"Australia has a lot of beautiful plants and animals and most of them are, frankly, monsters. The eucalypt is no exception. Its reproductive strategy is to drop those heavy, oily leaves around its base until the trapped heat and the highly flammable oil consummate their tragic love affair and burst into flame. The ensuing forest fires reduce the eucalypts to ashes, but the same goes for all the plants that might compete with them. The difference is that eucalypt seedpods need fire to open up and release their seeds, and the fires that coax them open also eliminate all the canopy cover that might compete with them for sunlight, while the ashes of the fallen competing trees enrich the soil with nutrients."
Doctorow, Cory. The Bezzle: A Martin Hench Novel (The Martin Hench Novels) (p. 18). Tor Publishing Group.
The Pyrophyte wildfires at first seemed like the natural result of climate change, and that may in some sense be true, but surely now one must acknowledge these events as part of a deliberate and intelligent attack on human civilization.
Imagine a world bleeding Green; Spiking trees rising like tumors, mangy moss, leaves and flower petals harder and sharper than a steel blade, a bioactive glow of magic fire flooding over skyscrapers and mountains.
The Pyrophyte made monsters as well. Salamanders, vegetables in the shape of lizards spewing sap worse than napalm. The mutated or reanimated fauna like the carnivorous Jackrabbits, Jabber squirrels and Jabberwocky "deer drakes". Deadliest of all are the Amber Megafauna, seemingly preserved to be an army in waiting.
The monsters serve their purpose, mainly to cause fear, but in fact the Cordyceps Zombie Ant Colonies, Flower Mad Banshee Bees, the conglomerations of sewage flora, fatbergs, and Rat Kings, and other organized vermin, have in fact proven much more difficult to fend off.
The Forest Folk, uncanny quasi-humanoids of all sorts, seem almost more to mock us than serving any unique purpose in the Pyrophyte ecology.
There was originally going to be more to this, a whole chiral biosphere, nuclear violet flames, and electromagnetic weapons used to fight against the Pyrophyte. I didn't even write any notes on the last one and I don't remember what the idea was exactly anymore. Anyway, I didn't want to lose my ~7 year streak of at least one post a month and I decided this was just good enough to post as-is, but I'm running out of unfinished or unpolished drafts that are good enough to post, so one of these months sooner or later I'm going to lose it probably :/.
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