Grekein

Body

"Intricately carved dark bark, with veins of green moss interconnecting each skin plate. Their head is a terrifyingly jagged branch helmet, with a fin of grass/ leaves coming off and down the spine of their back. No facial features, besides twelve raw yellow sap eyes exposed by the gaps between the roots of their head. A bark chest plate works down their knees, and splits along the frontal and back sides, to allow the free leg movement. They have wide rooted feet." Their shield and sword are grown from their own material; some carry a rooted bark whip where a hand should be. They hold "an internal map of every forest" and hire out as guides in the dark wood. Six to seven feet, one hundred and twenty to two hundred pounds, six hundred to two thousand years.

The twelve eyes are the answer to the kin's problem: no single Irugaine eye tracks fast movement, and twelve of them set around a head at different angles, each reading a narrow slice, assemble something close to a whole field, and a Grekein is the only Irugaine that can be flanked and know it. The internal map is not memory in the ordinary sense; it is held in the moss veins, which record the chemistry of every ground the Grekein has stood on, and a Grekein asked where it is will press a foot down and answer in a moment. A Grekein carried unconscious across a country wakes knowing exactly where it has been taken, which is the reason nobody has ever successfully kidnapped one twice.

Society

They are ruled as moss rules: it grows where the water is, and the Grekein follow the one who knows where the water is. Each barrow of the Green Barrows has a Wayholder, the Grekein whose internal map is the fullest, and the Wayholder is tested and never elected: a challenger names a place in the forest, the Wayholder must say what stands there now, and if the challenger knows better, the challenger holds the way. It is a slow office and a cold one, and Wayholders leave their barrows less each century.

Life

They live on moss-water, drawn from the wet plates of their own skin, and the damp of the barrow; a Grekein in a dry country sickens and its twelve eyes cloud.

Their splitting is the worst of any kin: the plate edges open along the grain in dry heat, the moss veins between them tear, and a checked Grekein loses its map piece by piece and cannot say so, because it does not know what it no longer knows. An old Grekein is a mass of filled and refilled fissures.

Harvest

Taken from them: the sap eyes, twelve to a corpse, which see in the dark after death for a year and are set into lanterns by the Under Realm's rich; the moss veins, which are a poultice against rot; and the branch helmet, which is worn by no one twice, because it grows into whoever puts it on. A Nu'uman caught with a Grekein eye in his pack is not tried in Irugaine country; he is planted.