dougmander said:
Urden of Ten Thousand Rings
I came up with this before I saw your post, but the two interpretations are very different and not necessarily incompatible, so they could potentially co-exist. If it's not too late
Gnarlytoes, the oldest and wisest elder treant, lives high in an almost impassable mountain range, where he can survey the entire primeval forest below him. Scrabbling to survive on the very threshold of the tree line, torn and twisted by the winds scraping across the raw rock faces, he is barely the size of a normal treant, but hunched and bent and twisted, like the trees of Krummholz formation. He has not moved for ten thousand years, and most have forgotten his existence, as he watches the screaming winds for omens, and listens to the sheeting rain for prophecies. A seer, his concerns are millennial not momentary. He arrives, born by a roc, one of the few creatures able to survive the gusts of winds at that altitude. Once present, he roots in and appears almost immovable. His hissy, squeaky voice sounds sharp and furious, but that is actually an artifact of his deformed mouth. He will watch entire species die and vast swaths of land go to waste before he stirs, and does not care in the slightest about life unable to fend for itself; but if something threatens an ecology, a continent, or the world, he acts both suddenly and completely.
