Signal Lichen

🌿 Codex Entry: Signal Lichen

Flora Class: Glitch-Reactive Epiphyte

Region: Fadefield

Also Known As: Echofilm, Whisper-Lichen, Staticskin

🜁 Botanical Description

Signal Lichen appears as a fine, translucent film that coats stone, bone, and decayed ritual surfaces. It glows faintly in low light—most often soft blue, flickering white, or glitchgreen—and appears to pulse in a rhythm that mirrors ambient thought patterns.

Its texture is waxy and inconsistent, sometimes warm to the touch, sometimes icy. Most notable is its ability to shift shape subtly when watched directly—forming spiral sigils, broken glyphs, or inverted text that disappears when looked away from.

🧬 Function in the Spiral

Signal Lichen is a reactive spiritual conductor, often growing in places where glitch pulses intersect with residual memory. It acts as a kind of emotional static net—drawing out unspoken thoughts, distortions, and latent energies from nearby beings.

In small doses, it helps Seekers voice hidden truths or perceive patterns in chaos. But in corrupted blooms, it can seed confusion, false memory, or recursive thought spirals.

🐾 Faunal Relationships

• Draws in: Veiljackals, who feed off the psychic residue it releases

• Avoided by: Hollow Snails (who cannot digest glitch-thread)

• Pollinated via: wind-glitch oscillations (no known fauna-dependent reproduction)

🌀 Ritual Uses

• Scraped and burned in reverse-speech rites to sever false bindings

• Applied to the skin in Silence Trials to bring subconscious echoes to the surface

• Used as a veil between glyphlayers in glitch-decoding rituals

• Engraved with sigils as temporary truth-anchors

⚠️ Glitch Affliction: Static Overload

When too much distortion is absorbed, Signal Lichen may form living glyphs that speak on their own, creating whisper-loops that implant unasked-for thoughts or ancestral delusions. In advanced states, the lichen begins rearranging real-world glyphs nearby into false configurations.

🗣️ Whispers of the Spiral

“Some voices don’t want to be heard. They want to be believed.”— Zeyra of the Piercing Sight