Virellia Rootwhisper

They call her Rootwhisper because she answers plants the way others answer friends. When the wind threads Thornhall Grove and every leaf turns to hear, it is often Virellia they are waiting for—a sylvan spirit whose voice is half-breath, half-birds-at-dawn. In a time when Galdrowen is relearning how to heal and how to speak to a world that once wounded it, she has become the forest’s translator.

Echoes.
The forest is mending, but mending makes noise: sap surging like rivers under bark, quakes where old wounds knit, young dragons cracking eggs with hearts too loud for sleep. Virellia walks this music as if on stepping-stones. She moves with a listener’s posture—head slightly tilted, fingers brushing moss to “read” the current beneath the green. Where others see chaos, she hears arrangement. She says the leylines sing in chords now, not single notes; that the choir of the world is warming up for a song it has not dared in a long while.

Her work is patient and particular. Apprentices see only the moments when she lays two palms on a ley-stone and releases its tremor into a steady hum. They do not see the nights spent building “listening posts”—little rings of seedstone and bark ribboned with lichen thread—each tuned to catch a different tone of magic. By morning she has a dozen measures of melody and one firm conclusion: where the song steadies, the forest can open; where it warbles, the forest must breathe slowly.

Elarin Wildbloom trusts that ear. He is a leader who looks outward, hopeful for paths between groves and distant friends, and Virellia is his spiritual confidante—the one who says, “Open the gate at noon, not dawn; the leys are calmest then,” or “Send word to Skyreach today; their stars and our roots are briefly in accord.” She calls him brave when he listens, kinder when he hesitates, and unflinchingly reminds him that haste is only courage with its ears closed. He smiles at that and waits for her to nod before he speaks for the Circle.

With Tharavos Mossfang, the conversation is different. He is old caution with claws; she is old patience with hands. They meet under the council-tree at the quiet hour before fog lifts. Tharavos recounts the threats he sees clawed into bark, the shadow-scent along the southern border; Virellia answers with a map of songs—the humming quilts of Thornspine quills, the sigh of Grove-Wyrm dreams, the bright, staccato heartbeats of the Verdant Embers. “Fear is a note,” she tells him, “but it cannot be the key.” He grumbles, then adjusts the patrol routes by a handspan because she is, infuriatingly, right more often than not.

She tends dragons the way she tends saplings: with attention to what they already want to be. The Grove-Wyrms come to her in sleep, tree-shapes vast as thunderclouds, asking for stories about the earliest rains. She tells them what the roots remember and wakes with resin tears glazing her lashes. The Thornspines present themselves like proud hounds, quills sleek, waiting to be told they’ve done enough for today; she loosens a strap here, oils a scale-bed there, and sends them to run the border where the quilts hum too loudly. The Verdant Embers—strange, small, fire-touched—are her particular joy. She teaches them to warm resin for faster quilts and to dim their flames when they pass newborn ferns. “Heat can be a promise,” she says, “not just a warning.”

She is not naive about the swamp. Where Duskfall sends its unseen hands, Virellia replies with clarity rather than fury. Memory Drakes drift near the edges of her listening posts, crystals chiming with stolen recollection. She hums back at them in a key that means no, not yours, and the echoes dull. When Duskwyrm shadowbreath curls through the cedars, she plants seedstones that turn the fog’s path into a gentler arc. “They seek silence,” she explains to her apprentices, “so we will speak quietly until there is room for truer conversation—or for one clean refusal.”

Much of her counsel happens in small, unglamorous acts. She carries bark-ink and writes on leaves, then tucks those leaves into the hems of warden cloaks: a reminder to rest, a simple route that avoids a sleeping spirit, three words—“wait for birdsong”—that save a scout from stepping on a newborn mushroom ring that could have soured a whole glade’s mood for a season. She is famous for the most modest of tools: a coil of vine, a clay vial of dew, a pocket of lichen dust that makes hidden fractures glow faintly blue.

Ask her what she wants, and her answer is almost always, “Balance that holds.” Not a return to a past that hurt, not a hasty future that burns—something like a conversation with a friend you feared you’d lost, then found again, changed and still precious. She dreams of a corridor of trust from Thornhall Grove to the borders of every neighbor who will meet them halfway, of quilts that hum low and sweet because no one is pushing, of a Circle whose power is measured not by how tightly it grips but by how widely it embraces.

At dusk, when the birds change shifts and the light leans gold, Virellia often climbs the council-tree’s lowest living branch and sits with her back against the warm bark. She inhales resin and leaf-breath, sets two fingers to the wood, and listens. The apprentices think she’s waiting for visions. She is, in truth, counting. One long tone for patience. One high thread for courage. A grounding beat for mercy. When the three align, she smiles, steps down onto the moss, and carries that chord into whatever decision faces Galdrowen next.