The sun above blazes with yellow mana, raw and powerful. Plants absorb it, transforming it into green mana. Animals graze, devouring this fruit, and red mana pulses in their blood. As rot claims them, it turns black and vacant, stripped now of so much power.
A curious thing happens in poverty of swampsoil; carnivorous plants invert this cycle, and this adaptation, paired with a mycorrhizal union with rotten things, grants a single organism all colors of mana mingled in their biology.
Call this the prismatic process. Alone, individual colors of mana are latent in their hosts, inert, but joined together like this, a plant gains the power to secrete godsap. Liquid like formless creation, white like a rainbow.
This godsap binds to objects, mirroring their substance in the higher astral plane. Whenever a bound object moves, so too does the astral body.
But what happens when godsap must bind to an already bound object? The connection is deferred; only one astral body can bind to a material body, but astral bodies can bind to others of their kind. This forms a chain or stack of layered astral bodies, all mirroring the same object — by proxy.
Arbitrary recursion is possible but an increasingly unstable configuration. Inevitably, the bindings loosen as the stack grows taller, until it takes no more than one chance perturbation to detach a binding.
When this happens, what results is a copy in search of an original — a dancer seeking a partner. Without a material body to anchor it, godsap slowly denatures, its pantomine of physical characteristics blurring into that inert yet oozing state of initial creation. At further length, it simply evaporates.
But if — before it vanishes — the astral body finds its quarry, a new body to bind to, it may yield one of two profound results.
First — and easiest — is the marriage of two copies. Suppose both had detached from the same stack of mirrors. It follows that their structure, their preferred dances, are already almost equivalent. They now click together like teeth of two gears.
Still one must ask: what do they do? We described the usual state of an astral body as following the course of its material counterpart, and of course the wont of matter is familiar to us, subject to all the known laws.
The primacy of the material body is contigent on the relative emptiness of astral space — an astral flag has no wind in which to wave, so its banner will never move lest a material wind comes.
An astral clock will tick in tandem with material gears. But detach two copies and bind them together. This new clock, existing only in the astral, will still tick in remembrance of earthly physics.
Or more to the point, recall godsap finds its genesis in the tissues of carnivorous plants. When one grows a new shoot infused with godsap, then it will likewise grow in astral space. If it continues to pump further godsap into those tissues, its astral body will burgeon with layer after layer of imitation until they slough off and bind to themselves.
But those detatched astral shoots will still grow — and perhaps further down at their root, they are still attached to the plant. Like this, a plant begins to truly extend along the fourth axis.
Three benefits await those intrepid plants that scramble along this path. First, of course, is that few (none, properly) predators exist in the astral realm, and thus what is secreted away in this anabasis is protected from grazing. The second assuages the immediate worry — what good is growing leaves in a lightless dimension? — with assurange that yellow mana flows abundant in the astral planes.
Last, though, is the other consequence of detatched astral bodies alluded to earlier. If a detatched layer finds no copy to bind to… well, on a purely physical level, what happens when a copy is “bound” is simply that an attractive force exists between it and its material body, ensuring they aren’t long separated.
When an astral body is no longer “bound”, little actually changes in the calculus of forces. Imagine an astral water droplet, bound and stable. Now imagine whisking away its physical body into a distant pool of water. Why should the astral body discriminate among the myriad now-intermixed droplets? Its dance, the form of matter it’s drawn toward, is simply water itself.
It remained bound to the droplet because the droplet was nearest. When that no longer holds, it will seek any replacement.
A carnivorous plant of this sort hungers for prey — suppose if, before digesting its insect meal, it pumps godsap into the still-squirming bug. Spawned hence is an astral fly. If detatched quickly, the astral fly will not mirror the digestion of its original. Now, for a brief spell — until the fly dissolves — the plant possesses a new copy seeking an original.
Hungry sundews often lure prey with the sweetest scents — but now it has devised a magnet for flies in an almost literal fashion.
Take a moment to consider the implications of all this. Here we have a clade of plants capable of growing into a vast space unoccupied, uncontested by any other organism. A space brimming with energy fit to harness. And by this same mechanism, an adaptation so flexible one can only call it tool-use.
Must you wonder, then, why these plants grew to proportions fit to blot out the sky, were their innumerable leaves visible to the mortal eye? Why the sieves of their phloem twist and fork with complexity to baffle and surpass the cunning of grasping mammals? Why, when language found the throats of hairless primates, their name means god?
Suppose you are one of these godvines. What does your hierarchy of needs look like? At the most basic level, of course, you want for water and light and space to grow. You want for the blood of animals to fuel your ascent into the astral plane. You want for protection from the elements, from hungry predators, from competition.
You need, ultimately, to give and receive of pollination. You need to establish a presence in the mycorhizal network, and its distribution of resources and information. But you can only tap into this source of nutrients if you yourself contribute.
Far easier to secure consistent access to the flesh and fertilizer of animals if you shape your habitat to lure or trap them. Of course, to feed them you’ll want fields of lesser plants to feed them.
So far, so instrumental — but what might a godvine do for fun? Growth for its own sake, perhaps; the construction of complex yet beautiful architecture that presents a pleasing channel for one to effective grow vines across. The penetration of roots elevated to the point of sport,