Dryad

He grew into a powerful and cunning being, the union of the heavens and the earth, with a great power over nature that he inherited from his father, and he had many children.

His daughters were the fae Dryads, and his sons were the wise keepers of the grove, Remulos and Ordinus and Zaetar.

He claimed kinship with the night elves, too, though he never said in what way.

The centaur, as it would turn out, were his grandchildren.

They speak low common and common, and some of them learn the languages of their enemies, goblin and orcish, and the tauren's own taur-ae.

A few centaur even speak taur-ae as their first tongue.

Because they are descended from Zaatar, son of Cenarius, they share their ancestry with the other children of the forest demigod, and they have been called the Cursed Cousins of the Dryads.

An artifact called the Cloven Hoof is said to date from the very time of their creation.

Burn it all, and we cut off their smithing fuel for a generation.

And how many Dryads die screaming in a blaze? How many generations of memory do you erase just to save a week of supply line pressure? If the Dryads are still there, they're already lost.

You of all people should know what corruption feels like.

You smell it in your bones.

New companion unlocked.

I'm gonna laugh really hard if at the other end we get a Dryad-Eel combo.

Alrighty.

Your will versus its will.

And she says, do you know what that is? No, I have no clue what that is.

So then she starts telling me the story of Dryads, how they're all women, how they only appear to human males when it's time for them to procreate because they need a human male to procreate and i'm like wait did you just tell me that i have a dryad child in colorado and she said well it'd be a daughter because all the dryads are females they don't produce males and she went into the Here's the part that gets me probably once a year.

I will dream of that woman that I saw again.

And she has a child with her.

basically yeah a turnover of almost every evidence we have around the situation the

locations that were pointed out to us by the Dryad as well that would be the main one you know

okay

anything significant from the notes blah blah blah blah blah

I really, I like that they included Grover's mum.

Again, I was like, the Dryads are described as, like, super playful and fun and energetic, and here she is being tree.

I was like, okay.

It's cool.

Now I ask for your help.

I must finish my incantations to allow Dryads from beyond the Vale to enter this place and lend us their aid.

Please do not allow them to interrupt my spell.

The demons came, as they always did.

This recording is in the public domain.

Dryads by Siegfried Sassoon, read for LibriVox.org.

When meadows are gray with the morn, In the dusk of the woods it is night: The oak and the beech and the pine War with the glimmer of light.

Dryads, brown as the leaf, Move in the gloom of the glade.

When meadows are gray with the morn, Dim night in the wood has delayed.

The cocks that crow to the land Are faint and hollow and shrill: Dryads, brown as the leaf, Whisper and hide and are still.

1910.

End of poem.

...

Dryad.

All right.

Um-

No, you're good.

You're good.

All right, it is the Dryad's turn.

Just don't mind me as I frantically try to get to...