The Rootbound

The Greenwake's radicals who let too much of the wild into themselves — feral land-wardens half-merged with the Greatwood, who hold the deep forest by tooth, root, and rot.

The Rootbound are Greenwake wardens who stopped drawing a line between themselves and the wood. Where the parent guild tends and harvests, the Rootbound have gone half-feral: skin gone to bark, hair to moss, some of them barely able to leave the grove they've grown into. Their mysticism is the living land itself — they read root and rain and the slow politics of rot, and they treat the Greatwood as territory to be held, not shared. They run off loggers, charcoal-burners, and salvage crews; they tax or ambush anyone cutting deep timber; and they trade forest goods (rare resin, drug-saps, healing barks, and any old crystal or relic they dig out of a root-hollow) to outside buyers for the coin and tools they can't grow. The Wardens treat them with grief and caution, the way you'd treat a friend who walked into deep water on purpose and is still, technically, swimming.