Grennoch - The Korred

Role in Its Society

Grennoch belongs to no society and would be baffled by the suggestion that he ought to. He has never taken an order, never held a rank, and has outlasted every arrangement anyone has tried to make with him. What he keeps instead is a ledger, and the ledger is the whole of his civic life.

South of Cinderglade, where the hill-chains close in and the long-cooled lava flows lie under everything like buried floors, the Verdant Shroud grows in defiance of the rock it is standing on. Ash-fed soil pulses there with a life that has nothing to do with rain. Bioluminescent fungus lights the underbrush after dark. Ancient roots crack the blackened stone open and pull it apart a finger's width at a time. That is the miracle every traveller comes to see, and almost nobody asks the obvious question about it: something has to keep burning, or the green stops coming back.

Grennoch is what keeps burning. He crops his own mane, and his mane is not hair — it is living rootstock, ashbloom vine and pyrefern and firewillow withe grown out of his scalp in a mat down past his knees. He shears it, he burns the cuttings, he works the ash down into whatever ground he has decided is owed, and within a season that ground is no longer stone. He has been doing this for longer than any settlement in Emberfall has stood, and the Shroud has crept a considerable distance out over the flows in that time.

He does not do it as a favour. Grennoch charges. The toll is always the same and never negotiable in kind: hair. A braid, a lock, a hank of mane or tail, cut and handed over willingly. Drovers moving herds up out of the Shroud toward Cinderglade have learned this the way people learn about weather — the ones who have met him twice arrive with a plait of horsehair already cut, hand it across without conversation, and find the paths open. The ones who haven't find the paths closed, overnight, in ways that no amount of hacking will improve.

Appearance Description

He stands a shade over three and a half feet and is very nearly as broad, built like something quarried rather than born. His skin is the dull blue-black of cooled basalt, split all over with fine seams that hold a low red glow, the way a crust of lava still holds heat days after it stops moving — brightest across his knuckles, his shoulders, and the flat of his brow, dimmest when he is content.

The mane is the thing people remember. It starts at his hairline and does not stop: a heavy, matted fall of living green and grey growth, ashbloom vine coiling through it, pyrefern fronds curled tight along the sides, whip-thin firewillow withes hanging past his knees and trailing behind him when he walks. Where he has cropped it recently the ends are charred to black stubble, and new shoots are already pushing up through the burn. His beard is the same material, forked and knotted and tucked into his belt to keep it out of the way.

He goes barefoot, carries a smoke-stained burl of firewillow the size of a keg as a club, and moves with the unhurried, ground-gripping gait of something that has never once been knocked over. Glowing fungus leans toward him as he passes. He does not appear to notice, and he does not appear to be pretending not to notice.

Backstory

Grennoch's memory does not run in years, and he has no interest in being asked how long. What he remembers is ground: which slope he opened, which flow he first got a root into, which stretch of black stone took him three croppings and which took thirty. He tells the Shroud's history as a list of debts settled, and he can walk a stranger to any of them.

The bargain that made him what he is was not struck with anyone. It was simply the shape of the place he grew out of. In the Shroud, destruction and renewal are not opposites arranged end to end — they are one event seen from two sides. The ashbloom does not open until ash has settled on it. The pyrefern curls itself shut when flame comes near and uncurls afterward without a mark, and it grows fastest in the season that nearly killed it. Grennoch's whole disposition is downstream of that: he does not consider fire a disaster, a punishment, or a mercy. He considers it payment. Nothing in the Shroud gets to be green until something has been spent for it, and he is scrupulous about who spends.

This makes him a poor neighbour to anything that wants to simply be left alone, and an exceptionally good one to anything willing to trade. He has never lied. He has never broken a bargain. He has also never once volunteered a fact he was not paid for, and he treats the difference between those two habits as the most important thing about him.

Lately he has stopped working the eastern reach, where the Emberheart stands with its flaming red leaves and its slow-running sap. He does not go there now. He does not crop within sight of it. He will not say why, and he will not take payment to say why, which is the first time in living memory that Grennoch has refused a toll for anything. He has also kept back a bundle of shorn mane — cut, bound, unburned, carried on his belt — and any question about that bundle ends the conversation, politely, immediately, and for good.