Overview
The Wyrdroot Kin are the treefolk of the underworld — not trees as surface folk know them, but beings of petrified bark, black sap, and fungal marrow. They are the remnants of the Old Forest, whose roots were driven downward during the great deluge. Those roots found strange nourishment in the caverns below, intertwining with crystal veins and mycelial networks, birthing new life both wise and grotesque.
The Wyrdroot do not speak as other creatures do. They creak, moan, and whisper through the wood, their voices travelling along the underground rootways. Some are guardians, others mad prophets, their minds splintered between wood and stone, fungus and thought.
Appearance
Their forms vary — some resemble massive humanoid trunks, their skin a blend of bark and lichen, their eyes glowing with trapped spores. Others are root-wraiths, hollow inside, with mushrooms sprouting from their ribs and moss dripping from their limbs. When they move, the caverns tremble with the sound of cracking wood and shifting earth.
Culture & Beliefs
The Kin believe themselves keepers of the Old Memory, fragments of the world before the flood. They revere decay as much as growth, claiming that “rot is but the shadow of life.”
They communicate through root networks that pulse faintly with light — fungal threads that carry dreams, warnings, and memories through the stone.
The Mykelings respect them as elder cousins, and some Cinderlings even revere the Kin as living conduits of elemental fire trapped in wood. Gnomes, however, fear their presence; they whisper that the Wyrdroot can hear every pickaxe strike against the earth and remember every scar carved into the stone.