Grovewardens: the Wardens of the Green

The sacred grove. Elves as terror. The hunters of hunters.

Every elf in the world lives in the forest. They raise no empires and crown no kings. They keep one grove, the oldest and richest land beneath the sky, and to it the elves of a hundred scattered woods make their pilgrimage to take up the only duty their people acknowledge: to be wardens of the living world itself.

They live in Harmony with the green, and they are pitiless to anything that is not. This is the part outsiders get wrong. They imagine the Grovewardens as gentle. They are not gentle. They abhor the defiler, the polluter, the axe and the plow and the pasture, with a purity of hatred that no zealot of the Dominion has ever matched. When lumber-men enter the treeline, the Grovewardens do not warn them. When a settlement drains a marsh, the settlement is simply gone one spring, and the folktales that grow up around the empty houses last for centuries.

They are the phantom on the frontier: the killers who are not seen until they are finished, who take the land back tree by tree and hunter by hunter, who hunt the ones who came to hunt. Every people has a story to frighten its children with, and in almost all of them the shape at the edge of the firelight has the eyes of an elf. They are feared by all the factions of the world, and they have earned it, and they would tell you they earned it defending the only thing worth defending.

The one enemy they cannot break

All but one people fears them. There is a single enemy the terror does not touch, and it galls the Grovewardens to their root: the forge-folk of the Ironoath. You cannot ambush what comes up from beneath the roots in a wall of iron. You cannot frighten a people who count their dead in a ledger and simply keep digging. The Ironoath are all but unfazed by the elves. They meet the phantom of the woods with lantern and pick and unbothered patience, and worse, they win. Where every other trespasser is driven back into folktale, the deep-folk fell the ancient trees for pit-props, hollow the ground the roots stand in, and hold what they take. Slow, grinding, successful desecration, season after season, against the one people who were supposed to be undefeatable in their own woods. The Grovewardens hate no one on this earth the way they hate the Ironoath, because the Ironoath are proof that the wardens can lose.

Where they stand

• Uneasily neutral with: the Warclans, of all peoples. Two green faiths that do not quite war.
• Feared by: everyone, save one.
• Bitterest, most personal war: the Ironoath, who do not fear them and take their forests anyway.
• At war with: any hand that scars the living land, which is most hands.

See the Grovewardens in the wiki for their units, buildings, and leader.