Wojna resembles a dead tree that has forced itself into the shape of an old woman. Her bark is gray and puckered, with strips of soft rot hanging at the joints; beneath the cracks, faint greenish light pulses like swamp gas. A skirt of shredded bridal lace and dust-coated riding leather drags over roots that serve as her feet. She moves with a slow, listing gait, favoring her left side, then snaps forward with the sudden speed of a branch whipped by a storm. An unexpected detail: tiny blue glass beads are braided into her bark like carefully kept jewelry, each one polished smooth by years of touch.

Wojna is patient with the wounded and merciless with anyone who threatens the grove. She can show careful tenderness toward small living things, yet treats human promises as bait until proven otherwise. When calm, she listens longer than she speaks. When angry, she becomes blunt and physical, snapping branches and closing distance rather than raising her voice.

Wojna once guarded a spring-fed grove where stage roads crossed the Esterra frontier. A survey crew marked the trees for a rail spur, and a hired posse drove her people from the grove while she was away bargaining for a treaty. She returned to find the spring choked with ash and her promised bridegroom, a local healer, hanged from her oldest tree. Grief and poison from the burned roots remade her into an undead thing bound to the grove's last living stump. At first she hunted only the killers. When she learned the railroad had paid them, she began stalking surveyors, guards, and anyone who carried its stamped papers. The old healer's sister, Sella, still leaves blue beads at the boundary, hoping to remind Wojna that someone remembers who she was. Wojna has not spoken to her in years, but never harms her.