WORLD TREES
World Trees are massive magical trees that emanate magic. That's all that anyone knows about them -- most aren't very well studied because they're under the protection of the Burrowers, and the few that aren't will very quickly wither up and die. There are some mages and scientists living on Xhaetil who're working away at studying the great tree but progress is, um. Erratic.
What are world trees?
- World trees consume aberrant and black magics and create positive healing and life magic.
- This actually means that they cannot be destroyed or harmed by magic as it'll absorb everything directed its way and just... grow flowers or some shit.
- Witches hate world trees get them away just fuck off.
- The job of world trees is to sustain life - the ambient magic that a tree produces affects the land and creatures around it and will generally cause living beings to grow healthier and larger.
- What exactly a world tree produces differs depending on the "personality" of the tree. Generally speaking, a tree produces oxygen, water, food, etc. - most commonly it will grow fruits and plants for basic food. Sometimes living creatures will be born from its roots or flowers; some trees will even grow metals / precious stones between or beneath its roots; some trees will not grow anything at all and will only emanate pure magic to be harvested by mages, etc, etc.
- Fruits of power and light grow on the trees' branches and roots - these balls of magic create pockets of life and often result in vast, underground, liveable and thriving caverns.
What do burrowers do?
- Burrowers will nurture and cultivate seeds, which they then venture out with and plant where they find black magic or negative emotions. The world tree then blossoms and heals the earth.
- That's um... what they do in theory, but in practice it rarely works out that conveniently - burrowers identify large congregations of humans as a net negative magic and emotion so they have a habit of planting trees under human cities - when the tree sprouts it'll destroy any paths or buildings it was growing under
- As such they're considered a bit of a pest and tend to get expelled very quickly...
- They're a pacifist and intelligent species otherwise so it's considered in bad taste to kill them, but aside from their bad habit of breaking buildings they're very aloof and cryptic so um... they're not very well liked by other species.......