Sunwake Grass

Sunwake Grass paints the Valari plains in continent-wide ribbons of amber-tan, the blades waist-high at full season and gold-tipped at the heads. Each blade is narrow, fibrous, and faintly fragrant of warm hay when crushed underfoot. By midsummer the panicle seed-heads ripen wheat-pale with rose blush at the bract and shed seed in resonant clouds whenever a Sunwake Plains-Ox herd ploughs through. The roots run dense and fibrous, knitting soil so tightly that even Drysea-edge winds cannot tear a Valari pasture loose. Pale Sister's light turns a moonlit Sunwake field into a slow rolling sea of pale gold, and Valari herders walk the boundaries reading the chord-rustle for any wrongness in the grass-wide voice. Burned for renewal in late autumn, a field regrows greener within two moon-cycles, the roots untouched. The whole continent's plains-economy rests on this grass, and on the Sunwake oxen and Saddleback striderks that feed on it.

Valari clans count the years by Sunwake harvests rather than calendars; a child is said to be six harvests old, never six years. The grass also forms the bedding of Saddleback striderks and the thatch of Valari roundhouses, so a single plant supports food, shelter, and mount. To trample a neighbor's standing field is a clan-law offense, settled at the next chord-feast.