Drycha

"Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason."

– Abraham Joshua Heschel

"Genocide is not just a murderous madness; it is, more deeply, a politics that promises a utopia beyond politics - one people, one land, one truth, the end of difference. Since genocide is a form of political utopia, it remains an enduring temptation in any multiethnic and multicultural society in crisis."

– Michael Ignatieff

Drycha, the Briarmaven of Woe, is an ancient and powerful nature and probably the most racist individual in Warhammer fantasy or Age of Sigmar.

Lore

Warhammer Fantasy

Long ago, Drycha held court amongst the roots of Addaivoch, the once-glorious creature known in later times as the Tree of Woe. While some believe that Drycha lost her mind when Morghur’s death tainted the ground of her glade, she was insular, capricious and malevolent for many long years before that.

In the early years of the alliance between the Elves and forest, Drycha was ever in evidence about the glades and groves, watching the Elves and examining their every action for any sign of betrayal. She rarely conversed with others, even the Dryads who served her as handmaidens, but instead chanted a mantra of the names of all those fellow spirits whom she believes have been failed by the Elves. It's unlikely her list would ever end because, despite her age, Drycha's memory was crystal-clear and new names were added with every battle between Athel Loren and the outside world.

As time went on, Drycha’s activities became more violent and worrying to the Wood Elves . On the fringe of the great Drakwald Forest in the Empire, peasants told stories of the trees that come alive, hungry for blood. On the edge of the Forest of Arden in Bretonnia, villagers gather only deadwood for their purposes, citing tales of other settlements found ruined and torn, the inhabitants left as scraps of tattered meat by the vengeance of the trees. To many, these events seem as senseless as they are apparently random, but if they are indeed the work of Drycha and her handmaidens, there must surely be a greater goal behind them than mere slaughter — though what that goal is remained to be seen. One of her last acts before disapprearing prior to the End Times was freeing Coeddil from the prison Ariel had bound him in.

In the End Times, things really went sideways. Drycha went to ground with Coeddil, he head full of schemes of vengeance against the Wood Elves.

Age of Sigmar

During either the End Times or the Age of Myth Alarielle had somehow recovered Drycha, her soul in something called a soulpod. While Alarielle made the Sylvaneth she refused to plant Drycha's soulpod. This was because Alarielle feared the damage that Drycha’s firebrand madness might do and the horrors she might wreak. The Everqueen worried also that Drycha’s was a necessary darkness, and that by keeping her imprisoned, the mother had somehow weakened her children.

At her lowest point during the Age of Chaos, Alarielle planted her barbed seed in the hateful chasm known as the Hamadrithil, desperate for someone to take the fight to Chaos. An ancient and malicious sentience dwelled in Hamadrithil that Alarielle hoped would make Drycha strong. The Everqueen got her wish and more. When she burst free from the rift, Drycha was no longer a mere Branchwraith. She was Drycha Hamadreth, a being encased in a body of twisted vines and gnarled thorn-root, the embodiment of the Hamadrithil’s malice given form. Her memory and sanity were fractured and she was torn between rage and depression, but Drycha was otherwise the same as she was before. Drycha’s bitter soul drew deadly spites to infest her form, flitterfuries that came to bask in the heat of Drycha’s rage while the squirmlings suckled at her sorrow.

Now Drycha seeks only the total dominion of the sylvaneth over the Mortal Realms and the death of everyone else. She will fight however and wherever she feels she must until that end is achieved; with other wargroves, by herself or even at the side of those flesh-and-blood beings she hates, providing that to do so furthers her genocidal aims. Drycha sings her own song, a discordant dirge of hatred for all those not of the sylvaneth. She drew the Outcasts to her in great number, along with other disaffected clans besides. Drycha’s first host was uncontrollable, a force of nature’s wrath that ripped through the allies of the sylvaneth as readily as their enemies. Unable to fully command her wayward daughter, but unwilling to destroy her, Alarielle was forced to name Drycha an Outcast herself. This seems only to have strengthened Drycha’s resolve, for she rules the other Outcasts as a twisted queen in the place of their estranged mother. Drycha herself remains an agent of anarchy and destruction, though she retains a grudging loyalty to her mother goddess and a hatred for non-Sylvaneth that keeps her on the side of Order.