Razorleaf

Razorleaf is a thorned, razor-edged growth that has blanketed the ruins of the Twisted Grove for a mile in every direction. Living, it is beige-brown and looks like ivy, and it grows so thickly interwoven that a man on foot is tangled before he is thirty feet into it. It thickens the nearer the keep you get, which is how anyone worked out that it grows outward from a center. For as long as the curse held, cutting a length free took the color out of it in moments, and it stiffened as it darkened until what was in your hand was rigid deadwood.

What it does is cut. Travelers are found opened from the knee down, horses are opened along the legs, and it will take a wine sack off a saddle and foul barding with debris without anyone noticing until the leather is red. For as long as the curse held it was worse than a hazard standing still, because it did not stand still: crouch to cut a piece and the nearest length came back toward you and followed when you stepped away, and the ones behind it began to crawl. It grew fast through the night and erupted at dawn, covering thirty feet of open ground in the time it took to run across it, which was the daylight counterpart to the night that belonged to the blights. Like them it shied from honest light and moved toward false light.

The twig-things that killed the explorers on the slabs were made of it, dead razorleaf wound round sticks, the vine serving as muscle and tendon and the wood as bone. They were not alive, and where or how they were put together was never discovered.

The assassin vines inside the keep are an entirely different plant, related to the razorleaf in no way beyond being found in the same ruin. One is an ambush predator that lies still and lures. The razorleaf only grows, and everything that walks through it bleeds.

It answered to people. It went denser every day there were living men in it and denser still the day after that, the way a body reacts to something it will not tolerate, though it never closed on a camp once a camp was made. Sleeping in the razorleaf zone was taken to be a death sentence regardless, and the party chose to ride on tired horses rather than test it. Where the plant came from, and why this ruin and no other, was never explained.

Campaign Updates

Leg barding is what got the horses in, at half pace and then a quarter, and the ride out was worse than the ride in because a night of activity in the keep had thickened everything. On the way through, the Elder walked the party to the gate and blew a clear path through the growth with the keep’s own gravity, which was the last thing he did before he dissipated from exhaustion. The path closed.

The mule Jacobo has nearly died in it twice, once on the flight out of the keep and once two seasons later, on a return trip that was supposed to be easier because so much of the ground had been cleared or burned already. It was easier. The animals still bled for it.

Then the curse broke over its head, and it went on growing. Walking the Grove a few days after the two trees came down, the company found it still razor-sharp and no longer animate: nothing stiffening, nothing reaching, closer to a cardboard cut than to a paring knife, and thick trousers or a horse’s leg protection enough to stop it. Koa read the plant as healthy and unstressed, and read it two ways he could not choose between: either a plant native to that ground that the life-tree only modified, or a modification of one, with the animation put on top and the plant underneath it real. Either way it will keep growing.

Around the life-tree it is doing better than that. With the two planes severed the trees are burning off what was in them, and where the death-tree burns cold the living one is spilling growth into everything near it: moss, mushrooms, blossom out of season, and a squirrel the size of a small dog. The razorleaf in that ground has tripled in size.