Flora
Tideglass Kelpcord forests stand thirty meters tall in Originis' moon-pulled coastal shelves, each blade-frond a four-meter ribbon of deep blue-green silvered along the midrib. The fronds are smooth as wet glass and their chord-resonant veins emit a low 64 Hz hum that travels meters underwater, audible to any swimming Thal. The stipe is rope-thick, banded in lighter rings every season's growth, and tipped with a holdfast that grips seafloor stone with crystalline tenacity. There is no true flower; reproduction comes via spores released at the moon-tide. By Pale Sister's full face the entire forest sways in a single chord-pulse, and the Thal say the sea sings most clearly there. Sunlight filtered through the canopy paints a Thal swimmer's skin in slow blue-green caustics, and small fish flit between the silvered midribs like sparks. A torn frond knits its severed midrib back to the parent in a single tidal cycle if anchored against current.
Resonates strongly with Pale Sister's tidal chord and is the standard Thal medium for water-borne chord-magic
Thal settlements are mapped by their Kelpcord forests, and a forest's chord-tone is recorded as a place's true name in the song-priest archives. To lose a forest to bleaching or storm is mourned for a full lunar year, the priests singing the absent chord nightly until a new forest takes hold. Trade-Thal carry a single dried frond as identification papers; another priest will recognize the home-chord of any genuine traveler.
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