A blessed boy, our first match for the Kudzu project.

Parents exalted awhile ago presumably due to perfectness of match. Officially ready to be a grandpappy!

Ideal mate would be forest/jungle, maybe? Anyways, he has to belong to the paisley pair







Construct Season Designations

Spring/Sowing: healing, research, support
Summer/Growing: logistics, leadership, production
Fall/Harvest: offensive and terraforming/reclamation
Winter/Enduring: defensive and "deterrents"



Defensive Construct Kudzu var. Slumbering (Primal defender)

Druids tend this variant for years or decades as it sequesters energy in its massive taproot. When called, it expends it all at once to create an army of constructs. Surging forward in something between a charge and a tide, their mixture of growth magic, projectiles, and raw strength builds to a chaotic and overwhelming explosion of force. Few enemies can cut fast enough to keep up with the growth, let alone counter it. The greatest weakness of this construct is its "recharge time"; it's best suited to defending out-of-the-way areas or acting as a deterrent. While minimally social, these constructs tend to find dragons endearing, participating in rituals and festivals with a kind of sleepy, vaguely familial pride.

These constructs are said to be direct creations of the Gladekeeper. This is somewhat less impressive than it sounds, as those legends hold that the Gladekeeper created countless such species and constructs during her war with the Plaguebringer, as everything She is and does spreads Herself, which is Nature.



Kudzu Subunit A

Kudzu is as kudzu is as kudzu has been, and all this since long before the clan. Kudzu is one in the infinite line of the glademother's gouge, which sprang full-formed when She clawed the earth, born to repeat Her motion forever. That's one story at least. Kudzu never had much need for stories; it's different from true dragons in that way, so trusts them to remember.

Nature does not yield its territory, and all territory is Nature's. This is what the Gladekeeper once carved into the earth. When She calls to them again, all of kudzu will wake and explode forward on the arc of Her voice and prove it to the world. Until then, this piece of it has found a nice place to nap. Her children are here--a delight--they flit and flutter and giggle and grow, and it's all very noisy and very, very fun. Kudzu joins them in the shape of two avatars. They are crude imitations of dragons, true, but it never seems to bother the little ones. It's in this form that it chooses to watch them, wondering at their cleverness and enjoying their music. They lavish care on it, directing water to its roots and pruning its leaves, which are good food for Her faithful, and reroute its creepers when they wander too close to the path (a necessary evil, it supposes).

Then the mages come to it, faces wan, shouting over distant screaming. "They're here! I don't know how they made it this far in, but please, you have to wake up!". This is false, of course--it will be time to wake when She says it is--but then aren't these Her little reflections? So their waking is a little waking, but no less true. Its avatars collapse into this truth, an ocean of writhing shoots and choking roots, forces to churn the earth and air and drown the sky in green. It crashes down and out, expending all of itself in a blaze of faith and glory. It finds the mages' enemies, which hack and cut and burn, but there's more of kudzu, always more. This is what it is, one shard of one word of one gouging motion of Her great truth, and it doesn't stop until this truth is rooted in the remains of what had scared its little mages.

It looks to them, wondering if they'll go back to their fun noisiness, but their faces are even more drawn than before. It hopes they will feel better. It drags its spent forms back into itself, its taproot withered in an instant by the magical release. The earth creaks as it settles.

In time, the little ones return to tending it. The soil is richer now. In time, their joy returns. Kudzu rests. It did well. All is right in Her world.