Nuala of the Grove

They call her Nuala because a single name is lighter to carry through dreams. She is not bark and bone the way most of Galdrowen’s folk are; she is a sylvan spirit—saplight, leaf-breath, and the hush between a forest’s heartbeat and the next. When the Verdant Circle needs counsel no book can hold, they darken the council-tree, steep silence like tea, and ask for Nuala. If she answers, it is usually with a riddle—and, frustratingly, it is usually the right one.

Origins.
In the first age, before the Circle had titles beyond “you who listen” and “you who keep watch,” Nuala learned the tempo of the Grove-Wyrms. Sleeping beneath hill-roots and old stones, the wyrms spoke in weather and root-pressure, in green thunder too large for mortal ears. Nuala found a path into their slumber, braided from birdsong, dew on fern edges, and the slow counting of rings. She taught the young proto-druids to breathe in measures of seven (the forest’s patience) and nine (its caution) until the wyrms tolerated their presence. She was never a master or commander; she was a translator of dreams.

When Elder Mossbeard gathered learners beneath the nascent council-tree, he asked Nuala to teach them humility—how to hear without reaching, how to ask without taking. She answered with a simple practice: “Bring no iron. Bring a question small enough to fit under your tongue.” In those days Nuala’s voice ran like cool water over stone. Her riddles were not to confound but to slow the too-eager mind until it matched the forest’s pace. During the Withering Skies, when magic thinned and even the Grove-Wyrms’ breath went shallow, she walked the boundary between sleep and waking, stitching dreams to roots so the old guardians would not drift away. “When the sky forgets,” she told the Circle, “let the ground remember for it.”

Fracture.
The Shattering did not only tear leylines; it tore sleep. Dreams warped, repeating like a bird calling to itself across a canyon. Galdrowen’s holy places flickered—morning moss at midnight, winter frost in summer shade. The Grove-Wyrms stirred, some with anger, some with fear, and Nuala felt their confusion thick as resin on her fingers. She became the Circle’s night-lantern, sharing what she could bear from the wyrms’ dreaming and shouldering the rest so the groves would not break under the weight.

Her counsel to Archdruid Fen Mossbark was spare and exact. “Tie the broken song to living things,” she said. “Roots can hold what stone cannot.” She sent wardens to plant seed-oaths in fissures and asked Thornspine packs to sing along the border quilts, not for menace but for measure—to re-teach rhythm where magic had gone erratic. When Duskfall’s Whispering Bloom pressed its tendrils into the weak places, Nuala resisted not with blades but with misdirection: a path that seemed shorter and looped, a fog that thickened around the wrong quarry, a memory gently misplaced. She never claimed victory over the Mire; she only insisted Galdrowen not lose itself in the fighting.

Some nights the dreams were cruel. Star-Serpents fell through her sleep like meteors, and Aetherwings blinked out mid-breath; she woke with frost in her hair and a taste of iron she had not brought. She carried those wounds with the quiet endurance of old trees in storm. Rootcaller Brannok said he saw her once, hands on a ley-stone, eyes full of lightning and grief, whispering, “Rest, old ones. I will keep the watch.”

Twilight.
After the worst fires burned elsewhere and Galdrowen drew in to preserve what could be preserved, Nuala’s role sharpened into prophecy. The Elderwood Guardian sought her before decisions that would close paths for a generation. She advised isolation when the Circle’s heart throbbed like a bruise and opening when that same heart threatened to calcify. To the border wardens she gave a new riddle: “Guard not only the living grove, but the groves that might be.” It was a hard instruction—one that asked Thornspines to pause mid-pursuit when the quarry’s path endangered seedlings rather than sins—but it kept Galdrowen from becoming a fortress that forgot it was a forest.

With Thalia Fernstep—restless, curious, frequently in trouble—Nuala was patient as shade. She walked with the young scout at the edges where Galdrowen met the wider world, pointing out the difference between a danger that teaches and a danger that devours. “Go,” she would say, palm brushing fern fronds back into place, “but tie a thread to home so you do not vanish into your own daring.” Thalia swore she sometimes felt a cool hand catch her by the collar when her curiosity outran her caution. Whether Nuala truly touched her, or the forest itself remembered the spirit’s kindness, no one troubled the question with proof.

Nuala’s visions in these dim years were less about catastrophe and more about continuity: tiny Grove-Wyrms turning under warm leaf-litter, Thornspine quilts humming in gentler keys, a circle of apprentices passing a bowl of clean water hand to hand before any debate—“so the mouth learns to bless before it argues.” She set few laws. She etched no manifestos. Yet her riddles shaped the choices that kept Galdrowen a place of healing rather than mere survival.

What she is not is equally important. Nuala is not a general. She does not choose targets or measure victories in ash-heaps. She is the one who walks the groves after the shouting, finding the saplings still unbroken and telling them the old stories so they will grow straight. She does not hate Duskfall. She hates forgetting—forgetting the river that feeds both forest and mire, forgetting that dragons and mortals share breath, forgetting that strength without tenderness becomes a storm that does not know when to pass.

So the Circle keeps a place for her at the council-tree: an empty stone, warm to the touch. When deliberations knot, someone will sit there, close their eyes, and ask a question small enough to hide under the tongue. Sometimes a riddle follows like mist over moss. Sometimes only a sense—a direction, a softening. Either way, decisions made afterward tend to hold.

Nuala of the Grove endures where she began: between breath and leaf, between long sleep and waking need. If the Grove-Wyrms dream of Galdrowen’s future, it is Nuala who listens first—and teaches the rest of us how to hear.