Grove-Wyrms

The forest’s oldest answer to a broken world.

I have walked the hush where root and rune keep counsel, and I have seen a Grove-Wyrm open its bark-scaled eye. It was like watching a hill remember it was a dragon.

Origins.
In the first age, when creation was still fresh and the world’s breath steamed in every glade, Grove-Wyrms were god-touched beings—rare, revered, more spirit than beast. The Verdant Circle’s earliest keepers called them “the breath’s bones,” believing each Wyrm formed where the World-Serpent’s final exhale snagged upon a seed. They slept long beneath standing stones, stirring only when storms threatened the sapling nations. Five are recorded in the Circle’s root-lore, each a silent sentinel crowned in lichen and light. Approach then was prayer, not pact.

Ascendance.
As Galdrowen’s wisdom flowered, so did kinship. Bark became armor, moss a mane, and the Wyrms learned the slow grammar of trust. Druids dream-walked beside them; some bonded through seed-oaths, exchanging a heartbeat for a heartbeat. Twenty are tallied in the Circle’s annals during this era—still rare, each with a self the size of a forest edge. They took to camouflage, their ridges mimicking knotted oak and thorn. When borders were tested, they rose without roar, wading through briar like tide through reeds, shaping battles by where they chose to stand. Archdruid Fen Mossbark once wrote, “A Grove-Wyrm’s greatest weapon is place. It arrives, and the ground decides.”

Fracture.
The Shattering snapped more than ley lines; it jarred the patience out of old things. Many Wyrms retreated, anchoring themselves over fissured nodes to hold the forest together with their bodies and will. Others reawakened furious and confused, mistaking friends for flame. Fifteen remained known to the Circle then, though “known” meant luminous sightings at the edges of corrupted glades and the thrum of earthsong answering druid chants. Rootcaller Brannok led wardens to keep scavengers away from Wyrm-watched chasms, reporting that a single slow exhale from the guardian quieted wild magic for a league.

Twilight.
Galdrowen turned inward. The Wyrms followed suit—ten by the Circle’s careful count, mostly hidden, each paired with a grove so sacred that even names were traded only in whispers. They guarded seed archives and memory-rings while Thornspine patrols handled the noise of war. Nuala of the Grove, who speaks in riddles even to friends, carried visions of Wyrms dreaming under green ice, “counting winters until a softer dawn.” To the desperate this seemed indifference. To the wise it was stewardship measured in centuries, not seasons.

Echoes.
The dawn returned by degrees. Young shoots pushed through old ash; the ley-threads began to hum again. A handful of eggs—thought fossil or myth—quickened. Twelve Wyrms now breathe in the Circle’s care, with a few juveniles curious enough to nudge campfires and listen to songs. Elarin Wildbloom, a reformer with a diplomat’s patience, argues that the new age’s pact must be broader than bond and battle: “Let them teach us the pace of healing.” Even the impatient agree when they watch a juvenile set its jaw to the earth and draw poison from a blighted spring like smoke from a wound.

Nature & Temperament.
Grove-Wyrms are protective, not predatory. They choose where to be, and that choice writes the next chapter of the forest. Their breath is not fire but a living heat that encourages growth, cauterizes rot, and braids broken roots back into song. Scales are layered wood-stone veined with sap-light; a blow that would crack granite yields to this flexible armor, which absorbs impact and returns it as a shiver through the ground. Their horns are green with cambium and can bud leaves in spring; their eyes hold the patient gold of late afternoon.

Bonding & Signs.
When a Wyrm considers pact, the forest tells on it. Owls roost lower. Vines lift like curious fingers. A circle of toadstools appears overnight and refuses to die. The bond itself is not rider and mount but steward and sanctuary; the druid learns the Wyrm’s routes the way a stream learns its stones. In battle the pair fights by shaping terrain: thickets rise, hollows soften, paths close to enemies and blossom to allies. When words must be used, they are few; most dialogue is pressure and presence.

On Corruption.
Grove-Wyrms hate ash that does not feed and flame that does not warm. Choir-wrought pyres and Embercore shock leave them restless and ill. They will not charge into Thar Zûl’s fires; they will unmake the fuel instead, turning tinder back to sap. Against shadowcraft—Duskfall’s quiet invasions—they are less direct. A Wyrm will curl around a memory-struck stone and hum until the dream unknots, or lie across a path for three nights so that the ones who would pass must sleep under its watch and wake untempted.

Fieldcraft.
If you stumble upon a Grove-Wyrm, you were meant to—either to learn or to leave. Withdraw your iron; offer your bare palm to the soil. Announce your purpose aloud; it will be weighed. Do not touch the moss of its mane without invitation. If it sleeps, let it. If it rises, do not run; choose instead to stand where you would be remembered. That is the lesson they give to those who survive long enough to become keepers: the world is not defended by speed, but by deciding where to stand and staying.

What they are, across all ages, is continuity given shape: the forest remembering itself out loud.