The Greenmantle

Old-growth forest on a scale that makes the Twilight look like scrub: trees whose trunks are landscapes, whose bark supports whole ecosystems, and whose canopies hold cloud. The Dryads live within them rather than under them, and the region has no roads, because the Dryads have never seen a reason to make travel easy for anyone.

Geography

Vertical. The Greenmantle is best understood as a stack of habitats — root, trunk, branch, canopy — each with its own population, weather, and politics, connected by routes only Dryads are told about.

The Heartwood

A ring of the oldest trees in the world, where the Dryad elders have grown so far into their trees that it is no longer clear where the Faerie stops. Decisions are made there over years. Petitions from the Eternal City are received courteously and answered after the petitioner has metamorphosed, retired, or died.

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 Dryads' refusal to trade in them is officially framed as backwardness. Anyone looking for evidence of what the Kingdom does to lands it decides are being wasted should look at the shrinking southern edge.