Crider's Oasis
In most worlds, you can run out of up, down, north, and south if you go far enough, but east and west loop together and you end up back where you started. In the Forest That Is a Mountain, north, south, east, and west are limited--and perfectly arbitrary--given that space stops just past the treeline. Up and down loop together, so the top of the tall, tall sky meets the bottom of the deep, deep ground.
The Trees' roots only penetrate a comparatively shallow layer of the soil, but the Laments' hollow glass roots reach all the way down into the sky. Most clouds are sucked up by these and pumped back up to the springs at ground level, but some sparse, muddy rain still falls on the canopy. Glass Spiders dutifully and obsessively clean every speck of dirt from the Leaves, but not all of it reaches the ground again. Plants can grow on this accumulated soil layer that the Roots are too jealous to permit to grow at the Forest floor, including some normal-sized, lower-case-"t" trees. They just need available water, and are last in line to receive any.
On rare occasion, a Lament root may break off under its own weight and fall into the canopy. Glass Spiders normally eat shards of glass and morsels of silica to replenish their bodies, but ones that consume Lament glass don't stop until they run out. They turn all of it into body mass, and grow in size accordingly. All creatures that incorporate Lament glass into their bodies become infected by their sorrow, and Glass Spiders express this distress in a few ways: First, they sob constantly, leading to the nickname the Wolf Matron's Thousand Pilfered Young have given them: Criders. Second, they start building hollow glass webs extending upward, back towards the clouds. Because Criders usually live under damaged sections of the Lament root layer, the air is more humid, and like Lament roots in reverse, the webs funnel water down to the aloft ground, leading to flourishing plant life, and sometimes even ponds or lakes. Third, they become highly aggressive when disturbed by other creatures. A Crider's oasis is one of the few places to find something to drink so far above the Forest floor, but one does so at great, great risk.
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Creative Commons Sampling Plus 1.0 License.
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