Mossbacks

Overview

Mossbacks are the great grazers of the Verdant Expanse, among its Overgrown: beasts that have grown together with a garden. Each carries a living garden on its back and keeps it in check, and its back is the one place on the plane where the growth does not reach for a sleeping traveller.

Appearance

A grown Mossback is the size of a peasant's house and shaped like a vast, low tortoise without a shell: a broad, flat back on six thick, slow legs, a long, supple neck, and a small, mild head with heavy-lidded eyes. Its back is one deep carpet of moss, ferns, and flowers, with saplings and fruiting bushes rooted in it and sometimes a small tree. Water stands in the hollows of it. The beast's own hide, where it shows at the flanks, is grey-green and creased like bark. It moves a pace at a time and the garden sways. It hums, low and constantly, a sound felt through the feet, and smells of wet earth and blossom.

Habitat and Range

They walk the jungle floor alone or in pairs, wandering wherever the growth is thickest, and are found across the plane.

Behaviour and Temperament

A Mossback grazes all day, reaching its long neck over its own shoulder to crop its garden as much as the jungle around it. It eats whatever on its back grows too fast and too far, and so its garden stays a garden while the jungle around it swallows paths and fallen beasts. It is placid and ignores everything that does not hurt it. Travellers who climb onto its back are carried, at a walking pace, wherever it is going.

Abilities

What grows on a Mossback is held to the beast's measure. Vines on its back do not wrap a sleeper, roots there do not take a resting body, and its fruit, unlike much of the plane's, is safe to eat. The beast heals from almost anything and does not seem to grow old.

Life Cycle

A calf is born with bare skin and gathers its garden from the spores and seeds that land on it, so that no two Mossbacks carry the same. Their lives are long beyond counting. When one finally lies down and does not rise, its garden becomes a hill of the jungle within days.

Uses and Dangers

For travellers a Mossback is a moving refuge: a place to sleep without being buried in vines, and food that will not sprout inside them. Experienced travellers look for one before anything else and ride it as long as it goes their way. The Verdant call them elders and do not let anyone harm them.

Lore and Belief

Travellers' tales give a Mossback a whole village on its back. The Tree-Men are said to speak with them, slowly, over seasons. On the Material Plane a story told near the old forests that open onto the Expanse, of a hill that walked away in the night, is taken by some for a Mossback that came through a Seed-Gate, and by most for a tale.

Treasure-seekers' tales say a Mossback carries the ruins of whatever stood on it when it rose, and that one somewhere in the Expanse walks with a lost temple of Caeldon on its back, gold and all.

Where It Appears

• The Verdant Expanse