Ashroot Shrubs

🌿 Codex Entry: Ashroot Shrubs

Flora Class: Remembrance Scavenger

Region: Fadefield

Also Known As: Griefroot, Memory-Burn Bush, Dustvein Shrub

🜁 Botanical Description

Ashroot Shrubs are low, twisted plants with pale gray leaves veined in black. Their bark flakes like soot, and their roots extend deep into spiritual sediment, seeking remnants of unprocessed grief and psychic collapse. The shrub often grows beside abandoned altars, dream-sinks, and memory voids where rites failed or voices fell silent.

When touched, its leaves crumble to fine dust—but only if the one touching it has recently experienced loss.

🧬 Function in the Spiral

Ashroot serves as a natural processor of spiritual toxins, absorbing echo pollution, grief static, and emotional residue. It filters the psychic soil of the Fadefield, allowing new rites and memory-threads to grow once corruption has been burned away.

Its ashes are used in ritual purification and soul-clearing ceremonies. The presence of Ashroot often marks the boundary between forgetting and remembering.

🐾 Faunal Relationships

• Eaten by: Hollow Snails (to digest sorrow-filtered detritus)

• Nestled within: Shard Crickets during decay seasons

• Avoided by: Veiljackals (as their own grief disrupts its field)

🌀 Ritual Uses

• Burned in ink-banishing rites to clear spiritual residue

• Ground into powder for use in Severance Glyphs

• Combined with Glyphmoss for memory transference smoke

• Planted after soul-release rites to stabilize the psychic field

⚠️ Glitch Affliction: Echo-Saturation Burn

When overexposed to glitch energy, Ashroot absorbs too much grief, causing it to combust spontaneously—creating clouds of memory fog that disorient or spiritually blind nearby Seekers. In this state, it may scream faintly when disturbed.

🗣️ Whispers of the Spiral

“Some memories must be burned, not buried.”— Thriniel of the Withered Root