The Beast Fears Fire - Thorn Labyrinths

Thorn Labyrinth [Disaster 3]
Impulse - To Deny Entry, Stymie Passage

It's not that hard to pin the formation of the Gulf of Catastrophe and the destruction of the Ketteleye on the Queen and he minions. There is very little evidence either way, but it makes a great deal of intuitive sense, and offers a pretty satisfying explanation. And there are the thorn labyrinths, which provide a hefty portion of the evidence to pin the destruction on the queen.

Thorn labyrinths, whatever else their properties are ecological disasters on multiple levels. They move and spread fast enough to be visible (and seem to do so even faster when not observed), choking out all plantlife they contact and attempting to entrap and impale all animals. Their presence drives custodial spirits of earth and wood out of their usual habitats, or, worse, entraps and drains them in order to fuel their growth. They generate a constant psychic background that is inimical to natural sapient creatures. They burn slowly and generate awful, greenish, acrid smoke.

Thorn labyrinths are massive, continuous tangles of woody vines with sparse and tiny black and white speckled leaves. Their vines appear to be segmented, and their bark slightly shiny, giving the appearance of many-jointed insectile legs. The resemblance is more than merely visual, as individual vines are jointed and possess a wide range of motion. Thorn labyrinths seem able to know when they are being visually observed, and while portions of them under observation do appear to to be in constant, slow motion, the portions of the plant or colony's bulk not observed can move very quickly. A thorn labyrinth is covered in clusters of black thorns, up to 10 cm in length and extremely sharp.

Harm - 2/Peril [Grief] Thorn labyrinths don't set out to harm their inhabitants directly, at least, not at first. Though they are capable of moving their vines with reasonable force when attacked, their major form of attack is simply their existence, position and the psychic resonance they create.

Path of Needles/Path of Pins
When you wish to bypass or escape a thorn labyrinth, face Disaster
On a Hit, you are able to navigate around or through, but the Moderator gets a Soft Move, anyway.
On a Hard Hit, you are able to find the labyrinth's power source (or one of them), which you may destroy, and cause the death of at least this section of the labyrinth.
On a Miss, you blunder into thorns, Suffer Harm as Stated.

Your regret is my reward
Thorn labyrinths grow over the bodies of the people they are able to trap and kill or subdue with their psychic resonance, using the spirit of the dead as a battery to fuel their movement and add to their psychic powers. They can do this to custodial spirits they entrap. In either case, they grow around their prey in dense balls of thorny vine. If you can cut one of these batteries free, destroy or magically isolate one from the rest of the mass, it will kill the thorns in the area (potentially the whole mass). Custodial spirits still strong enough to be viable are likely to be grateful to their rescuers, however it is possible to keep the spirit in the thorns and use it as a power source for other things (particularly psychic weapons). This will make you very unpopular among spirits and witches, for reasons which should be pretty obvious.

Spirits cannot pass through thorn labyrinth vines, which makes wreathes and garlands of the stuff potentially useful for securing a place or item from spirits. The downside is that vines will sometimes take root and begin to spread if not properly watched.

There are still islands in the Gulf that are totally dominated by Thorn labyrinths, as well as rumors of the stuff dominating a vast part of the Murrenic taiga.