Stalking an idea

Today's prompt feels like a mirror of yesterday's. "Helpless" suggested the victim of a horrifying something, while "Stalk" popped the idea of being on the hunt, of being either the classic horror enemy doing the stalking. I could have reversed that, of course, but since I had a character having a meltdown yesterday, I decided today has to flip the... whatever it is you flip. It's Friday afternoon as I write this and it's been a week.Today's Deck of Worlds horror expansion prompt resulted in:
A ruin (landmark) in a wood (region). The ruin is known as the Ruin of Footprints (namesake), and it was founded by those deemed to be abominations (origin). Adding in an attribute gave me monstrous flora. The woods themselves are known as The Woods Where No Wind Blows (namesake), they are the site of a great shattering (origin), and known for teeth (attribute).
This had me scratching my head a bit. Especially the teeth. I did feel there was a link between the monstrous flora and the great shattering, and perhaps the abominations too. Monstrous flora with teeth? This seemed a bit cheesy.
Stalking suggests a hunt, so I needed a hunter, assuming that this person is heading into the woods. I turned to the Story Engine and came up with this:
A petty rebel (agent and attribute) wants to end the power of a contagion (engine), but they must take up a burden they have been avoiding.I can see the woods, the ruins in the middle, and the monstrous flora. I can even imagine a rebel with a propensity to pettiness to avoid the burden of, perhaps, protecting a community outside said woods.
But even as I write this, I can't figure out how this is at all related to Amnar and the story I'm working on.
I put it all aside for a while. My head was foggy; still is. Then, after watching a movie (Black Bear—good, but in a "talk about this in film studies class" way, not really a "chilling on a Friday night" way), and developing a nasty "I hope this isn't COVID" cough, I had a thought.
1. There's another way to think about "stalk". Plants have stalks. I'd immediately considered it a verb, but it doesn't have to be. And in Amnar, plants can get pretty monstrous.
2. It doesn't have to be fiction. What if I just show up and get messy about writing and world building-related thoughts instead?So, those two points taken into consideration, let's talk about monstrous flora.
I honestly hadn't properly given consideration to the impact of all this magical biological energy being pushed out into the world until the World Anvil Summer Camp in 2022. That's bad, isn't it, for somebody who claims to have been working on a fictional world for so many years.
But as I thought through the consequences of this magical force that can heal but can also do other things, I realised there were some horrific side effects to this. Higher cancer rates, for example. Magical cancer. But not just humans being affected by this force. Animals and plants.
I had an instant vision of all these great trees and plants growing wild. Stalks like tentacles, perhaps, reaching and spreading. Tree surgeons as warriors, having to fight off whipping tendrils.There was me thinking I should come up with something about a ruin in a dark wood, or stalking something, some terrible super plant. But now I'm back to that original vision I had of a battle taking place on the brightest of days, as an open Gate spews deadly kata out into the world. Now, when I sat down here, having let go of the idea of writing some piece of scrappy fiction, I thought I'd at least manage a decent blog about the process of coming up with those ideas but...
No. Not even that. No, because I don't have the spell slots even for that right now, apparently. I used to call myself a Spoonie but then a D&D person on Threads suggested that Spell Slots are better than spoons as a meaningful explanation of what it means to have a disability or chronic illness.
I'm out of spell slots for this campaign against the word Stalk, whether we're talking about stalking an animal, a plant, or just the process of coming up with ideas. This is a rough way for things to go, even by my standards. Imagine in a stalk, then, a stalk and nothing else. That's how I feel right now.The effect of kata is that it energises matter at the cellular level—well, more accurately the atomic level. It's not picky about the matter involved, only that it heightens a certain latent energy that operates at the atomic level and this activation can have amazing effects. It can heal broken bones and knit flesh.
But it can also result in terrifying trees that lash their branches, in rapidly-growing vines that choke out whole forests. It's therefore necessary not only for some people to train in the ability to direct kata to heal people and animals and other forms, but to deal with these plants.