The Druids are the eldest living people of Alaria, and there are almost none of them left. They came into the world with the Ezz flood, the same surge of Melera's escaped music that woke Gaea and drove the titans into the madness that killed them. Where Gaea answered that flood with Kethic and a world of grown flesh, the Druids answered it with Faesong — the ambient music itself, worked rather than sung. They are not Gaea's children, and they are not her kin. They arrived beside her and kept their own road, a nature-race that shapes where she bred.
A Druid does not age toward death. Left alone it would simply continue, and a few have continued since the Gaeaic Eon began twelve million years ago, which makes them the longest unbroken memory in the world below the titans. They can still be killed. Across those millions of years a great many of them were, by dragons, by the Shattering, by the slow attrition of a world that kept producing things willing to try, and nothing replaced the ones who fell, because Druids are not born. The number has only ever moved one way. What was once a people is now a scattering of individuals who can pass a human lifetime without meeting another of their kind.
Everything about them unsettles. A Druid is hard to look at and harder to look away from, and those who hold the gaze too long describe their own purposes going slack in their hands, the wanting quietly lifted out of them. It is not a glamour worked on purpose. It is what standing near that much accumulated life does to a shorter mind. They keep away from settlements for the same reason, and they keep company instead with the pain walkers, the tall bark-skinned guardians that flood the air around them with a deepening ache. A Druid feels none of it. Druids cannot feel pain at all, which is the whole reason a creature that radiates it can stand at one's shoulder and harm everything but the thing it guards.
What they made
The Druids were thinning while the dragons still ruled, and they could count. Before the last of them was gone they resolved to leave successors, and the work cost them in a coin only they could spend. Around two and a half million years ago, in the span the elves call the Walk of Elves, the Druids shaped a people out of branch-wood, riverbed stone, and river-mud, and into each shaping they poured a measure of their own life. They made the new people in their image — the long ears, the slender build, the long sight, the patience with growing things — and then watched the elves do the one thing their makers could not. Elves multiplied. They filled the world. Their makers did not.
That making is why elves stand apart from every flesh-born people. Wood and stone and river-mud do not mix with Gaea's flesh, so there are no half-elves and never have been, whatever a hopeful story claims. It is also why the Druids understand precisely what they spent. The life that went into the elves did not come back. Each Walk-shaping thinned the makers a little further, in the same motion by which Gaea poured herself out through Kethic across the Gaeaic Eon until she was only a song in the ground, diffused into her own creatures, present everywhere and answering nowhere. The Druids watched that happen to a titan-scaled mother. They know it is the road they are walking.
Two of them have stepped off it. In the Shattering, when the Gray Prince came back and killed nearly every daemon by killing the people who prayed, two Druids who had ascended to godhood in deep antiquity refused the rite that would have bought them a stolen mortal life. Instead they rooted what they were into something the elves would keep alive for its own sake: Aelwennar into the Long-Song the elves recite to stay themselves, Eluvarin Aelweir into the First Grove and the laying of the elven dead beneath it. They stayed daemons, dormant in a form. The Druids who remain pray to them, their own ascended dead, and call them the founding ancestors, which is exactly what they are.
Whether to make again
The last Druids do not agree on the only decision still theirs to make.
One side holds that a people who refuse to renew themselves are already finished, and that the makers owe the world at least one more making before the craft dies with them. There are wood and stone and rivers yet. There is, in each survivor, a measure of life left to give. To withhold it, to sit on the remnant and persist as a sterile museum of what they were, is on this reading the single real betrayal of what a Druid is for.
The other side has run the same arithmetic Gaea's fate already finished, and reached the opposite end of it. Every making is a withdrawal that never refills. Gaea spent herself into her children and went silent; the Walk spent the Druids into the elves and left the handful that remain. To make again is not generosity but a slow and dignified suicide, one that would leave the world richer by some elves and poorer by every Druid in it. And the elves, for all their cities, cannot remember the Gaeaic Eon, cannot work Faesong as their makers do, and cannot make in turn. When the last Druid spends the last of itself, a kind of knowing ends that nothing in Alaria can build back.
Neither side has moved, because either move is irreversible and the makers have, if nothing else, time. What sharpens the question is that the elves the Druids already made have begun to produce things their makers cannot abide. Chief among them is the Gray Order, a cult of Amverela who worship the very titan whose Shattering nearly ended the Druids and did end most of the gods, and who have spent the age since hunting his resting place so they can wake him and let him finish. The Druids remember that catastrophe in a way no elf can, through the two ancestors who came out the far side of it by the narrowest margin. They know what a second one would unmake: not the humans the Gray Order despises, but everything — the elves, the Long-Song, the First Grove, all of it. That the danger walks in the shape of their own work is the particular cruelty of it. The makers are far too few to break the search by force. For now they are only the oldest voice in the world telling the elves what their cousins are truly praying toward.