Rootwalkers are slow guardian beings made of intertwined roots, standing stones, old bones, peat and living moss. No two share the same shape.
Appearance
A Rootwalker is a vast, hunched mound the size of a hill-barrow, walking on thick legs of twisted root that tear up earth and stones with every step. Its back is studded with tall, lichen-gray standing stones, like the ring of an old burial ground carried on its shoulders. Ferns, moss and small trees grow all over it. Pale bones show through the tangle, ribs and jaws caught among the roots, and its head is crowned with bleached antlers. Deep inside the roots of its face, two small amber eyes glow.
It is usually met in the misty upland valleys of the Greenfold and along the old Eilvaren borders, among ancient oaks, mossy boulders and scattered stones, where it is hard to tell which stones belong to a Rootwalker and which are only stones. The oldest known Rootwalker is said to rest beside the lake of Rootmere.
Behaviour
A sleeping Rootwalker can pass for a hill, a shrine or a fallen tree for decades. It wakes only when the place it guards is threatened. Fire can hurt it, but the surest way to destroy one is to break the oath or the landmark it is anchored to.
What the Greenfold says
Some Rootwalkers were grown deliberately over many generations by Eilvaren or Hearthkin hands. Others simply appear. Greenfold households say a Rootwalker is a place that has learned to stand up: where families have buried their dead, planted the same hedge and sworn the same promises at the same stone for long enough, the place slowly gathers itself, and one day it walks. Older Rootwalkers carry what they guard inside them, the bones of the buried families, the stones of their oath-circles, the roots of their trees.
That is why a child lost in the hills is told to sit by the nearest standing stone and wait, in case it is a Rootwalker that knows their family. It is also why some Rootwalkers have fallen still and become hills again, once the last family that remembered their promise moved away.
The small twig-bodied spirits called barklings are sometimes named the Rootwalkers' children. The restless draugr of the north are called their dark mirror: the dead who cannot rest because an oath was broken, where a Rootwalker rests on one that was kept.