Verdant Expanse Flora

Overview

The plants of the Verdant Expanse are the plane: a chaotic, shifting jungle where life reproduces faster than anything can contain it. A seed can become a forest in an hour. Trees grow into spirals, roots make bridges, flowers bloom and wither in moments, and the ground is a carpet of moss and fern. It is the richest larder any traveller has seen, and it can bury that traveller in minutes.

Appearance

The colours are saturated past anything on Caeldon: greens and yellows, deep purples, vivid pinks that seem to pulse. The only brown is the living soil. The canopy grows over the sun, and the light comes down dappled and moving.

Spiral Trees

The great trees of the Expanse twist as they grow, trunks turning round themselves in slow spirals, branches corkscrewing out and up. Their wood is stronger than steel. Their roots run above ground as often as below, and where two trees lean together their roots meet in living bridges across ravines and rivers.

Vines

Vines hang from everything, thick as a wrist or an arm, and grow while they are watched. They wrap ankles, lift fallen trunks, and close paths; one strong vine can lift tons.

Undergrowth, Moss, and Fern

The floor is moss and fern deep enough to swallow a footstep without sound and to cushion a fall. Leaves of every size crowd the gaps, some of them able to draw poison out of water or air.

Flowers, Fruit, and Nuts

Flowers open, fade, and drop in moments, and the air is heavy with their pollen and with nectar. Fruit, nuts, and nectar are everywhere and rich. The smell of blossom, fermenting fruit, and rot together can turn the stomach.

Carnivores

Many plants eat meat, and count a traveller as fertilizer: see Carnivorous Plants.

The Rivers

The rivers are thick with algae and glow with plankton by night, so that every stream is a line of pale light under the canopy.

Habitat and Range

The jungle covers the plane. Space itself is fluid there: a short path stretches as vines grow across it, and a clearing widens as its edges sprout. Nowhere in the Expanse is free of growth for long, and even metal and stone are slowly overgrown and eaten by lichen and fungus.

Behaviour and Temperament

The flora acts as one thing. Plants and animals alike are loosely linked through a root-network, so that harm to one part of the jungle is felt by the whole; a traveller who hacks a path finds the growth ahead thicker. It does not hunt in the way a beast hunts, but it grows over whatever stops, and the dead are composted within hours.

Abilities

Growth here is beyond measure. Wounds heal in moments among the plants, and the ambient life can cure almost any injury or illness. A vine can grow round a sleeping body before morning, roots trip and hold, and pollen can choke. Food carried in sprouts.

Life Cycle

Everything turns over in hours or days: sprouting, flowering, fruiting, and dying, each plant replaced before it is gone. Seed falls and is a sapling by evening. Nothing in the Expanse has a season.

Uses and Dangers

The Expanse gives abundantly. Its fruit and nectar feed anyone who will eat them, its living wood is stronger than steel and its vines stronger than rope, and its leaves filter poisons. Herbalists come for its rare herbs, and the dying come to be healed.

Its dangers are the same abundance: growth that can bury a traveller in minutes, vines that strangle, roots that trip, pollen that chokes, carnivorous plants, and a slow merging with the network until a traveller forgets their own name. Visitors are told to move fast, touch nothing, carry blades for the vines, cover themselves against spores and thorns, and cut any root they feel closing on them.

Lore and Belief

The Expanse is the engine of creation, and some Material Plane growers hold that a seed from its jungle makes any field bear; brought home, such seed most often runs wild and chokes the field. Healers tell of travellers who came back cured and carrying a piece of the Expanse growing inside them. The Verdant regard the jungle as themselves, and its plants as their own limbs.

Seed-thieves who cross to the Expanse for a lord's barren fields are hired, paid, and rarely seen again; those who come back sell what they carry for its weight in silver.

Where It Appears

• The Verdant Expanse