The Sap-Drinkers

A heretic splinter of the Rootbound who broke off to drink the amber sap their wardens only hoard — a wild forest drug-cult that runs feral on the stuff, hooked, hungry, and half-rooted in the deep galleries.

Beneath the Hollowing Oak the deepest galleries weep an amber sap the Rootbound wake-keepers guard like a strongbox. The Sap-Drinkers were wake-keepers once, until they tapped the caches and drank. The sap is the whole cult: it floods you warm and lucid and then it owns you, and a body that keeps drinking goes feral and slow as the wood closes bark over its wrists. So they sit in the weeping chambers, hooked on the living wood, raiding the wardens' stores when their own veins run dry and dragging deeper into the galleries the more they drink. They trade in what the deep dirt gives up — the wardens' hoarded sap, old temple-bronze and relics they pry loose and barter to outside buyers for coin and more of the drug — and they will gut anyone who corners them off a cache. The wardens have walled their galleries off and won't call them dead, because they are plainly still down there, still talking, still drinking. It is the saddest racket in the Vale.