Stoneleaf Tree

The Stoneleaf Tree is Tauria's rarest significant plant. It grows only on elevated rocky ground where the soil is thin and the wind constant — conditions that would kill most trees but which the Stoneleaf Tree has adapted to over thousands of years of slow patient growth. Its bark is grey and deeply furrowed, resembling cracked stone, and its broad canopy of leaves — each one leathery while it lives, pale-backed, catching light with a metallic quality — provides dense shade beneath which nothing else grows.

The metallic sheen is not a trick of the light. The tree draws minerals up out of the thin ridge soil and lays them down in its foliage, so that a leaf stiffens as it ages and hardens further once it is spent. By the time it falls it is stone — a flat plate roughly the size of a spread hand, grey, slightly translucent at the broken edge. The ground beneath a mature Stoneleaf lies carpeted in hundreds of them, which is the second reason nothing grows there. The Taurus took their first hearthstones from beneath such a tree on their first night on Tauria, and leafstone has floored and paved Alcyone ever since. What the tree drops is gathered freely. The tree itself requires Inanna's word.

The wood is extraordinarily dense and hard, prized for construction that must endure. Inanna has ruled that no Stoneleaf Tree may be felled without her personal permission.

Giliad's Field Note

The oldest Stoneleaf I have measured has a trunk circumference of four arm-spans. The growth rate of this species is slow enough that this individual may have been standing before the Taurus tribe left Earth. I find it difficult to look at it without feeling that I am being observed in return, and found somewhat hasty. — G.