Druid
The wild does not care about your politics. It does not negotiate with border disputes, acknowledge trade agreements, or yield to the theological positions of orthodox religious institutions. It grows where it chooses, floods when the season demands it, and occasionally swallows entire settlements that failed to make the appropriate spiritual arrangements. The druids of frontier cultures understand this implicitly, not as mystical revelation but as observed fact, passed down through generations of people who learned to work with the land or died trying.
Across Trisurus, the practice of druidic craft occupies a peculiar sociological position: simultaneously one of the oldest traditions in the crystal sphere and one of the most technically sophisticated. Where the Trisurus Fleet charts stellar mechanics, the druids of refugee and frontier cultures chart ecological systems with comparable rigor. Their knowledge of soil composition, migratory patterns, seasonal hydrology, and fungal networks represents centuries of accumulated field observation, and the fact that they interpret this data through a spiritual framework rather than a scientific one is, increasingly, a distinction that ecologists aboard the Fleet have begun to reconsider. Several Fleet xenobiologists conducting research on Verdania have reportedly described these cultivation techniques as "advanced ecological management with a liturgical soundtrack."
The largest druidic circle among Trisurus's refugee cultures numbers approximately five hundred initiated druids, led by a senior archdruid whose authority serves as both spiritual center and primary institution of druidic learning. The circle is not monolithic. Each major clan has produced its own druidic tradition, shaped by the ecological realities of the land each clan manages, and these traditions frequently disagree, sometimes loudly, about methodology, theology, and the correct relationship between a druid and the forest they serve. Conservative approaches to sacred site preservation sit in constant productive tension with more pragmatic willingness to adapt practice when trade realities demand it. The archdruid does not adjudicate these disputes so much as manage them, which may be the most politically sophisticated thing they do.
The druidic relationship to the wider Trisurus crisis takes on a visceral character. The Gyre, the slow collapse of the crystal sphere's outer boundaries, is not an abstraction to a druid. It manifests as unseasonable frosts killing winter crops, migratory birds arriving months late or not arriving at all, rivers running wrong, fungal blooms in forests where they have no business blooming, a wrongness in the deep root systems that trained practitioners can feel before they can name. The druids of Verdania's refugee cultures were among the first to document Gyre-related ecological disruption, and their sealed reports to community leadership constitute some of the most detailed ground-level environmental records available. Whether anyone who could act on them has read them remains, diplomatically, an open question.
On Verdania, the biodome world that serves as refuge for populations displaced by sphere collapse, a distinct druidic tradition has emerged among the Sylvan Remnant, the elven refugee population whose fey-touched nature practices predate the current crisis by centuries. Verdanian druids do not tend wild forests; they tend engineered ones, managing the biodome's calibrated ecosystems with a combination of traditional fey practice and hard-won technical knowledge. They are, in a real sense, the life-support system of an entire refugee world, and they know it.
Tradition: Naturalism, Ecological Stewardship, Cyclical Theology
Status: Formally recognized within refugee cultures on Verdania; regarded with suspicion by orthodox religious institutions; consulted informally by the Trisurus Fleet
Notable Institutions: Verdania Biodome Stewardship, various grove-based druidic circles, the Trisurus Fleet ecological division
Circle of the Land
When a crop fails or a watershed turns bad, the agricultural clans' senior druids are the ones the other clans call, and they have been answering those calls for long enough to have developed strong opinions about everyone who ignores their recommendations until something has already died. The Circle of the Land represents the druidic tradition most legible to outside observers: systematic land management, extensive botanical knowledge, and an institutional commitment to the idea that the health of the soil is the health of the people. The agricultural communities are the economic heart of refugee cultures on Verdania, and their druids function as a combination of agricultural extension service, environmental monitor, and spiritual counsel that would not be entirely unfamiliar to a Fleet ecologist.
Land druids maintain what their agricultural communities call "the long memory," a body of observational record that tracks ecological conditions across generations, far exceeding any individual practitioner's lifespan. Passed through oral tradition, mark-stone inscription, and increasingly through written record at major grove sites, this archive represents an ecological baseline that has proven invaluable during the current period of Gyre-driven disruption. When Land druids speak about what the Marches "should" look like, they are not speaking metaphorically. They have the data.
