Dangers of the Razorleaf

The thing that killed eleven explorers on the stones was never the vine, and it comes twice before the party reaches the keep door

TL;DR

The punctures on the corpses were not snakebite and not vine: they were sharpened wood, thrown and then taken back. The things that threw them came out of the trees twice: bundles of twig wrapped in dead vine, running on scrawny legs, carrying a poison that saps the strength out of a man. The party burned through both waves and pushed the horses in behind them, up onto Mól filigree stone and into a courtyard where the keep stands choked in razorleaf beneath a sequoia older than anyone’s grandmother. Then the outer doors gave, and the inner ones did not.

First seen

Razorleaf: the thorned, animate vine blanketing the ruins for a mile
The twig-things: vine and stick bound into something that hunts, and is not alive
The Eldamar sequoia: a centuries-old giant whose seed only opens in fire

What changed

The explorers’ killers are known: the constructs, not the vine that cut them.
The party is inside the outer keep, with horses and guide left at the gateway.
Razorleaf is understood: it grows by night and reaches for whatever lives.

Left open

Who barred the inner doors from the far side, and what is behind them.
The dead man’s journal, looted and still unopened.
Whether the vine spreads from a single heart inside the keep.

Synopsis

The lone body on the gatehouse rubble was carrying rather a lot: a traveling alchemist’s kit, coin, an axe, an empty swift-draw potion pouch, a hidden roll of ten alchemical vials, and a journal in Par concealed on him. What Mikhail read off the corpse itself was worse than the inventory. Razorleaf had cut him from the knee down, and something else had punched holes in him higher up; several of the wounds had closed and been reopened, which meant he had drunk his potions between hits and bled out inside anyway. A well-provisioned man, overwhelmed.

The punctures were too wide for a snake and sat wrong for a blade. The nearest thing anyone could name was a thrown dart, and when Aldo looked closely he found splinters ringing the holes: the points had been wood, and whoever had thrown them had come back and collected them.

They came out of the woods a few minutes later: tumbleweeds with intent, twisted twigs bound up in dead vine, scuttling on a great many thin legs. The fight on the rubble was short and ugly. Mikhail’s scream took one apart where it stood, Koa went through them in a fury, Nightstorm killed for the first time, and the horses came out of it cut but standing. Half a dozen of the things lay in pieces, and the pieces matched the wounds on every corpse behind them.

Koa cut a length of razorleaf to look at, and it followed him as he backed away. Mikhail floated the severed piece over and named the whole arrangement: the creatures are that same vine wrapped around sticks, vine for sinew and stick for bone, and they are not alive. Cut vine darkens and stiffens into deadwood within moments. The living stuff grows fastest at night, and reaches for anything warm.

The argument over what to do with the horses ran long enough that Aldo settled it by flipping a coin to the Wyrd Twins. They went in together and mounted, at a crawl, the leg barding Hinta had reshaped taking the blades meant for the animals. The second ambush hit them strung out in the brush and turned into a running fight through the vines, Koa taking almost every attack and a dose of the poison with it, Mikhail peeling creatures off the line with lights they could not resist chasing. By the end of it Koa’s sword arm was noticeably weaker and the road ahead was clear.

The stone changed as they climbed onto the inner platform: plain rock giving way to the filigreed, electrum-veined stone that marks a Mól keep, the same as the other two. In the courtyard they finally saw the thing entire: a keep smothered in razorleaf and moss, and beside it one colossal tree, its canopy laid across the roof. Mikhail knew it: an Eldamar sequoia, centuries in the growing, of a kind whose seeds crack open only at the temperature of a fire. That it stands alone with no saplings around it is not strange. It is how they grow.

Dwayne and the animals stayed at the gateway. The three crossed the courtyard on foot with rope, torches, oil and the alchemist’s kit, and Koa forced the rotted outer doors apart, the second leaf toppling inward as they entered, missing Aldo by the width of a dive. Inside, a service ramp runs the perimeter and spirals three or four stories up past arrow slits and empty guard rooms, shedding water outward as it climbs, and ends nowhere at all. No hatch, no roof.

That left the middle of the building, and the middle of the building is shut. The central doors are barred from the far side by something the party cannot reach. Koa hacked them until they were more splinter than door and they still would not open; charges, leverage and a great deal of swearing achieved nothing. Whatever put that beam across, it is not the vine.