Night Lotus (nox vis-us lot-os)
Nox Visus Lotos
Night lotuses are rare, beautiful flowers with pitch black petals and twinkling purple stamen. Their bulbs grow in warm, damp places and only bloom for a single hour at midnight, before closing up again. The fallen trunks of waterlogged trees in swamps or in wetlands are ideal places for night lotuses to grow. When their petals unfurl, a special pheromone is released that nauseates and repels surrounding wildlife. Travellers with an aptitude for botany are able to take advantage of the night lotus, and treat it as a place of sanctuary for that single hour it blossoms. Mysteriously, regardless of where the night lotus is grown, it will always bloom for precisely one hour at exactly midnight.
Down in the depths of the Underdark the drow cultivate fields of night lotuses for medicinal purposes unknown to topsiders. Herbalists on the surface use the night lotus as an ingredient in various numbing salves and cooling balms. Witches use the flower's stamen to create powders and strong incenses that, when burned, fend off creatures of the night. In recent years, botanists have uncovered another use for the night lotus. If prepared in boiling water whilst the flower is in its midnight bloom, the resulting tonic grants the consumer perfect 120ft night vision for roughly 24 hours.
Down in the depths of the Underdark the drow cultivate fields of night lotuses for medicinal purposes unknown to topsiders. Herbalists on the surface use the night lotus as an ingredient in various numbing salves and cooling balms. Witches use the flower's stamen to create powders and strong incenses that, when burned, fend off creatures of the night. In recent years, botanists have uncovered another use for the night lotus. If prepared in boiling water whilst the flower is in its midnight bloom, the resulting tonic grants the consumer perfect 120ft night vision for roughly 24 hours.
In their common tongue, drow call the night lotus: Ebani Iyelos.
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