Manawa Wood

"In These Trees We See Our Ancestors, Our Past, Our Mistakes... Our Failures."

Deep In the Magabar jungle, in dark densely clustered groves, lives a sweeping ivy and lichen covered tree, dangling with countless vine like branches covered in red leaves and faintly glowing purple bell like flower bulbs that illuminate the dense undergrowth that surrounds them. These are the Manawa Trees, long living trees that can easily live upwards of a thousand years, living in clusters far away from the edges of the jungle, they can easily take a hundred years to reach adulthood. The trees are exceptionally rare with an even higher demand. Manawa Trees are known to locals as Ancestor Trees or Spirit Trees, this is because of a phenomena where locals have described as being able to talk to the trees and from them with help of magic to see the memories of the trees, This has never been proven in any academic circle but the rumors do not stop many from attempting to find out for themselves. To complicate matters the Trees do very poorly outside of the jungle, and exceptionally poorly when grown alone outside of a already existing grove, often dying within years of planting long before reaching even adolescence.    The Wood of the Manawa Trees is valued highly as well due to its extremely rich color, as well as its very light weight, and softness, being soft enough to dent with just your hands. The wood also has a memory like quality where it will grow used to regular pressure and adjust its shape accordingly and even after serious blows even as far as splintering, Manawa Wood will return to its remembered shape.   The flowers of the Manawa Tree are highly valued for alchemy because of their innate magical properties, superstitious uses and extreme rarity die tp the speed at which they decay.