Info about him and some headcanoning under the cut!
Derryth is... an odd one, as most Sylvari will quickly note when they meet him. His connection to the Dream is loose, but not in the way that Soundless or even Nightmare would have. He just... Seems distant, and any sense of empathy others get from him is foggy, static-y even, like the connection can’t quite get through.
Derryth was born shortly after Mordremoth’s defeat, when a gardener in the Grove found an odd tree beginning to grow among the rest of their plants. Without knowing exactly what it was, but curious, the gardener cultivated the tree with great care, only to come to a startling revelation as it grew--
The tree was forming a pod.
It looked just like the ones from the Pale Mother herself, except it housed only a single embryo instead of clusters of them. Unsure what to do, but unwilling to leave it to wither, the gardener continued to care for the tree and its pod, which eventually birthed a sapling sylvari--fully grown, just like the Pale Tree’s children, and resembling the gardener in an uncanny way, as if they were his parent.
Derryth’s birth and entire existence shook sylvari culture, and between much research and curious sylvari, it was realized that their kind had evolved to be able to create more of their own through a form of reproduction.
The pod-bearing trees were dubbed “Blooming Trees”, and were later discovered to be able to grow from not just solitary sylvari, but from unions between multiple sylvari, and even with non-sylvari partners.
While there have been quite a few more Blooming Tree saplings born since the concept was first discovered, Derryth being the first of his kind (and with a parent that wasn’t expecting to be a parent) left him feeling like an oddity among other sylvari. Despite this though, Derryth found himself quite at home among the ranks of the Menders, even if he takes a more literal and surgical approach to being a healer than others in the profession.
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((A good portion of this headcanon, which I’ll probably write up a bit more info about later, is inspired by @duskroots‘s own HC on sylvari reproduction! <3))
