Arbs
Arbs
Arbs were a semi-sapient race created by the Life Wardens through one of the only successful examples of cross-kingdom Bioweaving. The tree was the subject and the Elf the donor, imparting fragments of Elven—and ultimately Warden-derived—cognition, communication, and motility into a fundamentally plant organism. Their resulting intelligence was uniquely strange: recognizably descended from sapient minds, yet expressed through the profoundly different biology, senses, and timescale of a tree. Arbs were slow, contemplative, enormously long-lived creatures whose thoughts could seem nearly incomprehensible to other Heirs.
Unusually, their biology stabilized around the donor contribution, granting extraordinary plasticity across woody Tracheophyta. During youth, an Arb responded both to the trees present around it and to the ecological pressures upon the forest, becoming what the forest most needed from what it already had. If oaks were present and conditions favored more oaks, the young Arb became oak-like; elsewhere it might become pine-, maple-, spruce-, or aspen-like. It never truly became those species, but mimicked and expressed their characteristics while remaining unmistakably an Arb.
Arbs communicated through deep, resonant thrummings originally understood by Wardens and Elves. After the Vanishing, Wood Elves eventually became one of only two peoples capable of reliably understanding them. Their long isolation together profoundly shaped both peoples: Wood Elves became increasingly attuned to the rhythms and needs of the forest, while Arbs developed their strongest social relationships with the Elves who could still hear and answer them. Over generations, Arbs and Wood Elves helped shape one another into distinct peoples, becoming inseparable pillars of Naja's great forests. Pixies were created as tiny winged Fair-Folk capable of sharing this communication, allowing Pixie families to live alongside individual Arbs, keep them active and socially engaged, guide their migrations, and help direct them as dependable forest sentinels. Arbs without Pixie companions tended to grow increasingly dormant and wild, while the Pixies came to regard their Arbs as companions, protectors, and living homes. Aside from the unusual Virpaela edge case, Arbs remained the only successful cross-kingdom Bioweaving known to Riftmoor.
