Assassin Vines

The assassin vine is a carnivorous plant with a voracious appetite. Rather than consuming creatures directly, it creates its own fertilizer by entangling prey and squeezing the life from it. Once the plant has killed a creature, it pulls the carcass over to its roots to feed from the decaying flesh. Although an assassin vine lacks eyes, it can detect and track prey through a combination of using its root systems to detect vibrations through topsoil and its leaves to detect heat changes in the vicinity. Although the assassin vine has no real intelligence, itslearned behaviors mimic those of cunning ambush hunters.
As it is slow moving, the assassin vine typically remains rooted in a single area for as long as it has sufficient prey. Though most often found along woodland trails or swamps, these plants can also be encountered in more rural settlements, poorly tended fields, and vineyards. While assassin vines can’t be trained in the classical sense, they can be used as defenses, and woodland-dwelling creatures like goblins and fey have been known to cultivate assassin vines as guardians for less-used routes into their lairs. In such cases, the tenders often seek to make the path more obvious than its disuse would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously working to ensure the bones of the vines’ victims are removed to keep their presence a secret, resulting in what appears to be an easy approach to the den but is actually an organic ambush.
Mature assassin vines grow to 20 feet long and have smaller vines extending off the main trunk that reach from to 5 to 10 feet in length. The smallest of these vines sprout every 6 inches or so; they tend to grow clusters of full leaves and occasionally bear small berries. A recently fed assassin vine can have bunches of plump, blood-red berries that are juicy and tart but leave a slightly unpleasant iron aftertaste, as if from the faint taste of blood from a bitten lip.