The Greenmantle

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

The Land

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 Nymphs are told about.

A mature Greenmantle oak stands two miles high in Faerie measure. The root level is dim, damp, and continuous with the Deephearth; the trunk is a cliff country of bark canyons, each fissure a valley with its own moss forest and its own residents; the branch level is the inhabited one, a road network of living wood with no ground beneath it; and the canopy is above the weather, in blazing sun, where the leaves close at night and the temperature drops forty degrees.

• Canopy weather. Cloud forms inside the crown. There is genuine rain up there falling on people who are two thousand feet above the forest floor, and there is genuine lightning, and there is nothing at all to hold on to.
• The drop. Nobody in the Greenmantle dies of anything else. Every Nymph child learns to fall — the technique of catching air on leaf-wings well enough to be hurt rather than killed — before they learn to write.
• Squirrels. Huge, arboreal, fast, and disinclined to negotiate. The Greenmantle's entire military doctrine is squirrel cavalry, and squirrel cavalry exists because unmounted travel in the branch country is not survivable in numbers.
• Sapfall. In spring the trees run, and a bark fissure can fill with hot sap in an hour. It is the province's great harvest and its ugliest way to die.
• The slow hours. Time works oddly near the Heartwood. Visitors report that conversations they remember as brief took a season. The Nymphs do not consider this remarkable and are not helpful about it.

Subregions

The High Forest. Trees a thousand feet tall over a floor in permanent shade, each vertical layer its own ecosystem. The Dryads hold it, and are very hard to see.

The Everflow. A vast river running in a closed circle through rainforest richer than the rest of Everdew combined, followed by the homeless, fiercely protective Iyara.

The Roan. Ancient worn mountains older than the High Forest, all deep hollers, where the Alseid live in extended families and consider no creature their inferior.

Flora and Fauna

The Heartwood

A ring of the oldest trees in the world, where the Nymph 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.

Settlements

The Greenmantle has no cities. It has holds — communities living in one tree, named for it, and rarely exceeding a few thousand.

Thanewood Hold (~800) — the Heartwood's own, and barely a settlement: attendants, listeners, and the small number of people whose job is to be present when an elder finally answers something.

Sapwell Nine (2,500) — the largest working hold, built around a bank of tapped sapwells. The nearest thing to industry in the province, and the place the Kingdom's factors come to make offers.

Cleftmoss (4,000) — a trunk-fissure town of moss-farmers and bark-crofters, mostly Basekin, mostly beetles and mites, holding a charter granted by a Nymph elder in a form no Kingdom court recognizes and no Nymph considers negotiable.

The Southern Camps — not Greenmantle settlements at all: Kingdom logging camps on the shrinking southern edge, chartered from the capital, present without permission, and growing.

Factions

The Heartwood Elders. The government, such as it is: a dozen beings on the boundary between Faerie and Elderborn, deliberating at a pace measured in seasons. Their answer to the timber question has been pending for sixty years and everyone understands that the pending is the answer.

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, talk to outsiders, and are regarded by their elders with the particular sorrow reserved for people who are right too early.

The Southern Concession. The Kingdom's logging interest, chartered out of the capital, protected by Wardency contract soldiers, and expanding at a rate carefully calculated to stay below the threshold that would require the Heartwood to actually decide something.

The Cleftmoss Charter. The bark-crofters, holding a grant that predates the Kingdom's claim to the province. They are Basekin, so the Chancery says the charter is void; they are chartered by an elder, so the Nymphs say it is not; and the argument is the most consequential legal case in the world that nobody at court has heard of.

The Fallers. Squirrel cavalry, technically the province's militia, in practice an autonomous order with its own recruitment and its own opinions. They have twice refused Heartwood instructions and have never once refused a Quickwood request.

Sites of Interest

The Southern Edge. Where the Concession is working: two miles of felled giants, stumps like plateaus, and the sound of it audible for half the province. The Nymphs have not fought. One treant crossed the line four years ago, stood in the cut for a day and a night, and left, and the camp it stood in was abandoned inside a week and has not been reoccupied. Nobody who was there will discuss what happened, and the Concession's charter now routes around that acre specifically.

The Rot. A giant, dead and standing, four hundred feet through at the base and hollow the whole way up: a vertical cave system of soft wood, fungus, grubs the size of wagons, and things that came in through the top. It is the richest source of rare fungus in the Kingdom and the most reliable way to die in it, and there is a well-established trade in guiding people partway.

The Root-Crossing. Deep under the western holds, a place where the roots run into somewhere else and the air smells of a world that is not this one — one of the three known ways into the Waking World. The Nymphs do not guard it. They simply do not tell anybody where it is, which has worked for a very long time and is beginning not to.

The Listening Ring. The Heartwood itself, from the outside: twelve elders, half-tree, standing in a circle around an empty clearing they have never explained. Petitioners wait in the clearing. Some are answered in a season. Some are answered after their descendants have taken up the petition. And a few report that while waiting, they heard the elders speaking to something in the middle of the ring, where there is nothing at all.

Hooks

• The Concession wants a survey of the next ten miles of the southern edge and will pay a great deal for guides who do not ask why the map skips one acre.
• A Quickwood cell asks the party to carry a petition past the Heartwood — directly to a treant, which is either diplomacy or treason, and the Nymphs have no word for the difference.
• The Cleftmoss charter is coming before a Chancery assizes in the Eternal City. The crofters need a Faerie who will stand up and say the grant is real. Everyone qualified has been bought, frightened, or promoted.
• Sapwell Nine's spring run comes early and does not stop. Three holds are flooded with hot sap, the wells will not close, and the tree is trying to say something the tappers cannot read.
• Somebody has been in the Root-Crossing. There are human things on the Greenmantle side: a coin, a scrap of cloth, and something that ticks.

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 lands it decides are being wasted should look at the shrinking southern edge.