The Sylvaneth are the living wrath of the natural world: spirits of root, branch, and season grown from soulpods in hidden groves across the Mortal Realms. Children of Alarielle, goddess of life, they are bound to one another by the spirit-song: a music older than cities that hums through every realmroot and leaf, carrying the Everqueen's will from glade to glade. When the song is a song of growing, the sylvaneth tend their groves in secret and let the wild bloom. When it becomes the battle-song, forests march, and things that thought themselves apex predators learn what the green world remembers.
No people of Order suffered the Age of Chaos more intimately. When Nurgle's legions invaded Ghyran, the Realm of Life itself became the battlefield: rivers curdled, glades rotted from the root, and whole generations of soulpods were poisoned before they could wake. Alarielle, wounded in spirit, withdrew into hidden vales as her children died singing, and for an age the sylvaneth fought a war of ambush and grief against an enemy that turned their own soil against them. The wound of those years has never closed. Every sylvaneth carries it, the way heartwood carries a burn.
From that despair came the great turning. Rather than fade, Alarielle let herself be planted and was reborn in her incarnation of war, and the spirit-song changed key. Now the glades muster in wargroves (Oakenbrow, Gnarlroot, Heartwood, Winterleaf, and many more), walking the realmroots to erupt from soil their enemies believed safe. The fallen are not lost: each spirit's essence returns as lamentiri, soul-seeds that remember, to be planted in fresh soulpods and grown anew. Grief and renewal are not opposites to the sylvaneth. They are the same season, arriving in order.
Yet the children of Alarielle are no gentle allies. They fight beside the free cities when the song requires it, and they remember every axe those cities have swung. Mortals who honor the groves may pass unharmed; those who take without asking vanish into the treeline mid-scream. For the sylvaneth serve life, not civilization, and the question that murmurs through the deepwood is which one the other peoples of Order will finally choose. Until then the forests watch, and mourn, and grow back, as they always have. The wise never mistake the regrowing for forgetting.
Units
Arch-RevenantHero · InfantryA martial champion of the glades who soars above the host, rallying the wargrove to ever-greater feats of slaughter.
BranchwraithHero · InfantryA haughty forest-noble who channels the lifebloom of Ghyran to birth new Dryads even amid the carnage of battle.
BranchwychHero · InfantryA slender spirit-sorceress bound to a single glade, reaping the enemy with her greenwood scythe and the songs of the forest.
DryadsBattleline · InfantrySwarming branch-spirits of the deepwood: capricious, keening, and merciless to any despoiler who raises an axe beneath their boughs.
Gossamid ArchersScout · Winged InfantryWind-borne skirmishers lifted on zephyrspite wings, loosing living arrows from above the canopy where no despoiler thinks to look.
Kurnoth HuntersElite · InfantryTowering huntsmen grown in the image of the lost god Kurnoth, whose greatbows, scythes, and blades answer the wild's oldest law: everything is prey to something.
Spite-RevenantsElite · InfantryThe forest's nightmare made flesh of splinter and thorn: dissonant outcast spirits whose very presence frays the spirit-song and the courage of everything nearby.
Spiterider LancersCavalry · Winged CavalrySwift spite-revenant riders mounted on giant dragonflies, striking with venom-tipped lances before darting out of reach.
Tree-RevenantsBattleline · InfantryNoble spirits who walk the hidden ways between groves, arriving on the wind's heel to enforce the Everqueen's will with glaive and waypipe.
TreelordBehemoth · MonsterAn ancient noble spirit grown to colossal size: a walking piece of the deepwood whose strangleroots and sweeping limbs unmake armies like rotten fences.
Treelord AncientBehemoth · MonsterAn age-old tree-spirit of immense wisdom and power, calling upon the forest itself to ensnare and strangle the foe.
Warsong RevenantHero · MonsterA spellsinger spirit whose ancient laments twist reality, choking the foe with brambles as it sings the forest to war.
Characters
Alarielle the EverqueenThe EverqueenThe goddess of life herself: mother of the sylvaneth, mistress of the spirit-song, a deity whose moods are seasons and whose grief once nearly ended a realm.
BelthanosFirst Thorn of KurnothThe foremost of Kurnoth's hunters, a stag-borne revenant who leads the wild hunt against the despoilers of the forest.
Drycha HamadrethThe Splintered SongThe eldest and angriest of the forest's spirits: an outcast queen whose hatred predates the glades and does not distinguish between Chaos and civilization.
DurthuLast of the Elder TreelordsThe eldest and most wrathful of Treelord Ancients, who remembers the World-That-Was and hates all who wield axe and flame.
The Lady of VinesThe Everqueen's ShieldAlarielle's truest servant, grown from the goddess's own essence: the handmaiden who carried a dying deity to safe soil, and who returned from death bearing a share of the divine.
YlthariThe RebornA once-slain Branchwych returned from the underverse, leading her loyal guardians in an unending quest to protect the glade.
Subfactions
GnarlrootThe loremasters of the sylvaneth, keepers of grove-magic and the deep memory of the lamentiri. Gnarlroot works more closely with the wizards of the free peoples than any other glade, trading wisdom for wardenship. Blight and betrayal have scarred its rootways, and its generosity now comes twinned with watchfulness.
HeartwoodThe most martial of the glades, honoring the hunter-god Kurnoth in every drawn bow and every silent kill. Heartwood answers the call to war faster than any of its kin and fields Kurnoth Hunters in unmatched numbers. Its spirits hold that protection is not a mood but a discipline, practiced daily and forever.
OakenbrowThe eldest of the great glades, rooted in lineages that remember the world-that-was. Oakenbrow marches beneath more Treelords than any other glade, and it wakes to war the way mountains wake: slowly, and then all at once. Its nobles counsel patience in all things except the defense of the old groves.
WinterleafA glade scoured by an unending winter of war, whose survivors' sap froze and never wholly thawed. Winterleaf fights without mercy and largely without song, killing with the quiet of snowfall. Other sylvaneth mourn what the glade lost; Winterleaf considers grief a weapon like any other, and keeps it sharpened.
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