Skullwort

Real Life: Snapdragon seeds

The Skullwort plant has no leaves and usually resembles little more than a small dead bush and is covered in small, white seeds that look remarkably like human skulls.

Possessed of the rare quality known to biomancers as necrosynthesis, Skullwort can only grow if germinated within the body of someone, or something, recently dead. As a result, they can be be sometimes found deep below the earth, or inside darkened castles while on the surface they are most often found on battlefields and cemeteries.

The skull shaped seedpods are prized by necromancers, seers and druids for their many qualities, but supreme care must be made in harvesting as the pods will try and find a new host to germinate in by chewing their way into the flesh of any creature that may come into contact.

Known Properties
-Seeds placed into the skull of a skeleton can cause it to re-animate. The skeleton will then try and kill any living creature nearby to deposit the skull-seed into the flesh and allow it to germinate.

-Seers and Prophets have been known to collect the skulls and after being inscribed with forbidden runes, are used as powerful divination tools.

-If carefully harvested, prepared and brewed into a tea, it allows the drinker to converse with the dead.

-If the wind is blowing from the Final Realm, the skulls talk to each other in the voices of those who have passed.

-It is rumoured that feeding the seeds to Wraiths or Zombies might sate their hunger for a limited period of time. 

-Crushed into a paste and carefully prepared, it can be used as a potent zombie-bane. Much care must be taken however, as the recipe is very difficult to make and the slightest mistake can result in a terrifyingly powerful hallucinogenic and necrotizing drug.

-A party of delvers once found a blind and ancient dwarf who had been dropped into some subterranean oubliette. The dwarf, now quite mad, claimed that he was the last survivor to an expedition that had gone deeper than any before or since. There, in caves carved through the hearts of precious stones larger than castles, they discovered a vast realm of Fungoids, Ant Men, Morlok and Gremlin, all ruled by a giant skull that hung from the branch of a tiny tree.