The Vampire Rose

As clouds gathered overhead, the FGC debated what to do next.

Phelan took a moment to test the mirror the group recovered from the harpy, and identified it as a Quicksilver Mirror – a magic item of fae origin, with an unsettling effect on people. But there's something about it that he can't quite identify; an enchantment he isn't familiar with that's layered on top of the item's magical properties. Based on the aesthetics of the piece, he's guessing it's hag magic. Their spells and enchantments can frequently be hard to identify, simply because they don't follow the normal rules. Someone would have to attune to it and use it to learn more.

The group bravely enters the maze. The hedges tower over their heads and the footing is unstable the ground choked with vines. Planksnapper leads the group, but quickly realizes that the maze shifts on him, so he can't lead from too far above.

Our heroes encountered some disturbing animated bundles of coagulated blood and thorny vines that emerged from the hedge walls, and also learned not to taunt the topiaries.

(Shockingly, the internet does not contain any images of beholder-shaped topiaries.)

Emerging into the center of the hedge maze, the group finds an enormous, soaring greenhouse. Behind it, there's a small cottage.

The Gardner's Cottage

The front room of the cottage is clearly where the wayward teens have been hanging out, burning plant matter and lounging on ratty pillows and blankets.

There's a locked door that others have clearly attempted, but none have successfully entered; that is, until Snow comes along.

Inside is a dusty office workspace. The shelves and desk are strewn with dead plants and rotting notebooks full of cramped handwriting, interspersed with odd diagrams.

Looking deeper, you see that the diagrams are scientific plans for combining humans and plants into shocking monstrosities.

The handwriting starts out as what looks like notes for several academic essays on the healing and healthful properties of symbiotic relationshps in nature. The notes take a sudden turn, dated about five years prior, where they deteriorate into experiments that build on these ideas, but become more and more monstrous, exploring the merits and similarieis of life and death, and extending the metaphor into grafting plant matter onto human subjects.

The author was clearly brilliant but troubled, and the experiments showcase their training in a combination of the arcane and healing arts.

There are other research volumes here that seem focused on botany, advanced healing arts such as resurrection and raising the dead, and terrifying texts that focus on their darker cousin, necromancy.

A basket in one corner contains some old, curled blueprints of a massive greenhouse wtih a handwritten note at the top:

For my Emmaline. May our love be evergreen.

The Greenhouse

Snow does a circuit of the greenhouse and detects movement within. Erash adds a dragon to their numbers and the party opts to go in the front door, at first seeing nothing other than towering, verdant columns of plant life and flowers in every hue.

The eerie silence is broken, but only in their heads. Standing in the shadowy corner of the greenhouse, surrounded by cluttered worktables and urns of odd roses, a creature of thorny vines and roses topped with a human brain communicates with them.

At first she – you assume this is Emmaline – seems curious and open to talking, and in fact offers them arcane secrets and hallucinogenic plants if they'll only swap a little blood for the favor. But her goodwill ends abruptly when Ferric implies that Gertrude has done wrongly by her.

The fight rages, with man eating plants seeming to lunge from every corner. Erash falls to one of them. When Emmaline crumples to the ground, blood sprouts emerge from her remains. In the hushed silence that follows the end of the fight. The heroes heal their friends, catch their breath, and look around...