You need to understand one thing, to fully understand Gridania. It is not the idea of the elementals or the concept of Woodwrath. It’s not the hesitance around foreigners coming into the forest, or the limits to where you can or should go within its borders. No, the most important part of figuring how this city-state and its forest dwellers seem to live in the simplest place, but remain so complicated to outsiders, is in fact taking the time to understand the value of slow, careful, considered growth.
Every move anyone makes in Gridanian, in the Shroud in general really, is based around the concept of planting a small investment, and slowly watching it unfurl and reach higher. To slowly nurture now, for the express reason of reaping the benefits later is how it all came to be, really. The city itself, grown from the smallest seeds of hope, to the sprawling metropolis that is carefully entwined with the forest. The people, literally sprouting from the ground itself and twirling and blossoming under the nurturing touch of the Elementals and spirits. To understand the soul of the Gridanian people, you have to believe in the value of planting this sun, and having the patience before you sow no matter the time it took for it to form. Or, at least, to Charlette this was the fundamental truth to being one of the Shroudborn. This sun, she was practicing nothing less than the uttermost patience, as she lined a crop of her own.
Patience is something Charlette had in abundance, it was something sewn into her character a long time ago. By her parents, her teachers, the culture that she grew-up in. The trick to it, she found, was to revel more in the pleasure of working on a task, or setting one in motion towards its finalization. Not solely the rewards that may result from such effort. She reminded herself of that, as her hands dug deep into the soil of the orchard fields, and placed another seed deep within it. She covered it over like a mother pulling a blanket over her child, mixing in a fertilizer Bobocufu had them produce especially, from specific material, all native to the Shroud itself. The orchard was a testimony to this ideal of the Gridanian people, stretching on for yalms in every direction. Each tree had taken at the least fifteen twelvemoons to grow to maturity. Each row of trees emanating out from the central farmhouse had been planted by a new generation of the same family, owning the land and constantly tending to it, growing each one lovingly. Charlette may never get to see what she planted this sun grow to more than a tall sprout, a notion that may have halted many in the efforts she currently exerted on the task. But not if you were a Gridanian. A true child of the forest.
For how else did a Gridanian build a better future, a better home for the next generation, than by laying down the foundations for the very thing that protected, fed and sheltered them all? What was that saying? “Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they shall never sit in.” If there were a people that this truly spoke to, it was them. And in Charlette’s heart sat the soul of a Gridanian. A duskwight who believed in the forest home and all it promised.
If you could understand this, really take that lesson to heart, then you could understand anything about her. Which is why it confused her so deeply now, just how much the Order itself had proven in its recent activities that this law of their apparent people, does not occur to them.
