Spore-Clouds

Overview

Spore-Clouds are swarms of sentient spores in the Verdant Expanse, the plane of unchecked growth. They drift until they find a host, take hold of it, and make it spread seed. Those who know the plane count them among the Overgrown, the creatures that have merged with the Expanse, and among its hunters.

Appearance

A Spore-Cloud looks at first like the rest of the Expanse's air, thick with pollen, but it holds together. It is a haze the size of a cart or a cottage, gold-green or violet, faintly glittering where the dappled light catches it, and it moves against the breeze. It drifts low between the trunks and breaks round a swinging blade, closing again behind it. It smells of mushroom and damp bread, sharp in the plane's sweet air.

Habitat and Range

They live in the Expanse's undergrowth and its warm, still hollows, where the air is thickest. They are not known outside the plane.

Behaviour and Temperament

A cloud acts as one creature, and seems to choose. It hangs back from what is already rooted and goes for what moves on its own, a bird, a beast, or a traveller, and most of all for a traveller asleep. It enters through mouth and nose, and settles there.

A host does not lose its mind at once. It keeps walking, but it walks where the cloud wants, gathering seed and fruit, carrying them, and pushing them into the soil far from where they fell, with a calm it cannot explain. In time the cloud grows through the host and the host stops being a traveller at all.

Abilities

The spores possess. A taken host's will bends to theirs, its pockets fill with seed, and its hands plant. The cloud is hard to escape by running and is not harmed by a blade; it is driven off by smoke and wind, and kept out by a face wrapped tight.

Life Cycle

A cloud grows in its host. When the host is spent, or rooted where it last planted, a new cloud rises from it, and the seed it sowed becomes the Expanse's next forest within the hour. How the first clouds came to be no one knows.

Uses and Dangers

They give nothing that a traveller can use. Their danger is the slow theft of a body: a companion who seems well, only quiet, and keeps stooping to the soil. Travellers are told to wear protection against spores and to watch one another for the stoop.

Lore and Belief

Travellers' tales call them the Expanse's gardeners, and some say the Verdant send them. Others believe a taken host can be freed by burning seed under its nose, which drives a cloud out only if it is caught early. The Spore-Clouds are not the same as the Spore Cloud working of the nature mages, which releases a cultivated strain without any will of its own, nor as the spores of the Beyonders.

Herb-hunters who come back from the Expanse are watched for a season by their own villages, and wherever the Expanse is spoken of, someone recalls the hunter who came home with a sack of rare herbs and a cough, and woke the village green.

Where It Appears

• The Verdant Expanse