Trena

Body

"Animated tree folk, varying in shapes and size, as trees do. A literal embodiment of the forest, depending on where they were sprouted, as seen through their matching bark and leaf color. Their split bark faces reveal a mass of fleshy muscle that seeps sap-like mucus, and they just moan for the death of the forest. Their hands and arms look similar to modern lesser species, and more humanoid as the years progress; weapons grow out from their hands. Their feet root into the ground when they stand firm." "The only pain they feel is wooden chopping and fire." Eight to thirty feet, two to nine thousand pounds, nine to twenty thousand years. They grow more Nu'uman-shaped with age, over millennia, and "can speak any Irugaine language."

A Trena has no nerve worth the name outside the face and the hands, which is why nothing else hurts; the trunk is dead wood laid down around a living column, the way a tree is, and a wound in the trunk is a fact rather than a sensation. The moan is a pressure sound, forced up the column when the sap falls, and a Trena moaning for the death of a forest is a body reacting to a chemistry in the ground before the Trena has thought about it. Their sight is the slowest of any kin and their patience is the same organ: a Trena genuinely sees a sapling thicken, and genuinely does not see a running Boalden until it has stopped.

Society

They are ruled as a forest is ruled by its canopy: the tallest takes the light, and the tallest is the oldest. Trena do not vote and do not contest. They stand together, and the one whose crown is highest speaks last, and what it says is what is done, and it may take a decade to say it. The Standing of Ikivanhala has been in session for nine thousand years on a single question, which the Jakai say is whether to move. A young Trena of a mere thousand years is a sapling in council and does not speak.

Life

They eat nothing and drink the rain and stand in the light, taking root and sun, and a Trena chained in a dark hold starves in a century, moaning.

Like the other dry kin they split along the grain in a dry season, and fire is the death they fear, being the one thing besides the axe that they feel. They walk the edges of the Salted Groves and moan for them.

Harvest

Taken from them: the heartwood, the finest timber on Nu and the only timber the Angun Oak will graft to, which is why the shipwrights of three kingdoms have Trena-felling on their books as a capital crime they would commit again; the sap-mucus of the face, which seals a wound in a breath; and the grown weapon, which is a tree's worth of wood shaped to a blade. A Trena feels the axe. A Trena felled screams for a day, and every Irugaine in the forest hears it.