Oshma

Body

"Their floppy, large, bark and moss covered bodies, resemble that of an old woman, in a robe of flowers and vines. A net of hair-like flower clusters with insects carrying pollen to pollinate the forest. Only female and self reproductive. White-gold eyes, and a welcoming aged fleshy bark face." Her base is "a collection of tangled roots, like an octopus onto the forest floor; always rooted, but ever-moving." Her voice is "a harmonic soft-song," produced through a vocal cord of fungi netting. Six feet, five to six hundred pounds.

She ages backwards: "They are born old, and begin their life at its end, and revert back to a flower upon their death." She arrives with "immense knowledge of life at birth, possessing the secrets of life and the key to growth," and spends her existence unlearning it. Her vaan is the only one in the species that runs backwards, unbuilding the pattern one stage at a time rather than maintaining it, and everything else about her follows from that: the knowledge she is born with is the pattern read at full, and what she loses as she grows young is not memory in the ordinary sense but instruction, so that the Oshma who can still answer a question about the making of life is always the oldest and therefore the closest to the end. A grove that wants an answer out of her is competing directly with a grove that wants her to stay.

Society

She rules as a flower rules its pollinators: it does not command them, it feeds them, and they carry it everywhere. The Oshma holds no office and gives no orders. She is rooted, she is always moving without going anywhere, and everything comes to her. Her rulings are answers, given in the soft-song to whoever has knelt in the bowl of flowers and asked, and they are carried out of the Petal Court by her insects, which go to every grove within a hundred miles and are read by the Irugaine there as plainly as a letter. No kin is bound by what she says. Every kin does it. The Sixteen Roots meet at her feet and she does not sit on the council, because she is the floor of it.

Life

She takes sun, rain, the soil of the Life Tree's buttress roots, and the pollen her net of insects brings back, which is the only thing she takes from the world that the world notices. She eats nothing that has died. Her insects are her lungs as much as her hands, since the flower net respires through them and a hive lost in a hard winter leaves her short of breath for a season.

She has no death date. She decides when she is needed to return to the soil, and when she decides she begins her de-ageing in earnest. The Irugaine call it the Going Down, and it is the only Irugaine death that is planned, announced and attended. A grove that has an Oshma will do a great deal to keep her from deciding, and a grove that has lost its forest will send year after year of petitioners to an Oshma who has not decided yet, and be refused, and come back. The Salted Groves have been asking for an age.

Harvest

Taken from her: her blessing, a flower plucked from her own head and given, "carrying with it a portion of her life and its healing abilities," the single most valuable object that leaves Irugaine country, which cannot be bought at any price, because the only Oshma alive gives it away for free to whoever needs it and to no one who offers coin; and the pollen from her net, gathered off the ground beneath her and traded at the forest's edge as the finest crop-blessing on Nu, which is legitimate and which most groves quietly permit. Nothing else, ever. To cut an Oshma is the one act that brings all sixteen kin out of their groves at once, and it has happened twice, and both times what came back out of the wood was not the party that went in.