Power of the Petals
They say you don’t find a tidebloom vine. It finds you when you might be about to die.
- Lysander Riverwind, Navigator of the Silk Duchess
The vine also produces long trailing blossoms and an unusual egg-shaped fruit. Both of which are the source of interest in the Otherworld vine. Tidebloom flowers are trailing flowers, growing along a petal-vine the plant grows just for this purpose. These blooms do attract pollinators from bees to hummingbirds and more, but their purpose is far deeper than that.
Tidebloom vines are self-pollinators. So, their blooms are the first step in generating the mysterious fruit they bear. These petals shimmer with an inner light, as soft as moonlight, in pulsing glows of blue, violet, and green. Their fragrance is soft, with hints of salt, old wood and brine. Nothing strong but always light. In a grove, they’re a startling display of color and soft light, almost haunting in their beauty. Some even say they can hear a light song when they enter a tidebloom grove. A music that the kelpwitches swear is real.
Blooms first appear during the new moon, then unfold within two days. After that, they last for two weeks before bearing the tidebloom fruit, often one fruit per blossom. Tideblooms can produce a crop of dozens of egg-shaped fruit at a time, and oddly will do so regularly throughout the year, save for the winter months.
Despite the unusual growing season, the reason for it is less the climate and more what the plant is trying to do. Which is far more than just blossom, grow, and produce fruit. The secret purpose of the tidebloom is, in the end, to preserve.
Magic of the Method
Tideblooms are inherently tied to kelpwitches. The vine forms the backbone of the kelpwitch groves and also is literally part of any kelpwitch’s body. It protects and preserves a given kelpwitch, who was often a dying or drowning victim. But the blossoms and fruit serve another purpose as well. They store the memories of the dead.
In a unique symbiosis, kelpwitches are both gardeners and wandering extension the tidebloom vines and the groves themselves. Once kelpwitches harvest memories of the dying, or those who volunteer memories when they believe they are to die, those memories are placed into a grove. The energy of those memories, if not the memories themselves, is stored deep within both root and branch. Living and coursing along with the sap and vine, twining across the seasons.
It’s said that those memories are the reason the vine’s blossoms glow the way they do. Subtle ghosts in the plant, whispering to the world and anyone who might listen, about their former lives. But the glow isn’t the only way to hear or reach those memories.
Fruit and Tea
Most stories say the memories can be reached by drinking a tea made from the petals. That is mostly true, but the effect is fleeting. It gives a glimpse into the memories stored there but, while clear and intense, the effect lasts only a few hours. After that, it vanishes like a dream.
To truly access those memories the tidebloom stores, a person has to eat the fruit and swallow the small seeds speckled across the fleshy pulp. The fruit itself looks unforgiving, being a small, red, egg-shaped fruit with yellow spiked spines around the outside. Those spines are very sharp, like a porcupine’s spines, and very painful when they stab a victim. This is how the tidebloom tries to protect the memories. Likewise, trying to eat the root or vine will instantly make a person deathly sick for three days, even if undead or golems, with no memories to show for it.
But inside the red fruit, the pulp is creamy-white with thousands of tiny black seeds. Each seed contains a single memory, along with all the thoughts and feelings associated with it. To ensure the memories live on, they are duplicated countless times over across a grove. Ensuring no memory can be lost, as they are woven into the root system of the vine and the grove.
When a person eats the fruit of a tidebloom, it imprints a copy of those memories into that person’s mind. The memories become a part of them forever, complete with the emotion, context, and fragments of identity. It isn’t that the person eating becomes the person in the memory. Instead, anyone who eats tidebloom fruit knows those vivid memories aren’t their own, but can recall them perfectly.
But it isn’t so simple as just picking a fruit to eat it. There are hundreds of copies of memories in the fruits, with no indication of what memory is stored where. If a person picks and eats fruit selected at random, they could get overwhelmed by the memories. Some have been driven mad.
Only a kelpwitch innately knows what memories are stored in what fruit. They don’t reveal that lightly, but only to those who they think need it. At rare times, they’ll reveal it in moments of danger or pending disaster.
Eat the wrong seed, and you’ll cry for a lover you never met. But if you eat the right one, you’ll learn their name and what brought them joy.
- Kora Ingelson, Deep Minder of the Blooming Veil Tide Grove
Mystical Properties
With that said, tideblooms are sought after for these Etherwave-mystical properties. So far, no one has successfully grown tidebloom vines in a greenhouse. Though powerful, the vine is fragile, with delicate special needs that are difficult to recreate. What little has been discovered is that tidebloom vines need direct moonlight and rock or soil-filtered water.