Their tradition emphasizes attunement to specific terrain, the unique conditions of a particular forest, wetland, or highland, over general facility with nature magic writ large. A Land druid who has spent thirty years managing a specific bog system knows those bogs the way a shipwright knows a hull. This depth of local knowledge comes at some cost to versatility, and Land druids are occasionally criticized by other Circle traditions as inflexible or too narrowly focused. They tend to respond to this criticism by pointing at something that has not died lately and continuing their work.
On Verdania, Land circle practitioners have found unexpected common ground with Verdanian biodome engineers, as the skills involved in managing a calibrated closed ecosystem map surprisingly well onto traditional land stewardship. Several Land-trained druids have traveled to Verdania as ecological consultants, an exchange that has produced minor diplomatic friction with orthodox religious institutions and considerable practical benefit for both parties.
Circle of the Moon
Warrior clans do not produce many druids, but the ones they produce tend to be memorable. The Circle of the Moon is the druidic tradition most visible from outside refugee cultures, because its practitioners have a habit of showing up in border conflicts as forces of nature, sometimes literally, and they are considerably more difficult to negotiate with than any standard diplomatic representative. Warrior communities form the military core of frontier cultures; Moon druids form something more unsettling, which is the part of that military that doesn't fight like a military.
Moon circle practice is built on the theology of transformation as truth, the belief that the shape a living thing takes in a moment of extremity reveals something essential about what it actually is. Moon druids train extensively in the practical and philosophical dimensions of assuming other forms, not as a trick or a tool but as a form of spiritual inquiry. The practitioners who have spent years cycling through the forms of predator and prey emerge from the process with a different relationship to violence than either the warriors they fight alongside or the more contemplative druids they are technically colleagues with. They are, not to put too fine a point on it, somewhat frightening even to their own communities.
Politically, Moon druids complicate the careful management of relations between druidic communities and outside powers. They are loyal to the Circle, and through it to their community, but their loyalty runs through the sacred grove and the compact with the natural world, not through the political calculus of trade relationships or the Trisurus Fleet's occasional overtures toward cooperation. When a Moon druid decides that the forest requires defending, the archdruid's opinions about diplomatic timing are largely advisory. Warrior leaders find this useful. Diplomatic leaders find it occasionally alarming. Orthodox religious institutions have filed formal protests about specific incidents that technically cannot be attributed to any individual actor.
Beyond frontier territories, the Moon circle's theology of transformation resonates differently. It finds some expression among those dealing with the Gyre's destabilizing effects on living systems, including practitioners on Verdania who work with species struggling to adapt to new ecological pressures.
Circle of the Sea
The trading clans among refugee cultures are the most comfortable with the world beyond their territories, and their druids reflect that orientation. The Circle of the Sea did not take its current form because these clans border any ocean (they often do not) but because their relationship to water, trade, and the movement of things between places generated a druidic tradition that eventually found kinship with coastal and maritime practitioners from beyond their communities. Trading clans maintain more sustained contact with outside cultures than any other group. Their druids carry that cosmopolitanism.
Sea circle practice centers on liminality, the study of boundaries and the things that cross them. Sea circle druids work extensively with riverine systems, wetlands, tidal zones, and the ecological communities that exist in transition between states. This translates into a body of practice concerned with flow, with adaptation, and with the particular kind of knowledge that comes from watching where things move, not where they stay. A Sea circle druid tracking the migration of fish through community waterways is doing the same essential work as one monitoring how information moves between trade settlements or how refugees from collapsing spheres integrate into new communities. The methodological framework is the same.
Politically, Sea circle druids are the most likely to develop working relationships with outside institutions. Several are known to maintain ongoing arrangements with merchant houses, providing ecological intelligence about river conditions, flood risk, and sustainable harvest levels in exchange for access to trade goods and outside information. This pragmatism sits uneasily with the more conservative clans. Conservative leaders have described the trading clans' merchant arrangements as "selling the river's secrets to people who want to dam it," but senior archdruids have declined to formally censure the practice, which is itself a political statement.
