Consider the Treants

The prompt ping pong has come to a halt due to no fault on either end. We may resume it in the future, but I'm not making promises in the current state of things.

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In the Shadow of the Ancients 
by JasonEngle

Treants (or ents, if you want a Tolkien copyright, or tree-people if you think treants are just tree-ants) are plant people. It is important to remember this, because plants have a different subset of needs and traits that inform their societies.

They don't need agriculture, because their food is all around them. They do practice some forms of farming for pest control. Rot grubs are put in rotten bark to eat away the dead parts and retain the healthy growth. Bats and insect-eating birds are given roosting priorities to keep leaf-eating insects at bay.

They don't need housing - after all, being a giant walking tree leaves you with few predators to ward away, and being exposed to the sky and rain is sort of important. Their homes are their forests, which in turn define their family units - their groves. Treants are not born, but instead 'awaken' from old trees. When a tree is close to waking up, the grove moves close to protect it, and to ready the surrounding area for its first cumbersome steps.

Diving Deep #2

Same as last week. Away we go.

Crossing the Rubicon by Jason deCaires Taylor

Here we see the remnants of a group of pilgrims, believed to have been members of Atlantean lower classes. Around the time of the collapse of Atlantis - this being, of course, after the city was swallowed into the ocean - impoverished members of society were swept up in zealous fervour by an unnamed prophet, who told them of a promised land far from Atlantis, which could only be reached through the marching of feet and the sweat on their brows. In a mass migration, they fled the crumbling city and traveled onwards.

They were promised eternal life. That their presence would be felt throughout the centuries.

Like most promises of that scale, they were empty and twisted. It is unknown what caused the petrification. Some suspect a mistranslation of a time stop spell; a last-ditch attempt to save their people from the oncoming plague that seemed to expand from the city they left behind, leaving them unblemished by foulness in the water. Others suspect the prophet was simply mad, or cruel, or just tired of the ceaseless marching. A minority believe that this was the cause of Atlantis's downfall, and elsewhere in the depths there must be a larger collection of statues from the city itself.

These statues still think and remember and regret. Telepathy can reach them, but spells to commune with the dead do not. Their speech and thoughts are slow, like communing with the spirits of mountains. They ask if they've arrived yet, if the walk has ended, why the waters have become so cold and numb.

They move sometimes. Small increments, less than a metre a year. Still shuffling towards the promised lands. Slow enough fro corals to embed in the rock, for worms to make homes in their petrified circulatory systems.

another sculpture by Jason deCaires Taylor