of Caeldon that hunt without a mage.
Overview
Fen pitchers are the largest of the few plants of the Material Plane that hunt without a mage to make them. They grow in clumps on the deep fen and floating reed-mat of the Reedmere in the Confluence Basins, and their cups, as tall as a child's knee, drown frogs, mice, shrews, and small birds. They cannot take a grown person, but they are the truth that the marsh tales of drowning-vines grew from (see Carnivorous Plants).
Appearance
A clump of fen pitchers is a cluster of upright, hollow, horn-shaped leaves, each a pitcher as long as a forearm and as wide as a cup at its mouth, rising out of a low rosette on the moss. They are pale green below and flushed deep red and purple towards the mouth, veined like a hand held to the light, and a hooded lid leans over each mouth to keep the worst of the rain out. The rim is ribbed and slippery and wet with nectar. Each pitcher holds a pool of thin, faintly cloudy fluid. In early summer the clump raises nodding, blood-red flowers on tall stalks. Close to, it smells sweet with a sour edge, like fruit left too long.
Habitat and Range
They grow only on the open, deep, sour fen of the Reedmere, where the reed thins and the ground is half water, and on the floating mats of reed and moss that drift on its meres. They need sun and poor wet ground and are shaded out where the reed stands tall. A clump may cover a patch the size of a table and live on the same patch for longer than a Reedfolk house remembers.
Behaviour and Temperament
A pitcher lures with colour and nectar. Insects come first, then the frogs and shrews that hunt them, then birds that hunt both. The rim is slick, the inside of the pitcher waxy and lined with downward hairs, and whatever slips in cannot climb out; it drowns in the pool and is slowly digested. A big pitcher may hold the bones of several frogs at once.
Abilities
Their fluid digests flesh slowly and burns broken skin. They do not move, grip, or reach; everything they catch catches itself.
Life Cycle
A clump grows from dust-fine seed on wet moss and takes years to raise its first full-sized pitchers. Old pitchers brown and fall over in autumn, and new ones rise from the rosette each spring. A clump may live a century.
Uses and Dangers
Reedfolk pilots read a fen pitcher clump as a sign of deep, soft ground that will not bear a foot. Herb-wives use the fluid, diluted, on warts and old sores. The danger is small and mostly to the curious: a child who reaches into a pitcher for a trapped bird, or a dog that puts its nose in, comes away stung and blistered, and the ground under a clump is often a sinkhole.
Lore and Belief
Basin folk say fen pitchers drink the drowned, and that a clump on a mere marks where someone went under; Reedfolk know them for frog-drinkers that grow wherever the fen is deepest, which is where people drown. Children of the Reedmere are told the pitchers keep the songs of the birds they drown, and are warned off them with it.
Smugglers on the Reedmere are said to sink their goods in the deepest pitcher pools, knowing no one wades there willingly.