Phytón

These intelligent plant people possess a sort of immortality through their seeds—unless these are destroyed by external events other than merely the ravages of time. At one time, long ago, they were a proud fey people. But they angered the goddess Sarapheth, and were bound to the Material Plane, never to return to the Faewild.

Each phytón is essentially an primal spark of life that inhabits, successively, a series of plantlike bodies. Every twenty years or so, a phytón produces a seed. Their old body withers away as their soul enters the seed, which then swiftly produces a new body. The process brings with it minor changes in personality and some loss of memories, such that each new phytón is related to their predecessor while still being a different individual.

Roughly humanoid in size and shape, a phytón’s body is mostly made up of a fibrous plant material resembling a woody vine, with a face like an enormous, colorful flower. Phytóns have a great deal of control over the shape and structure of their bodies: with a few hours of effort, a phytón might make themselves taller or shorter, long-limbed or barrel-chested. Though they can learn to smile or laugh to fit in with other ancestries, they tend to use a different set of emotional signifiers, fluttering their face-petals to show happiness and making a rustling sound when agitated or upset. Being plants, ghorans have no innate understanding of gender in the human sense. Phytóns who find themselves in the company of other ancestries sometimes adopt a more masculine or feminine form, though just as many don’t bother.

Phytóns dwell in secluded forests, and they tend to be much more isolationist. While they don’t possess the magical ability to enter an extradimensional home within a tree like dryads, they are extremely skilled at building their abodes so that they don’t disrupt the lives of the local flora. However, as each new incarnation slightly shifts a phytón’s personality, they sometimes develop a wanderlust that spurs them to leave an isolated home and travel into the wider world.