The vine will wither quickly in iron-rich soil, which is often pointed at as the reason tideblooms don’t survive in cities. Last, some believe that tideblooms need the kelpwitches that tend them, as much as the kelpwitches need tideblooms. It’s felt there is a mysterious symbiosis there, where each nourishes and supports the other. Yet another reason tideblooms don’t fare well in greenhouses. People want the tideblooms, but aren’t eager to enslave a kelpwitch along with stealing a tidebloom. Those who have tried are said to have come to a bad end.
But there are three main Etherwave-magical properties known about tideblooms, their fruit and more.
Memory Binding. Tideblooms store imprinted copies of memories. The more powerful, the more easily they are stored. These are deaths, vows, heartbreaks, even murder, or inventive discoveries. When the vine blooms, the blossoms at times whisper fragments of these memories to those who’ll listen. Certainly share them for a short time through a tea. But to fully know the memory? That requires eating the fruit.
Arcane Conduction. Tidebloom vines amplify water and spirit aligned channeling of the Etherwave Arcana. Particularly restorative and memory-based spell bindings, but only when the Etherwave Arcana is channeled into a potion or a spell while inside, or directly next to, a tidebloom grove.
Healing Elixirs. Once ground, the blossom petals can be distilled into what’s called the Tidewake Elixir. This thick, powerful potion is capable of restoring sanity or healing other mental trauma. But, like all magic, it comes at a cost. The person either drinking it, or administering it, must give up a set of personal memories as payment.
Tidebloom magic isn’t safe. It’s not a toy. The damn plant remembers too much, and if you’re not careful, it’ll remember you!
- Morowen Waxbend, Sea Hag of Port Royal
Ecology and the Lost
Even though tidebloom vines come from Otherworld, they have settled in around Earth. In each place they’ve sprouted, forming their own niche in Earth’s nature and environment. On Earth, most creatures won’t eat a tidebloom willingly. It’s as if they instinctively understand the danger and risks involved. But just as the tidebloom fell to Earth from Otherworld, so did some of its predators.
Glass-eel Nymphs, tiny, flying, glowing creatures often thought to resemble miniature thayans but with eel-like salamander tails, eat the decaying blossoms and blossom nectar. Tidebloom blossoms are part of the source of why the glass-eel nymphs glow as they do.
Whisperflies, a blue-gold type of insect similar to a dragonfly that also visit the blooms, eating the pollen.
Skrell Crabs, while they care little for the pollen, do harvest the tidebloom leaves. The crabs eat the leaves as part of their diet, feeding off the decay. They also are known to eat the sharp spines off tidebloom fruit.
Myths and Dangers in Moonlight
For all their haunting beauty and history, tidebloom vines are far from harmless. Many stories are wild tales, such as a tideboom taking human form under a new moon. But others have been proven to be all too real, such as the Drowning Choir and the Moon Daughter’s Kiss.
A Drowning Choir, or the Drowning Choir, is often mistaken for the legendary ‘siren song’. It’s a rare and dangerous phenomenon. This is when an entire grove of tideblooms blooms all at once on the same evening in harmony. When this happens, the tideblooms release a soft hum or melody for just a few seconds. Anyone who hears it without some sort of mystical or physical ear protection to muffle the sound is mesmerized. Those living souls caught by the hum are lured to walk into the sea.
Kelpwitches don’t encourage the effect, but cultivate the tideblooms to bloom on different days to prevent this from happening. But if there are not enough kelpwitches for a healthy grove, that won’t be possible. So, in those situations, kelpwitches work to keep people from drowning if they can. Otherwise, they sadly gather the memories of the dying, if there are any kelpwitches nearby.
The Moon Daughter’s Kiss is another unusual effect. Many claim it may be the source of the warning about sleeping too close to a fairy mound. This effect can happen only under a new moon, when the tidebloom’s blossoms first open for the season. It’s said that anyone sleeping near a blooming tidebloom vine at that time is granted visions. Either a view into past lives through the memories, or of events yet to come, as the blossoms call upon the Etherwave Arcana for the first time.
Beware the song of the ‘bloom, sailor. It knows the name you buried.
- Captain Estra Varn, last log entry before vanishing near Mariner’s Veil
Game Notes
Tidebloom Vine
Threat 1 (Environmental / Magical Resource)
Suggested Complications
Echo Bloom. A tidebloom blossom whispers a strong memory into a character’s mind, which causes hallucinations, flashbacks, or sudden emotional outbursts.
Ghost Root. The character has stepped on an exposed root of a tidebloom vine. As a result, they are entangled for a moment in the living memory of someone else’s death.
Elixir’s Price. A character drinks a Tidewake Elixir and regains clarity, their mind, emotional calm… but forgets the face of someone they love.
Comments