Glare-Lilies

Overview

Glare-Lilies grow in broad meadows on the crystalline plains of the Radiance. Each flower gathers the shadowless light of the plane and throws it out again, sharpened, onto whatever stands before it, so that a thing lit by a Glare-Lily is shown in every detail at once. A traveller who looks too long at what the lilies show, or into the lilies themselves, is blinded.

Appearance

A Glare-Lily stands knee- to waist-high on a single pale stem, translucent like glass with a thread of gold inside, with two or three narrow leaves of the same clear stuff. The flower is a deep trumpet of six petals, white shading to gold at the throat, faintly iridescent at the edges, and it shines from within, so that a meadow of them is a field of lamps on a plane that is already too bright. They turn slowly, together, towards whatever moves among them. They make no sound of their own, but a meadow hums faintly when someone near it lies. Their scent is of incense and of rain on hot stone.

Habitat and Range

They grow in the open light-meadows between the glass towers, rooted in cracks of the crystal ground, and nowhere else known.

Behaviour and Temperament

A lily turns its throat towards the nearest moving thing and follows it, and the light it throws grows stronger the longer it is held on one subject. Many lilies on one traveller make a glare in which nothing about them, not a stain on the cloth or a mark on the skin, can be hidden or overlooked.

Abilities

What a Glare-Lily lights is seen whole: every flaw, scar, and hidden pocket shows plainly, and painted or disguised surfaces show what lies under them. The light is too strong for mortal eyes held on it for long, and a stare of a few breaths leaves the eyes dazzled for hours, one of many breaths for days.

Life Cycle

They seem not to seed or wither. New lilies are said to rise where something was shown in the Radiance that had been hidden a long time, and a meadow is reckoned old by how many there are.

Uses and Dangers

The Illuminated walk the meadows unharmed and have no use for them; nothing is hidden from them anyway. Travellers who come to the Radiance for a lost thing sometimes walk a meadow to find it, since the lilies show what is on a person that they had forgotten carrying. The danger is blindness, short or long, and the exposure of anything the walker hoped to keep.

Lore and Belief

Travellers say the lilies are the eyes of the plane and that they show the soul, not only the body; what they show is the body and its belongings, unsparingly, and the plane does the rest. A picked lily is said to stay alight on the Material Plane and to make liars confess in its glare. The few who have tried it report that it goes dark within a day, and the confessions, if any, were their own.

Lords have paid delvers fortunes to bring one back to light a traitor's trial, and the tale is told of the lord who held one up to his own council and found he had no one left to trust.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Plants and Fungi