Rootcaller Brannok

They call him Rootcaller because he answers when the earth cries. Brannok is a bear-kin of great height and quiet hands, a warden whose footsteps make moss spring back instead of bruise. His voice is low and steady, the sound of water under bark; when he lays a palm to the ground, roots listen.

Ascendance.
In the bright order of the early Verdant Circle, when patrol routes were new ink on bark-maps and the sacred heart of Thornhall Grove beat without fear, Brannok served as the keeper of approaches. He learned the old craft—how to hum a path awake so it shifts for friends and hardens for foes, how to braid living roots across a trail so that horse and boot slide sideways into soft fern rather than sacred soil. Archdruid Fen Mossbark trusted him with the innermost clearings, a charge Brannok carried like an oath in his bones.
He trained beside Thornspine packs without trying to master them, running hand in ridge so their pace and his breath matched. He read their temper the way other wardens read weather: a quill-bloom meant trouble near; a sleeked spine meant all was well. When Kara Windshade began her thorn-venom studies, Brannok was the first to volunteer for the tedious work of gathering cast quills safely and hanging them in resin quilts along the green line. “A border should warn before it wounds,” he said, setting the pattern that would become Galdrowen’s everyday miracle—living fences that hummed a note only welcome hearts could hear.
Visitors from Skyreach and Itharûn remember the big warden with the gentlest questions. He preferred accord to spectacle, escorting scholars to ley-stones and back with the easy patience of an oak. If he rarely spoke in council, it was because he saved his words for trees.

Fracture.
Then the Shattering tore the forest’s grammar, and paths forgot their own sentences. Brannok felt the break in his ribs before he heard it—ley-current shearing, roots recoiling from impossible angles, night and noon overlapping in a single clearing. Thornspine packs misread each other’s scent-marks and turned on kin; Duskfall’s vine-crests probed the warped borders; rifts opened like mouths.
Brannok did the work that does not make songs but saves them. He gathered feral broods with food, patience, and, when he had to, grief-hard mercy. He led warden circles into the worst of the breaks, singing sap-songs to coax roots back into woven strength. Where a fissure bled ashlight from Thar Zûl’s far dominion, he hammered his staff into the ground and called the ground to meet it. The trees answered. He is said to have stood there all through a red storm with Nuala of the Grove whispering visions beside him, until the fault knitted into a scar and the Thornspines settled like hounds at his feet.
In those years his creed hardened: hold the line, bring them home, and if home no longer holds—make a new ring of safety and call it heart. When the Whispering Bloom sent saboteurs under cover of fog, Brannok’s patrols changed rhythm. Wardens moved in fours and fives, quilting fresh quills every dusk, smudging their scent with cedar, listening for the wrong silence. He accepted the uglier tasks without ceremony: the long watch at a cracked ley-stone, the burial of a fallen warden whose name had been worn smooth by rain. “The forest will remember,” he would say, palm to earth. “Help it do so kindly.”

Twilight.
After the worst storms passed, Galdrowen drew inward, and Brannok became what young wardens thought a guardian was supposed to look like: broad as a door, patient as winter, difficult to move once set. He trained cadets in the border dance—run close to the drake, match breath, keep one hand in the ridge so the forest can feel the shape of you through the Thornspine’s bones. He taught them the ledger craft: count quills, count oaths, count kindness, and make sure the last column is longer than the first two combined.
His tenderness showed in who he chose to protect. Thalia Fernstep, quick-footed and too curious for the Circle’s new caution, found in Brannok a stubborn ally. He did not crush her questions; he showed her the cost of answers. “A door you open is a door you must guard,” he told her, lending her a dull quill to braid into her hair—a quiet vote of faith that she would choose the right doors.
While the Elderwood Guardian held the Circle’s center, Brannok kept the edges from fraying. He mended quilts after night raids, sat with wounded Thornspines until their breath stopped hitching, and tended the graves no one else visited. Some said he had become more tree than bear-kin—slow to anger, slower to forgive himself the lives he could not save. He never argued. He just kept walking the border at a pace others could match.

There are flashier heroes in Elarion—magi whose names throw light, riders whose shadows make stories. Brannok is the reason those stories have places to happen. He is the hinge between path and grove, the voice that calls roots to hold when the world shakes. If you ask him what he is proudest of, he will point to a healthy quilt wall and tell you the names of the wardens who learned to sing it straight. If you ask where he will be tomorrow, he will tap the map where the line looks thinnest and say, “There. Until it isn’t.”