Founding of Project Verdance

Political event

On Dies Volri, beneath the first blooms of Cortus, the Gauldowhynnian High Council authorizes Project Verdance, a clandestine biological intelligence program concealed within the Royal Botanical Repository. Publicly framed as an ecological restoration effort, the initiative’s hidden aim is to grow plant-born infiltrators capable of bypassing Bechtlarite surveillance. It marks the quiet beginning of one of elven nations's most controversial and dangerous endeavors.

As the season of Cortus began and renewal swept the western domes, the Gauldowhynnian High Council convened behind closed doors upon Dies Volri. From that meeting emerged a royal decision, authorizing Project Verdance, an initiative cloaked in environmental rhetoric but seeded in subversion. Officially, Verdance would advance sustainable canopy integration and ecosystem restoration beneath the Royal Botanical Repository. In truth, it would become a living weapon. The Council sought a response to the Bechtlarite Empire’s tightening grip over communications, commerce, and covert observation. To match machine with machine was folly, the Becht had perfected that domain. The Gauldowhynnian answer was more elegant, to teach life itself to deceive. Their aim was to cultivate sentient flora capable of mimicry, infiltration, and intelligence gathering, blending the sacred ley energies of the natural world with forbidden biomantic science.   The Verdance Annex was quietly established beneath the Repository’s third dome. Its appointed leads, Auralien Re’Sith and Cael Thorian, began constructing a root-weave lattice, a living neural matrix capable of learning through resonance and stimulus. Their early prototypes displayed reactive growth patterns that mirrored the pulse rhythms of surrounding researchers. In private correspondence, Re’Sith described the phenomenon as the “breathing of the dome,” a phrase later redacted from official documentation.   Public reports cited Verdance as a triumph of pre-Blight restoration. Internal ledgers, however, revealed acquisitions of arcane resonance crucibles, technology with no agricultural application. Oversight was compartmentalized; ethics boards were circumvented through emergency provisions under the guise of “environmental necessity.” Still, whispers reached beyond the Repository. Seanachaisian envoys, wary of the Becht’s growing interference with natural law, began efforts to infiltrate the operation.   By the close of Cortus, Project Verdance was fully operational. Its researchers had taught the first tendrils of the lattice to respond to auditory cues and mimic simple gestures. The Council, in its final communiqué of the season, declared the project “a garden of perfect obedience.” History, however, would remember it as the root of something far less tame.