The Green God

Appearance

It is a vast sprawling expense of dark green tendrils that extend over the forest ground for miles, bright purple blossoms sprouting from the end of each vine. Its creepers entwine the trunks of massive trees and festoon their branches, forming a weblike network of extensions that small arboreal animals can use to travel across the expanse of the forest. The vines are fibrous and unyielding, requiring repeated slashes from a steel machete before they give way. When an explorer finally lopes them off, they squirt a pungent smelling sap that will sting and burn if it meets exposed skin.

Role in both nature and culture

This organism draws its sustenance from the detritus such as rotting leaves, animal droppings and decaying carcasses that litter the forest floor. It is effectively a scavenger that cleanses the forest ecosystem of any type of pollutants that might otherwise contaminate the underlying soil and subterranean sources of water. Even heavy metals that leach into the soil from runoff discharged by mines are absorbed by the Green God and transformed into relatively harmless nitrogen which its roots secrete. The constant replenishment of the soil’s nitrogen levels by the Green God ensures the forest remains fertile

For this reason, it is often treated with great veneration by the local tribal communities that regard it as a beneficial deity. Indigenous slash and burn cultivators raze small tracts of the forest to make way for their crops and then harvest them before leaving the land to lie fallow. Nestled among the ash and crop stubble that the tribals leave behind, the fire-resistant spores of the Green God will regenerate and once again reestablish the presence of this primeval organism, absorbing the agricultural waste left behind. These swiftly spreading creepers will travel across the forest floor, seeking to rejoin the wider organism that they were once a part of. The fertility of the denuded soil will be restored by the rapidly expanding root network as the sundered parts of the Green God rejoin each other. Its existence enables the indigenous tribes to cultivate multiple crops without running the risk of stripping the forest soil of its vitality.

As a way of repaying the Green God for its invaluable role in sustaining their livelihood, the tribals dispose of the remains of their loved ones by allowing the creepers to absorb them into itself. The belief that the souls of the deceased will continue to live on in the physical form of the Green God is deeply instilled among the tribals and any attempt to burry or cremate a corpse is seen as an unforgivable attempt to condemn the dead person to an eternal death with no hope of attaining immortality.

What distinguishes the Green God from regular plants is its ability to form perceptual connections with sapient beings. Local shamans claim that by ingesting a potent drug distilled from the flowers of the Green God and focusing intensely, they can tap into the sensory network that extends across the entire being of the Green God, their own consciousness dispersed among its myriad appendages, allowing them to divine the overall condition of the ecosystem. If there is anything that imperils the forest by directly impacting the well-being of the Green God, they will feel a sensation of intense nausea. Due to its sprawling size and the various types of environmental niches that it incorporates into itself, the Green God channels fragmented visceral inputs into the minds of its worshipers. Only a truly skilled shaman can put together a holistic vision from these disparate and disjointed sensations.

Tribal lore attributes the origins of the Green God to a blazing meteor that fells from the sky eons ago, containing with its smoldering remnants the first clutch of spores that gave birth to the Green God.