The Uihonaii have an extraordinary bond with trees—their bloodline is literally tied to the forest. When they die, they become trees, and when the time is right, they are reborn from their wooden forms. These walking forests possess bark-like skin when in their tree form and can live for centuries, accumulating vast wisdom.
However, they can only take root and transform in special soil, requiring them to always return to their homeland. Weapons crafted from their sacred wood are incredibly powerful, often becoming sentient artifacts.
The making
Like every orc, the Uihonaii were made at Mount Kajiit. The wood came later, and it came all at once. A clan had settled in a single old forest when that forest's living Kethic, the green current running its deepest leyline, broke its banks and washed through them where they stood. It neither killed them nor passed on. It bound them into the wood: bark for skin, and a death that leaves no corpse. When an Uihonaii dies the body takes root and rises as a tree, and in its own slow time the grove may give the person back. The surge set this loop in the moment it struck and pinned it to the exact ground beneath them, so the rebirth takes only in that first sacred soil. An Uihonaii must come home to die, and each generation carries its dead deeper into the same grove rather than let the loop fail. Uihona and Krovaxi are venerated as patrons of the cycle, not its makers; the binding was old before the prayers, and the prayers came to name a thing the orcs were already doing.
Aspects
- Born from sacred groves
- Wisdom of centuries