Living Slime

It's the minerals around them. Their flower-crowns take it from the water and their roots pull it from the ground. And the curious thing is that they don't use the minerals directly; they're feeding something else that lives inside each tree-animal.

No, that's not what I meant. I really don't understand this all too well, but it seems like there's a kind of living slime inside each tree-animal, and that's what the tree-animals are feeding with the minerals.

That was my first impression, but the deeps-dweller is emphatic about it: the slime is alive. It's contained entirely within each tree-animal, completely cut off from soil and water and out of reach of the minerals it needs. The animals have to collect those minerals on the slime's behalf.

That is exactly the analogy the deeps-dweller used to explain it to me. The difference being that the slime lives permanently inside the tree-animals, and they depend equally on each other. The slime's byproducts are what nourish the tree-animals.

You said yourself, there's not much else down there.

The deeps-dweller doesn't think so. When I first met it, it was worried about coming to the end of its life.

Hard to say. At least a hundred years. But the problem isn't that it's old--it's that the slime's minerals are disappearing from the area.

That's the drift of it. Specifically, if too many of the tree-animals die, the deeps-dweller loses its ability to think. Tell me, have you watched anyone in your family suffer cognitive decline?

Then you can understand why it would want to avoid that. That's the basis of our current agreement with the deeps-dweller: it monitors the water around our conduit to protect it from Dregs sabotage, and we provide a regular supply of holdurnose to keep it healthy.