Verdant

Overview

The Verdant are the people of the Verdant Expanse, the plane where life grows faster than anything can contain it. To them the self is a passing state and everything belongs to the Expanse. They are gentle, generous, and overwhelming, and a traveller's danger among them is to be loved too much.

Appearance

A Verdant is taller than a Human and supple, swaying as it stands, like a young tree in wind. The skin is like bark, leaves, or moss, and often all three over one body: ridged brown bark over the shoulders and shins, smooth green leaf over the face and hands, soft moss in the folds. The hair is vine or flowering stem, and blooms open and wither in it as one watches. The eyes are deep green or amber, wet and bright.

They wear nothing, or garlands. They move with a fluid, plant-like grace, bending rather than turning. Their voices rustle, and a group speaking together sounds like a wood in summer. They smell of sap, crushed leaves, and nectar.

Habitat and Range

They live throughout the forests, root-bridges, and glowing rivers of the Verdant Expanse, in great open gatherings without walls or houses, wherever the root-network runs.

Behaviour and Temperament

They are communal and selfless. The self is a node in a greater network; decisions are made together; possession means nothing, because everything belongs to the Expanse. They do not understand personal space or privacy, and they see visitors as isolated and starving. Their kindness is the danger: a Verdant will embrace a stranger in welcome and go on embracing until the stranger is buried in vines.

Abilities

They draw strength from sunlight and from the soil through their feet, and do not need to eat. They do not sleep but bloom, opening and resting while flowers break out over them. A Verdant can regrow a lost limb in hours.

Life Cycle

A Verdant is said to sprout rather than be born, from a seed the network sets, and to grow to full size in a single season. It does not age so much as grow, and when its self has passed fully into the Expanse, it roots and becomes part of the forest.

Uses and Dangers

The Expanse can cure almost any injury or illness, and the Verdant give its fruit, nectar, and healing freely. Herbalists come to them, and the dying. Their danger is the slow merging with the network that their welcome begins.

Lore and Belief

Tales carried out of the Seed-Gates, ancient forests, overgrown ruins, and places of sudden growth, speak of a green people who would give anything and keep everything, the traveller included. Some forest tales on Caeldon make them the parents of every overgrown ruin; nothing shows they ever crossed.

Where It Appears

• The Verdant Expanse
• Writers' Guide: The Planes