The Ythari live alone, one elf to one tree, and they do not outlast it. Each Ythari is quickened from a seed of the tree that will hold them, and the two come into the world as a single life wearing two shapes. The elf walks. The tree does not. Past that, the difference between them is thinner than it looks.
The making
The other elves were shaped from matter that had stopped growing: cut wood, quarried stone, river-mud lifted off the bank. The Ythari were made the one way that keeps growing. An elder druid set a measure of life not into worked material but into a living tree-seed, and let the two come up together, so that the elf and the tree share one making rather than the elf being built and the tree being found. The spirit went into the heartwood at that first working and has gone there ever since, in every Ythari quickened from a seed of its own tree. Nothing about this softened or shifted across the ages; it was fixed in the first making and breeds true with each new pairing. It is the oldest of the elven craftings still worked, and the only one that plants itself.
A Ythari's skin and hair carry the color of their tree's canopy, and turn as it turns: green through the growing months, rust and ocher when the leaves go, bare grey in winter. One bonded to an evergreen stays dark the year round. One whose tree has taken a blight greys early and in patches, in the same places the tree is failing. The health of the tree can be read on the elf by anyone who knows what they are looking at, long before the tree itself is found.
The bond is not sentiment. A Ythari's spirit, the strand that in every other living thing departs for Celestia at death and lasts as long as its name is remembered, does not sit in the body. It is lodged in the heartwood. The body is on loan from the tree and returns to it. When the tree dies of age, the elf dies in the same season, and the spirit makes the ordinary crossing, carried by the named-tree rites the elves have kept since the Walk. When the tree is felled, or burned, or split to the root by lightning, there is no crossing. The strand is severed with the trunk and ends where it stood. A Ythari killed that way is not grieved into Celestia. They are gone, the way a song is gone when the last person who learned it dies.
This is why there are no Ythari towns and never have been. A Ythari cannot go far from their tree. Within sight of it they are well; a day's walk out they sicken, like a cutting kept too long from soil; a season away kills them as surely as an axe. Two Ythari can be neighbors only if their trees are, and the old trees that suit the bond do not grow in convenient rows. So the Ythari are spread the way old trees are spread, each keeping one patch of ground, meeting others seldom and briefly, knowing them mostly through the Long-Song that passes between them across the distance.
A threatened tree makes a Ythari dangerous in a way that owes nothing to temperament. An axe-stroke to the trunk opens on the elf's own body. Fire at the roots is felt as fire. A Ythari whose tree is in danger does not retreat, cannot be bargained with, and has nothing left to lose that they have not already lost: their death and their unmaking are the same stroke, and they know it. Woodcutters who have put a blade to Ythari ground tell it the same way every time. The wood was empty. Then it was not. Then someone was bleeding who had not been standing there a breath before.
Most of the surviving Ythari are found in Iyaklomori Grera, the trackless forest of Illron, where the fae tolerate them for the plainest of reasons: a people who would die before a tree of theirs was cut keep the forest's law more faithfully than any treaty could compel. They were never a numerous folk. A people who cannot gather cannot become a nation.
Aspects
- One tree, one life, one death
- Solitary; builds nothing, takes nothing