Reedweavers

The Reedweavers are the wetland dwellers who have embraced what some settlements fear most—symbiosis with the Verdancy. Where Saltfolk build walls of salt and Vaultmen walls of concrete against the Green Tide, the Reedweavers have learned to dance with it, cultivating beneficial plant partnerships in the vast marshes and bogs between former cities. They are a culture born of adaptation, patience, and the delicate art of distinguishing friend from foe in a world where every vine might mean salvation or destruction.

They live in elevated settlements woven from living reeds and salvaged materials, their homes rising from misty waterways on stilts of cultivated bamboo and reclaimed metal. Their skin carries the perpetual dampness of their environment—pale and often tinted faintly green from constant exposure to beneficial plant compounds, hands stained with the rich earth of their floating gardens. They move through their watery domain with the fluid grace of those born to wetlands, equally at home poling reed boats through narrow channels or wading knee-deep through marsh grass that parts before them like a living curtain.

The Reedweavers have mastered the art of botanical diplomacy, reading the chemical signals that plants use to communicate and responding with carefully cultivated pheromone gardens that speak the Verdancy's own language. They tend vast networks of symbiotic species—the Bloomfrogs that serve as mobile ecosystems, the filtering rushes that clean their water and the Kelp Keepers. Their children grow up learning to distinguish between the gentle green that heals and the hungry green that devours, developing an almost supernatural sensitivity to the intentions of plant life.

Unlike the militant resistance of other survivor communities, the Reedweavers are humanity's attempt at negotiated peace with the new world, and living proof that evolution may not always mean conquest, but the possibility of partnership.