Druid

The druids, chimerae, wod-wid, woodwise, or greenseers of the Mountains of Reality are little known, and much-feared beyond that land.
For those who visit in winter will know the eerie thrumming of drums echoing from valley to valley, floating over the snow in the night. Some may have seen one, barefoot, bearing knives of stone or clubs of wood, wearing the simplest of robes and a string of amber beads.
What all know is that they are illiterate, refusing to either read or write, that they 'advise' the Gloom Queens, that they are doctors, ambassadors, ritualists, and magicians, that they have prodigious memories, that they love nature, and strangest of all, is that many, or most, are no longer entirely human at all.
Dark rumors say that, though they are defenders of the land, they have little love for humanity. Grimmer rumors speak of murderous rivalries between or within their circles or ‘travails’, and of human abduction and sacrifice for unknowable goals.
What god, or force, or agent they worship, if they are even truly 'religious' in any real sense, seems to change shape and name according to the place and time. The Helix, The Wheel, The Web, The Grootwamme, The Umbor, The Great Incubator, The Mother, or The Green Moon, it could be any or all of these.

CHIMERAE
At some point in their development and education, every druid must take what is called The Step of No Return; they must become something new, something other than human.
When this happens, or what they become, can differ a great deal from travail to travail, and from druid to druid. Some take the step almost immediately, others not until old age, and a few never take it, becoming what is derisively referred to as 'skelseers' by other Druids; the unchanged.
No matter how much power they have, what they have learned, or what they have achieved, until they take the Step of No Return, no druid will ever wield meaningful influence amongst their own kind.
What they become afterward can vary wildly. Some are symbiotes with intelligent fungi, some are part plant with green blood and leaves for hair, able to drink sunlight and root themselves in the earth. Some become hive druids, able to become insect swarms at will. Others have transferred their soul, or mind, to an immortal animal of some kind, that may live long after their body dies. Some are animal/human hybrids, able to warp spasm into other forms, or eternally trapped between them. Some are flocks of birds and can no longer sleep in human form. Some are living infections, ageless, immortal, passing from host to host.

TOOLS AND S
The druids believe that the Umbor cannot be worshipped or served with anything made by mortal hands. Thusly, they are obsessed with finding and using natural tools and weapons with minimal, or no working or manipulation used in their creation.
Their weapons are stone and wood, they perform surgery with their hands, they write nothing down, and memorize their entire culture and philosophy. Their currency amongst themselves is in amber gems, one of the few forms of outward status they are allowed to wear. It is whispered that the bugs frozen in such gems are their spies, daemons, and assassins.

ORAL CULTURE OBESSIVES
"It is curious that a people so changeable in form possess such remarkable continuity of knowledge" - Vosil Fail, excommunicated Sophont of Yga.
The druids may be one of the few groups to have a direct line of knowledge dating, not just from before the Fall, but from the age of Uud at the height of its power.
However, it’s in code. In fact, it’s encoded in multiple overlapping levels; metaphorical, cryptologic, phonetic, tonal, rhythmic, mathematical, and conceptual, and they have but few of the keys to 'read' it.
Reading they would never do of course, because all the knowledge of their culture is based in practice and oral transmission. The druidic story-cycles can take a decade to learn, it’s said, and a lifetime to understand.


Even this is untrue. They take several lifetimes to understand, and many of the oldest and strangest druids are deeply engaged in this process and are actively guarding their methods and understanding from the few of their peers that approach their power level.
It is the information encoded in these sagas that gives the greenseers their magical abilities.
Druidical magic is actually made up of individual pockets of precise bioscience linked together and activated by a magical superstructure. In terms of pure thaumatological power, it’s pretty light, only bending reality enough to gain access to and to utilize its techniques of forgotten super science.
In comparison to the work of sorcerers who gain control over reality by poking holes in it and trying to control what comes through, and wizards, who mold spacetime carefully like wet clay, druidic 'magic' is quite mild, it leaves little magical trace and damages the Real only slightly. Nevertheless, it can be suppressed and disordered by the same things that affect most magic.
If they were to ever fully decode their inherited knowledge, all the understanding of the Green Moon, the Umbor, the Grootwamme, or whatever it is, will be theirs to use as they wish. Whether this would be a good thing is less certain.
In comparison to recalling and endlessly trying to comprehend this massively encoded and highly complex culture-thread, the mere act of remembering the entirety of the law system of the Gloom Queens, and all the relevant information from the Mountains of Reality and Blackwater as a whole, is a not-particularly-taxing side job.

