The natural fauna of Antiochia can be divided into two broad categories:
That which wishes to kill you,
And that which is confident you’re going to die sometime fairly soon.
A prime example of the former is the Murderous Thorned Dandelion, which does a poor job of being a dandelion, but does a fantastic job at protruding into every faintly trustworthy path through the brush while being both murderous and thorned.
A fine example of the more complex latter category, however, would be the Excessive Minibur Distributor, which, upon contact with any foolishly passing surface, invests a prodigious number of spiny burs upon that surface- So many burrs, in fact, that it might seem to a casually bleeding observer that the plant must be entrusting all of its eggs to one proverbial basket. However, so much faith does the plant have in your impending demise as you wander this Cilician landscape, that it does not at all fear that soon all of its many implanted burs shall be properly planted in the soil where your body falls.
But all life here does not choose to interact directly with you in the physical sense. For example, the Suspiciously Pleasant Tentacles cause you no harm on contact, and in fact are rather pleasant to the senses, visually and aurally. This is of course all a trap, as this plant conceals amongst itself every brand of murderous plant, all ready to be painfully discovered the moment you come too near. It is thus made clear that this Tentacle plant most certainly wants to kill you, but has chosen a somewhat more civilized method of murder than its brutish, scheme-less comrades.
This is not of course to demean the brutes, for they do their jobs extremely well. Just take a gander at this fine example of the Literally Just Thorns: All thorns, all the time, for every occasion, in life and in death.
And one who was there for the initial cleaning away of the brush from our site cannot forget the glory that is the Bizarro Piercing Oak, which is a sort of bush covered with pretty little leaves that are actually rigid, spine-covered epidermis-rupturing devices. Only once has or will anyone sit upon a bed of Bizarro Piercing Oak leaves trusting that they’re plain old satisfyingly crunchy leaves.
All of these observations are of course working gradually towards some sort of unifying conclusion. And that conclusion would be that this place was never meant to be inhabited by man. The Purple Game Ender confirms this theory: An ungodly plant that possesses inch-long, titanium-rigid spines connected by a series of stiff purple scaffolding. In the early days of the month, this horror was found everywhere around the site, and the magnitude of the difficulty of locating it again for this picture in our last few days here should be taken as a testament to the voracity of mankind to triumph over anything that stands in our way.
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