The Ioma teaches me to read soil the way some people read constellations. Right against the vents the ground is glass and sulfur, mineral crusts that sterilize everything except the microbial colors smeared across them. Step back a little and the mats thicken into gelatinous film, thermophiles spinning chemical energy into the first real strata of life. Beyond that the peat wakes up, the pH steadies, and roots start testing the warmth that seeps sideways through the crack. The gradients line up perfectly with the contour lines traced in the atlas and the geological notes in The Ioma Rift.

Those microbes do the heavy lifting. Chemolithoautotrophs chew on sulfur and iron, cyanobacteria stitch nitrogen out of thin air, and the mats they build become soil even as the water scalds. They paint the rocks in rust, gold, and green, and they give me the first clue about what plants can survive in each pool or seep. When the mats change color, I know the chemistry shifted before I bother to take a sample.

The vascular plants treat those gradients like a ladder. Heat-tolerant grasses cling to the lip, sedges and rushes knit the shallows, and the “Goldilocks” bands explode with pickerelweed, orchids, and broad-leafed endemics that shouldn’t exist this far north. Warm shrubs, willow, alder, berry thickets, build height that the open tundra never manages. Then, right at the edge of the influence, the community snaps back to sphagnum, bog cotton, and lichen crusts that remind me what the wider climate still demands.

Every useful plant in Thalen carries a thermal address. Firewort tempers fever and only grows within a stone’s throw of the vents. Mist sage catches droplets on its hairs so we can burn it in purification rites. Depth lichen creeps slow enough that its presence marks a sacred boundary, and slough moss smolders into visions for the priests. Mapping these gardens isn’t botany for me, it’s cultural cartography wrapped around survival, the same map I lean on in Crafting Survival in the Mist and Culture Woven from Mist.