Drycha Hamadreth is old in a way that frightens even Treelords. Her lamentiri carry memories from a world that no longer exists, and what those memories taught her is simple: mortals betray forests. Always. Chaos merely does it faster. Cast out by the glades for a rage that refused to choose targets, she became regent of the Outcasts — the severed spirits whose discord matches her own — and made the deep hollows of the realms her bitter court.
Her hollowed body is a hive. Swarms of flitterfuries and squirmlings nest within her trunk and pour forth at her shriek, stripping flesh the way autumn strips leaves. Her moods swing between poles with the violence of a storm front — cackling, vicious frenzy and cold, methodical malice — and those who fight near her learn to read the swarm-sound the way sailors read the sky.
Alarielle woke Drycha to war knowing exactly what she was: a weapon that cannot be aimed, only released. Drycha fights for the Everqueen because their enemies overlap, not because her exile is forgiven, and every mortal ally of the glades feels her regard like a splinter working inward. The sylvaneth keep her the way a forest keeps a wildfire — never gladly, and never entirely.
Heroes & legends
More Sylvaneth
Alarielle the EverqueenThe EverqueenThe goddess of life herself — mother of the sylvaneth, mistress of the spirit-song, a deity whose moods are seasons and whose grief once nearly ended a realm.
BelthanosFirst Thorn of KurnothThe foremost of Kurnoth's hunters, a stag-borne revenant who leads the wild hunt against the despoilers of the forest.
DurthuLast of the Elder TreelordsThe eldest and most wrathful of Treelord Ancients, who remembers the World-That-Was and hates all who wield axe and flame.
The Lady of VinesThe Everqueen's ShieldAlarielle's truest servant, grown from the goddess's own essence — the handmaiden who carried a dying deity to safe soil, and who returned from death bearing a share of the divine.