Flora
Hushroot Nightshade hides at the shaded edge of every Originis biome, a meter-high shrub of deep wine-purple ovate leaves with serrated edges that drink rather than reflect sunlight. The branches are charcoal-dark and the five-petal star flowers droop on slender stems, near-black at the petal but throat-silvered, exhaling a faint scent of ash and honey. Berries follow in glossy black clusters the size of grapes, and the entire plant carries a hush around it: birds avoid the canopy, and even the wind seems quieter near a stand of Hushroot. Beneath the soil, a deep taproot reaches farther than the visible plant and channels chord-poison up into every part. Brushed against by accident, the leaf leaves a violet smear on cloth that no washing removes. The plant prefers the borderlands between biomes and turns up under hedge-shadows everywhere on the supercontinent, a quiet poisoner familiar to every Veyari child as the plant one does not touch.
Every Veyari subtype teaches its children a single rhyme about Hushroot, and the rhymes are nearly identical across Valari, Thal, Cael, Dren, and Myrr translations: do not touch the wine-leaf, do not eat the black berry, do not sleep where the silver throat opens. Skilled assassins of any subtype occasionally use it; skilled healers occasionally use it; everyone else gives it a wide road.
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