Rieken

Body

"A body of soil and root. Their skin is smoothed bark, riddled with moss clusters and jiggly dangling roots. A coned root collar falls down to form bark clothing." Primarily female; the rare males "carry more off putting physical traits, leaning further away from Nu'uman qualities and more towards that of trees." "Their faces are that of Nu'uman's, burned into the trees they chopped down, like a moment of captured time." Hair "made of jiggly or jagged roots." Six feet, a hundred pounds, one to two thousand years.

Inside, a Rieken is mostly void: a lattice of root and packed soil around an open trunk, which is why one weighs a hundred pounds at six feet and why a Rieken can be carried by two Nu'uman and cannot be knocked down by four. The dangling roots are the sense organ, not decoration; they trail on the ground as she walks and she reads the soil continuously through them, and a Rieken indoors on a boarded floor is as good as blind and behaves like it. The face is the strangest thing about her and the Rieken do not explain it. They "die at the bases of trees, composting within minutes, as to give life back to their source."

Society

They have no head and no chief. The Rieken are governed as a wood is, by the roots beneath it: when a matter must be decided, every Rieken within a day's walk comes to the Stand of Remembered Faces, roots into the soil, and the roots knot together underground. What passes between them in the knot is not speech, and no other kin has ever been party to it. When they pull up, the matter is decided and there is no one to appeal to. A Rieken who will not root is not argued with; she is simply not in the knot.

Life

They draw from the soil through the feet and drink the rain through the bark; a Rieken standing in good loam for a night is fed for a month, and a Rieken kept on stone starves in a year.

Their sickness is rot at the collar, where the cone holds water, and the cure is to stand in a running stream for a season, which they do openly and which is one of the few sights of Irugaine life the surface has ever been allowed.

Harvest

Taken from them: bark-cloth, peeled from the collar in strips by the Rieken herself and given, the softest and most durable cloth in the wild; root-hair, twisted into a rope that holds in water; and the moss clusters, which are a hundred small physics. The face is never taken. A Nu'uman who cuts a Rieken's face from her bark finds, when he looks at it, that it is his own.