Nymph

Nymph

The Nymphs live inside the oldest and largest trees in the world rather than under them, and they have never seen a reason to make travel through their forest easier for anybody. The Greenmantle has no roads. This is not an oversight.

They are peaceful, reclusive, and extremely slow. A Nymph conversation can take a season. A Nymph decision can take a century. Petitions from the Eternal City are received with perfect courtesy and answered after the petitioner has metamorphosed, retired, or died.

Appearance

Bark-textured skin in browns and greens, hair like moss or fine root, and leaf-shaped wings that change color with the season and are shed and regrown annually. Elder Nymphs grow visibly into their trees over the centuries, until it is no longer clear where the Faerie stops.

The shedding is the part outsiders find unnerving: a Nymph is flightless for about six weeks every year, plans their whole calendar around it, and treats the question when do you shed as roughly as personal as it sounds.

Attuned Magic

Nature. A nascent Nymph coaxes growth, closes a wound in bark, and speaks with the plants in reach. A powerful one moves a thicket to block a road, camouflages a whole grove, hardens wood past the strength of stone, and carries a message tree to tree across the entire forest faster than a courier could fly it.

The tree-to-tree relay is the reason the Greenmantle has no roads and does not need any. It is also the reason the province cannot be surprised: something entering the forest at its southern edge is known at the Heartwood before it has walked a mile, and has been for four hundred years.

Life

A hold is one tree, and a tree is a country. Nymphs live in the trunk and the branch levels, in chambers grown rather than cut, and their work is tending: sapwells, bark-wounds, root-rot, the slow correction of a canopy. Nothing is harvested that will not regrow within the tender's attention span, which is longer than most peoples' lives.

Names. For the tree. A Nymph is Thanewood or Cleftmoss or Sapwell-Nine, and if they move — which is rare and slightly scandalous — the name goes with the tree and they take a new one.

Arrival. A new Nymph is not spoken to for a season. They are housed, fed, and left in the branch country to learn the sound of the hold, and then someone begins a conversation with them that will take a year. Other races find this cruel. Nymphs find the alternative — telling a person with no memories who they are, quickly, before they have found out — considerably worse.

Time. The slow hours near the Heartwood are real. Visitors report that conversations they remember as brief took a season, and the Nymphs have never explained it, possibly because from inside it does not need explaining.

Society

There is no city and no ruler. There is the Heartwood, a ring of the oldest trees in the world where the elders — Eldest Thanewood foremost, though he has not spoken in sixty years — hold council on a timescale that makes the Kingdom's politics look like weather.

Deliberation is the government. A question is raised, and it is not answered, and the not-answering is a decision that cannot be bought, hurried, or threatened — which is exactly why the Greenmantle is the least exploited land in the Kingdom, and exactly why its southern edge is being logged.

Tribes

Three regions, three tribes, and no mechanism whatever by which any of them could bind another.

They are cordial with one another and united only in declining, politely and for four centuries, to sell the Kingdom anything.

Currents

The Heartwood Elders. Twelve beings on the boundary between Faerie and Elderborn, deliberating. Three are further along than they let visitors see.

The Quickwood. Younger Nymphs who have concluded that a sixty-year deliberation is a decision to lose the southern edge. They cut roads, learn to fight, and talk to outsiders, and their elders regard them with the sorrow reserved for people who are right too early.

The Fallers. Squirrel cavalry: nominally the province's militia, practically an autonomous order that has twice refused Heartwood instructions and never once refused a Quickwood request.

The Cleftmoss Charter. Bark-crofters — mostly Basekin — holding a grant witnessed by an elder that the Chancery says is void and the Nymphs say is not. The most consequential legal case in the world that nobody at court has heard of.

Relations

The Greenmantle is the least exploited Faerie land and the one the Kingdom most wants. Its timber, sap, and growing-magic would be worth an empire, and the Nymphs' refusal to trade in them is officially framed as backwardness. Anyone looking for evidence of what the Kingdom does to land it has decided is being wasted should look at the Greenmantle's shrinking southern edge.

Playing One