Quickenbloom

Form: A low flowering bulb, no taller than the grass, with purple-veined leaves
Range: Wild all over the continent, and never farmed
Effect: An animal that eats one becomes a kin over the two months that follow
To anyone already awake: A bitter weed

A quickenbloom is a low flowering bulb, no taller than the grass around it, with purple veins running through its leaves. It grows wild all over the continent, and it grows nowhere on purpose. It is the plant that makes a kin: an animal that eats one becomes a person over the two months that follow.

It will not be farmed

Every attempt to farm one has failed. Seeds do not take. Moved bulbs die. A bloom carried ten feet from where it came up is a dead bloom, and people gave up trying in earnest generations ago. Purple veining is the usual sign that congruence has got into a plant, and a quickenbloom is otherwise plain enough that most people have walked past one without looking twice.

It calls

Some animals that come near one are seized by a need to find it and eat it, and will cross a great deal of ground to do it. Most animals feel nothing at all, and nobody knows what decides which is which.

What people notice — and it is noticed rather than proved — is that the ones who go tend to be the clever and the curious. The dog that works out the latch. The crow that follows a plough. Whether the bloom picks them, or whether those are simply the animals that wander far enough to find one, nobody can say.

To anyone who can already think

To anyone who can already think, a quickenbloom is a bitter weed. Humans have eaten them, and nothing happens. The same goes for an Alium, a Cryptum and everyone else. Whatever the bloom is for, it has no use for a creature that is already awake.

You can feed one to a pet. People do, and it is frowned on everywhere, for a plain reason: what you get is not a cleverer animal. You get a person, and people do not stay pets. It ends badly often enough that most households will not keep a bloom in the house.