You come over the wooded rise and the lake lies below, long and still in a fold of green upland, grey-blue under mist. Reeds stand along its edges. Old oaks lean out so far that their branches almost touch their own reflections. On the shore, lichen-grey stones stand in the wet grass, some upright, some leaning, some half sunk in turf, as though they stopped walking long ago and forgot to start again.
On the near bank rises a hill. It is the size of a barrow, hunched and green, thick with moss and fern, small trees growing from its back between tall standing stones. Long roots trail from it into the shallows. Look long enough and there may be something like bleached antlers among the branches at one end; very rarely, people say, something amber glimmers deep among the roots. Most days nothing moves but the mist. At the foot of one stone someone has left a bowl of bread.
The place
Rootmere is one of the few places in the Greenfold that maps show at all, and still no map says how far it lies from anywhere else. You reach it by introduction, not by signpost: old oaks, mossy boulders, streams running down into the lake. People come to keep old promises, to bury and remember, and sometimes just to sit by the water. Nobody expects the guardian to wake. Everyone knows that it will, if the place it guards is threatened.
What is told
Greenfold households say a Rootwalker is a place that has learned to stand up. Where generations bury their dead, plant the same hedge and swear the same promises at the same stone, the land slowly gathers itself, and one day it walks. Rootmere's guardian is the oldest anyone knows; no family remembers when it first stood, or whose promises first gathered it. A Rootwalker is undone most surely when the oath or landmark it is bound to is broken, and nobody knows which one holds this one. So keeping the old promises here is not only piety but practical care, and every surveyor's stake near the shore is a risk no one can measure.