Marker Lichen

Overview

Marker Lichen crusts the inscribed stones of the Witnessfields: the boundary markers of the Grey Line and the stones that line the marker roads between the sealed cities. It grows so slowly that a crust is as old as many lifetimes, and it grows into the cut letters first, so that the script of the elder Archive-Law Civilization is read through it, under it, or not at all.

Appearance

It forms flat, rounded crusts pressed tight to the stone, from the size of a coin to a broad plate, grey-green at the centre and ringed with a narrow band of sulphur yellow at the growing edge. Old crusts run together into a map-like patchwork with thin black lines where two meet. In the grooves of the inscriptions it grows thicker and paler, so that from a few paces a weathered text shows as pale writing on a darker stone. It is dry and papery, and smells of nothing.

Habitat and Range

It wants clean air, light, and hard, dressed stone, and it grows across the Witnessfields' open uplands on markers, culvert faces, and the roofless walls of witness halls. It is rare on the rough field stone of the basin side, which is how herders at the Grey Line know the old stones from their own.

Life Cycle

A crust grows by a fingernail's breadth in a lifetime and lives as long as the stone lasts. Pieces broken off root again where they lodge in a groove.

Uses and Dangers

It harms no one. To scholars it is both help and hindrance: in low sun the pale lichen-filled grooves make worn letters readable, and where the crust has covered a text they scrape it away with a bone blade, slowly, to read what lies beneath. Goblins copying warrant fragments from the open ruins do the same. Dyers on the basin side know that it gives a brownish dye, but nobody gathers it here.

Lore and Belief

Flockturn herders say the lichen eats the words and that a stone whose text is gone has been eaten clean; that is why, they say, some markers name nothing any more. The lichen etches the stone a little, and the herders are not wholly wrong. Scholars argue over whether to scrape at all, since a scraped stone loses a crust older than the oldest record-house, and some scribes of the Mending Orders hold that the lichen's patience is a kind of remembering. The basin saying "slow as the marker grey" means something that will not be hurried.

Treasure-seekers read the lichen too: a stone scraped clean is a stone someone has read recently, and the marker roads are walked by more than scholars, hunting the inscriptions said to tell where the archive cities buried their strongrooms.

Where It Appears

• Overview: Plants and Fungi