Flosien

Body

"Intricately carved, bright beige-white plated bark skin, forming a natural suit of armour. Atop their head, a crown of red leaves, and from their shoulders and neck, a cape of malleable red-pink leafed vines falls." They walk on angled wooden toe-tips "like ballerinas," and "their eyes bleed red sap when enraged." "Having been mutated by the Crimson ages ago, their red colour comes from that mutation that plagued and fantastified the forest of their origin." They have "fought against it and remained pure of heart," and are the only known lineage to have done so. "A weapon (Staff, bow, sword, axe, etc.) is born woven into their arm." Six to seven feet, one hundred and twenty to two hundred pounds, six hundred to three thousand years.

They are a stabilised Crimson strain, one of the very few, and the proof that it is possible. What the Crimson did to them, beyond the colour, was speed: a Flosien's sap runs under pressure rather than by the day's warmth, held by a valve of hardened gum at the base of the neck, and a Flosien can spend that pressure in one burst and move faster than anything wooden has a right to. The eyes bleeding red sap is the pressure venting, and it means the burst is coming. The cost is that the dawn weakness, which every other kin merely suffers, is in the Flosien a total collapse: the valve cannot hold against a low tide of sap, and for an hour before first light a Flosien knight is a statue that can speak. The Red Hold is walled with three miles of grown thorn for that hour and no other reason.

Society

They are ruled by an order of rings, after the growth rings of the tree: every Flosien born in the same century is a ring, and the rings command outward from the heart, the oldest ring innermost. The Innermost Ring is whatever remains of the eldest living century, often three or four knights, and their word is law in the Red Hold and nowhere else, because a Flosien will not command outside the wood that made it. A knight rises only as the ring inside it dies. Sethvaal has sat in the Innermost Ring for eight hundred years. A Crimson-touched Irugaine of any other kin is the Flosien's business, and the Innermost Ring keeps that duty rather than delegating it, on the grounds that they are the only ones who know what they are looking at.

Life

They live on sun through the red leaf and sap drawn up through the toe-tips from the warm soil of the Hold; they eat with the mouth only in company and only out of courtesy, and a Flosien posted away from the Hold's warm ground thins, greys at the crown and must be recalled within a decade.

Like the other dry kin they check rather than rot: a dry season opens fine cracks along the grain, and those let in weather and weed.

Harvest

Taken from them: the plated bark, which is armour-grade and is taken only from the dead, whom the Flosien burn instead of composting, so that the Crimson in them goes up as smoke and never down into the soil; the red sap of the eyes, a Crimson derivative that does not mutate and is worth more than its weight in amber to any alchemist who knows what it is; and the born weapon, which no smith has ever managed to remove from the arm without the arm.