JUDGES
There are two prime laws for the human subjects of the Mountains of Reality, the Courts Vital and the Courts Objective.
The nature of the Courts Objective is intelligible to any visitor, ultimate power to decide any case resides with the Beodomor, the Queen-of-Queens, if you can wake her up, who rests in Morningspain. From here, power flows to each of the subsidiary Queens, Queens-Ordinary, and from them to their knights, each of whom is responsible for a particular part of their kingdom, and who may appoint a seneschal with their temporary authority.
All of this is as expected for a feudal government, considered a backward and regressive form of organization in most of the Grey Cities.
But the Courts Objective only cover legal issues to do with objects, abstracts, distant things, or non-living things.
Anything to do with living bodies, growing things, life, or more generally, processes instead of states, comes under the authority of the Courts Vital - the druids, who are broken down into a complex series of 'circles' or 'travails', each of which has shifting areas of authority.
Theft is a Queen thing.
Poaching is a druidic matter.
Murder is a matter for both knights and druids. Technically, for a direct servant of the Queen, murder counts as 'misuse of sword', or whatever the weapon used was. Legally, if you strangle someone with your bare hands before a knight, they cannot arrest you, but most will try to detain you by force and then drag you before the local druid who will usually make the detention legal by making the arrest and confirm the crime, often after speaking to the microfauna in the body in question.
Pairings of knight and druid are common in investigations in the Queendoms, their abilities compliment each other neatly and each can pursue one aspect of the crime, depending on what evidence presents itself.
Appeals in the case of the Courts Objective ultimately go to the Beodomor, and can be made in writing, with reference to the law which itself is written down.
Appeals to the druids must go through a series of travails, ending finally at the last travail, the High Circle of the Druids. The Supreme Court of the Courts Vital is actually a trial-by-combat with high-level druids. Incidentally, constitutional change can only come about through a fight to the death.

ADVISORS
Each gloom queen has a druidic judge, magician, doctor, and advisor, who acts as the head of the Court Vital in that Queendom and who either rules, or reports to, the local travail.
The incredible memory, scrying abilities, strange vital magics, and generally sound wisdom of the Greenseer makes them an invaluable help to the Queen. They organize agriculture and the use of natural resources, help arrange marriages, perform medical treatments, and essentially place themselves at the disposal of the Queen.
They also control the means of rapid communications between the separated valleys and Queendoms. In summer and spring, singing birds wing their way from valley to valley, singing their songs into the ears of the local druid before passing on. Only the druids can decode the meaning of these songs. In autumn and winter when the environment becomes difficult indeed for smaller birds, the druids engage in massively sustained low-frequency drumming episodes, often banging on huge rotten logs for hours or days at a time. The deep unearthly thrumming flows through valleys and over hills for many miles. As with the birdsong, only the druids know the deep meanings of these rhythms.
The druids have also placed themselves in charge of many of the smaller bridges in the Mountains of Reality. This crevasse and river-cut land has many valleys and settlements accessible only by bridge or cut off during winters or floods. The bridges reaching these places are made of natural materials, wood and grass rope, they are easy to repair. And they need repairing a great deal since they break down continually.
Agriculture in the Queendoms is self-sustaining, well-run, and has a minimal impact on the environment. It is also ruinously inefficient and keeps the majority of peasants at the edge of starvation, rarely providing any kind of tradeable surplus.
All of this is entirely intentional. The druids are one of the primary forces for conservatism in the mountains, keeping technology, other magics, and cultural change to a minimum. They have their own interests in the mountains and the environment, and humanity makes up only a small part of them.

DOCTORS
In the mountains, the druids are usually the only reliable and readily available medical help. This is another strong reason to stay on their good side and to grow both crops and children the way they tell you to. Should you rotate your crops in the wrong manner, of let your pigs dig up the wrong truffles in the wrong season, you may find yourself banned from medical care.
Medical issues are one of the reasons that druids are, occasionally, invited into the Grey Cities, since their strange abilities can sometimes address complex medical problems which even Grey City sophonts are unable to comprehend.
The cures of the druids though can often leave the patient. . . changed. Either in personality, or form, or both. They can heal cancers, but insist on keeping the ones so removed, and taking them away to do. . . something, with them.

DRUIDS BEYOND BLACKWATER
The reputation of druids in the Grey Cities could hardly be worse. Not only are they strange wizards, but they are strange foreign wizards who hang out in forests and bogs. They lair in the Zomia, the unpopulated and desolate areas, thick forest, moorland, mountains, and swamp where crops will not grow, and guards will not patrol.
Many of the Greenseers in the Grey Cities are ones kicked out of the Queendoms, often for good reason. They may be genuinely murderous and deranged, bent on human sacrifice, or following a sociopathic personal interpretation of the Sagas. Or they might be reasonable people fleeing a corrupt travail or bad doctrine, escaped radicals, someone with too much sympathy with mankind or too little respect for tradition.
High-status druids are sometimes summoned to particular cities for diplomatic or medical reasons, these can operate under 'diplomatic immunity' as representatives for their Queens, theoretically under the protection of the Beodomor.
Others might be simple aspirants or learning Druids who have been sent out amongst the cities on one of the strange quests of the Woodwise.

YOUR QUEST
It is customary, at some point during their training, for a druid’s teacher to give them a quest both subtle, but also almost incoherent.
This might be to "Learn the dark face of the Green Moon", “Discover what is All", “Seek out the Dream of the World" or some other riddle or koan.
The aspirant is then essentially booted out and told strongly to not come back until they have learned the meaning of the lesson.
These 'quests' serve many purposes; they get the aspirant out of the way, make sure they get some life experience, they give the person in question a chance to run for it and back out of the final step if they are scared of it, they might get the aspirant killed, but if this happens they probably weren't worth the trouble anyway), they act as a kind of Rumspringa, and there is always the slight chance that they might actually find the real answer to the lesson.
They are also a reasonable way of removing particular druids if they disagree too much with their travail, are truculent, improvise too much, are scared of the Great Change, seriously screwed something up or accidentally won an important court case they were expected to lose, thereby throwing local politics into confusion.
If you did not run, it is highly likely you were sent.