Verdant Overgrowth

Overview

Verdant Overgrowth is what the Verdant Expanse leaves in those who come back from it. The plane's life can cure almost any injury or disease, and the dying go there for that. Many come home whole and carry a piece of the Expanse growing inside them. At first it is a green thread at a healed scar. Given years, it is a body that wants sun and soil more than speech, and a person who forgets their name in the garden.

Cause

Growth in the Expanse is beyond measure: wounds close among the plants, and the same life that closes them roots in the flesh it has mended. Pollen and spores enter by breath; seed lodges in cuts and clothing; the plane's root-network draws a lingering traveller into itself until individuality gives way. Life magic worked there may make its caster overgrow. Spore-Clouds possess a host outright and make it sow.

Who It Strikes

The sick who go for a cure, since the deeper the healing, the deeper the growth; herbalists after the plane's rare plants; those who sleep there, whom vines and spores find first; and life mages, whose workings the plane amplifies. Peoples, ages, and trades seem to matter less than time spent and healing received. The Wrought are not known to take it.

Signs and Course

It starts small, weeks or months after return: a fine green line in a scar, a rootlet under the skin like a raised vein, a cough that brings up pollen, a sweet green smell on the breath. The sufferer grows warm and calm in sunlight, sleeps outdoors, eats less, and drinks more.

Over seasons the growth spreads along the healed places: moss in the creases of the skin, leaves at the fingertips, a stiffness of the joints like wood. The mind follows, into a contentment that does not want, then into forgetting: of tasks, names, and finally self. At the end the sufferer goes out, stands in soil, and roots, as the Overgrown do.

Contagion

The growth does not spread from one body to another. Seed and food carried home sprout, and run wild in a field. A spore-taken host sows wherever it walks, which is why companions are told to watch one another for the stoop.

Treatment and Its Limits

Early growth can be cut out by a surgeon like a splinter, and often returns; the cut must go wide. Verdant Sense finds living plant mass hidden in a body. Smoke and seed burned under the nose drive a Spore-Cloud out only if it is caught early. Purging Flame can burn out spreading growth at serious cost to the caster and can kill the patient if the growth cannot be cleanly separated from the flesh it holds together. Healing magic is unwise: it feeds the growth as readily as the body. Herbalists dose bitter, drying herbs to slow it, which work on some peoples better than on others. Nothing undoes a mind that has begun to go green.

Mortality

Overgrowth kills slowly when it kills. Many live long lives with a trimmed growth, and the illness they went to cure stays cured. Those it spreads through are lost to themselves within years and root; burning it out kills some patients outright.

Lore and Belief

Healers tell of travellers who came back cured and carrying the Expanse inside, and some say every cure from the plane is a seed. Growers hold that a seed from the Expanse makes any field bear; brought home, it most often chokes the field. Some families plant a tree for an overgrown kinsman and say the person is in it. Travellers' tales call the Spore-Clouds the Expanse's gardeners.

In the Medieval Era

Overgrowth is rare, because few reach the Expanse, but it is the best known of the cure-all sicknesses: a desperate family's last road, and the reason most healers counsel against it. Herbalists who trade in the plane's plants meet it among their own gatherers. Surgeons who have seen a case keep it to themselves, since a patient cut back too often learns to hide the green.

Where It Appears

• The Verdant Expanse (Rapid Healing, the Suffocation, Loss of Self, Overstimulation)
• Verdant Expanse Flora
• Spore-Clouds
• The Overgrown