Dryad

In folklore, a dryad is a tree nymph or tree spirit in Greek mythology. In reality, they are inherent beings of nature itself, originating inside the Wilderlands dimension within the Inner Light. Their minds, personalities, and spirits, are an amalgamation, usually, of mindless life energy. When bacteria, fungi, and other living things die, their souls or spirits, vibrate at the frequency of the Wilderlands. Sometimes, these mindless bits of energy full of instincts and sensations from life, merge, not unlike life forms in the Physical World evolving into something greater than the sum of its parts. At a certain point, these spirits coalesce into a mind, and a dryad forms.

There, in that timeless dimension where the spirits of animals and plants frolic and spend eternity, dryads learn to shepherd and tend to nature. Sometimes, like the souls of humanity reincarnating from the Inner Light back into the Physical World, like the case with Walter Riley and Clover Riley or Eliza Day and Justine Day, the dryads find their spirits pulled into the Physical World, usually in the form of a seed, where they grow a corporeal form. Inherently and instinctually guarding the lands which spawned them, these spirits do their best to combat the forces of the Outer Darkness from claiming the untamed lands of wilderness on the Earth.

Dryads are much rarer in today’s world, due to the cancerous consumption of humanity across the globe. They do not attack or kill humanity because they see them as children of nature as well. That does not mean they do not dislike or even loathe what humans do to the planet, but to fight anything besides the Outer Darkness, whose unnatural forces desire to taint the land’s very spirit, the Dryads must sit and watch as their precious homes are destroyed. They tend to correlate to their biomes, and as their lands are polluted and paved, the dryads shrivel and die, their bodies decaying and their spirits returning to the Wilderlands.