The Greenhouse: Fungal Garden

Eventually, having made your slow way through the Garden of the Fallen, the somewhat narcotic effects of the bittersweet funerary herbs having dulled your senses and slowed your steps, you enter a cool cave, with thin wisps of mist swirling through it, and seeming to settle into your clothes, the damp, still, air a welcome cure for your half-drugged state.

Looking about, now that your vision has adapted to the dim light, you seem to have walked into yet another tomb; there are bodies set in shallow pools throughout the room, or in the wall niches that feed them through swift, though thin, waterfalls, slowly, though faster than one might expect, having a layer of stone form over them, their decay slowed by the water's preservative properties.

Carefully advancing further into the caverns, you find that the next chamber is where the bodies are placed after having been removed from the water; on narrow stone platforms around the periphery of the chamber, with a few fashioned from massive, still living, grey-spotted white mushrooms set closer to the center, apparent statues rest, green-glowing lichens having been enticed to grow over them, as well as, in some cases, red-hued mushrooms with narrow, pointed, caps, giving off faint light of their own. From the ceiling, almost like the many-stranded bead curtains seen in the City of Bells, hang the mycelia of numerous purple-tinted mushrooms, with three-tiered heads, which are set upside-down on the roof, and also, as is everything in this place, it seems - including their mycelium, which emit a cold, but pleasant blue light - glowing.

Tending the fungi are more of the mirror-skinned people from the Garden of the Fallen; possibly their kind are simply the owners of this strange building, or perhaps their race has been assigned the caste of dealing with the dead. In either case, they seem to be reasonably expert at their tasks, carefully spreading fertilizer, of various types, where it is desired that a certain type of fungi grow, and carefully, patiently, scraping it away where another, or none, should be.

The Greenhouse: Garden of the Fallen

Passing through the tomb of the dryad Tolriani, you enter a domed chamber, filled with strange, ashen trees, with pale white leaves. In some of them, elaborately decorated obsidian jars can be seen, the trunks slowly growing around them.

Through the chamber walk black robed people, with mirrored silver skin, and softly glowing faceted eyes, in shades ranging from a dark, almost black, purple to a bright, shining green, collecting the fallen branches, and taking them to stone platforms in the center of the room, on some of which bodies are being burned.

The scent of funerary herbs, bitter and sweet, hangs thickly in the air, given off from the pyres, and small bowls of incense set on rocks, as well as amongst the roots of the trees.

The Greenhouse: The Dryad's Tomb

This was originally for "How does your garden grow", over on Porky's Expanse, but I've decided that, as it was getting too long anyway, and I need something to do over here, I'm going to make an at least semi-regular series on here, detailing one place, or possibly more. So, without further ado, here's the first room in The Greenhouse to be written up:

In the antechamber before the garden, upon a stone platform directly in front of the doors, lies the body of a woman, once beautiful, but now scarred, as though horribly burned, and apparently undecaying. She wears a green dress, and is covered from the waist down by a crimson and gold shroud, which is folded back, and would cover her completely were it not.

The copper doors are twice the height of a tall man, and bear a bas-relief of a woman, who could be the one upon the platform, though as her form is unmarred in them, it is difficult to be certain.

Just beyond, in the garden itself, is an oak tree, once great, but now split and charred by fire. Though it is clearly dead, the leaves remain upon it, and nothing has claimed the spaces inside as would usually happen, nor is it rotting.