Assassin vine

An assassin vine is a carnivorous plant that hunts by waiting. It is not intelligent and does not appear to want anything beyond a meal. Grown out, it runs to several hundred pounds of coiled mass anchored into stone or timber by a few thick roots, and it hangs among ordinary ivy and creeper without looking any different, which is the whole of its method. From late spring through summer it puts out small sweet-smelling flowers, and the scent is bait rather than the season’s ornament. In winter, with nothing coming to it, it will uproot itself and creep as much as a hundred feet looking for food.

What it does when something is close enough is fast and simple. It takes hold and crushes, and the ground around it comes alive in the same moment, so that whatever was standing nearby is snarled and cannot help. Handling one afterward costs nothing worse than a mild rash off the secretions. Nothing that stabs is much use against it: arrows and bolts sink into a mass that does not care, and the thing has to be cut. Cut the wrong part and the labor is wasted, because a hacked vine grows back. The anchor roots are where it lives. Sever those and the whole weight of it lets go and dies.

It is an entirely different plant from the razorleaf outside, and the two are related in no way beyond having been found in the same ruin. One carpets a mile of ground and opens the legs of anything that walks through it; the other hangs in one place and waits. The accounts confuse them constantly, and the company that went into the Twisted Grove confused them too, on first sight and again afterward.

Campaign Updates

Two of them died in the keep. The first was mistaken for the growth choking a walled balcony twenty feet up the back wall, which the company settled on as the easiest breach once the main doors proved barred from the far side. It took Koa around the leg partway up his climb, and when its second anchor split it tore off the wall and fell toward Mikhail standing below. Koa went off the ledge after it, caught the window frame with one hand and several hundredweight of dying plant with the other, and held both so it would not come down on Mikhail.

The second hung from a wall anchor in a room forty feet square with a hole in its roof, and it was in bud rather than hunting, which bought the party the time to argue about whether to leave it alone. They did not. It went the same way as the first, and the anchor roots of both had to be gone back for, or the keep would have had its vines again inside a season.

Neither corpse was wasted. Both were dragged out to the stone platform and burned that night as fuel for the ring of fires the party kept lit against the blights. One further room in the keep was choked with vine thick enough to be worth a careful approach and proved to be nothing at all.