Starfly Plant

A starfly is a bright, butterfly-shaped plant floating slowly through the void between worlds. Its filmy wings catch sunlight and make sugar for the seed at its core, a warty, almond-shaped pit like a peach stone, full of bitter chemicals that poison living things.

Starship crews are delighted to meet one, since the fruit is delicious. To them it is a good-luck sign, ending hunger and promising wealth and happiness.

The starfly is the mobile fruit of a mother-tree that roots in the ice and dirt of comets and sends its winged fruit off to seed new ones. Its shape echoes elven ships, and scholars correctly guess that elves enchanted the plant to mature while mobile, breeding their small and large living ships from it; its easily altered form makes it the backbone of elven spacefaring.

Mother-tree: A landed seed roots and eats the comet's ice and minerals. The sapling grows wing-like leaves, then a water bulb; the leaves turn mirror-bright and focus sunlight to boil the water, and steam venting from the bulb's nozzles drives comet and tree sunward. Near the sun the leaves drop and a second stage begins, the tree consuming the remaining minerals until it is big enough for its own gravity plane and air envelope. Its pull draws rock and debris into its organic furnace. Around 1,000 feet tall, its smelting pods wither and give off gases that become air, and thick new foliage grows to shelter animals and plants. A mature tree is a whole ecosystem, and if its gravity gathers enough extra rock it may become a liveworld.

Rumor claims elven mages secretly fit helms into mother-trees to fly them as starships, and that such trees will replace the current living ships at the heart of the elven fleet. It is unproven, and the elves' rivals would pay well for the truth.