On Verdania, Sea circle practitioners have found particular relevance as the refugee crisis intensifies. Managing the flow of displaced populations into a closed ecological system is, in the relevant technical sense, a water management problem, and Sea circle training produces practitioners with precisely the right conceptual tools for it.
Circle of the Stars
The Stars druids will tell you their tradition predates the clan structure that currently organizes community life, and they will tell you so with a regularity that other practitioners find endearing for the first few years and mildly exhausting thereafter. The Circle of the Stars traces its theology to early interpretations of ancient standing stones at major grove sites, astronomical markers almost certainly, whose original builders understood something about the relationship between celestial mechanics and natural cycles that the intervening centuries have partially obscured. Stars druids have been reconstructing that knowledge ever since, with varying degrees of success and considerable disagreement about methodology.
The practical application of Stars circle practice is pattern recognition at the longest scales. Where Land druids track decades and Moon druids work in the immediate present, Stars practitioners concern themselves with cycles measured in centuries: the recurrence of drought patterns, the long-period fluctuations in solar intensity that affect crop yields, the deep-time rhythms of species migration and extinction. This work is genuinely valuable and also, inevitably, not particularly useful for immediate crises. Stars druids have an institutional reputation for providing excellent long-term forecasts approximately three generations after anyone would have found them actionable, which is unfair but not entirely inaccurate.
The Gyre has given Stars circle practice a new urgency, because the disruption of celestial mechanics is visible in exactly the data these practitioners have spent their careers collecting. Stars druids at major grove sites have documented measurable changes in the positions of the standing stones' shadow alignments, changes that should not be occurring at any timescale relevant to human observation. That something is changing the fundamental astronomical relationships that have structured druidic theology for centuries has not been publicly disclosed, and senior archdruids have strong views about who that information should reach first.
Circle of Blood
The warrior clans' relationship with nature as sacred principle has never been entirely comfortable, and the Circle of Blood is one reason why. This is not the druidic tradition that agricultural communities teach their children, nor the one that trading diplomats reference when explaining druidic practice to merchant outsiders. It is, however, real, and it is old, older than some of the Confederation's founding stories, maintained by a small lineage of practitioners who understand nature's cycle of predation and death as something more than background context for growth and renewal. Blood circle druids work with the violent economy of living systems: the food web, the parasite load, the territorial pressure that shapes species distribution. They do not celebrate this. They witness it and work within it.
Within druidic communities, Blood circle practice is regarded with a complicated mixture of respect and discomfort. Other druids acknowledge that the work these practitioners do, managing the predator-prey balance that keeps the Marches' ecosystems functional, addressing populations of dangerous creatures that threaten clan territory without simply eliminating them, is necessary work. They are less universally comfortable with the theology that Blood circle druids bring to it, which frames the druid not as a steward above the cycle but as a participant within it. This is, in the technical sense, more ecologically accurate than most competing frameworks. It is also not what most people want their spiritual leaders to be telling them.
Outside the druidic communities, Blood circle practice is virtually unknown, which is largely by design. The few outside scholars who have documented it have described it in terms ranging from "deeply pragmatic naturalism" to "unsettling." The practitioners themselves tend to be unconcerned with outside opinions, which may be the most honest response available to them.
Circle of Entropy
The practitioners who concern themselves with decay, decomposition, disease, and the cycling of dead matter back into living systems have never been popular at community gatherings, but their contributions to ecological function are difficult to overstate. Entropy circle druids work with the organisms that most people would prefer not to think about: the fungi that break down the dead, the bacterial communities that process waste, the parasitic species that regulate host populations, the forest fire that clears decades of accumulated fuel load and allows new growth to establish. They are, in the functional sense, the part of the ecosystem everyone benefits from and no one wants to sit next to at dinner.
The agricultural clans produce most of the druidic community's Entropy circle practitioners, because agricultural practice requires genuine understanding of decomposition cycles for soil health. Druidic farmers know that healthy soil is mostly dead things in the process of becoming alive again, and their druids take this theological insight seriously. An Entropy druid explaining the spiritual significance of mycorrhizal networks to a skeptical audience from another clan tradition is making a sincere point about the sacred importance of rot, and the fact that the audience tends to become uncomfortable partway through the explanation is a problem with the audience's theology, not the argument.
The Gyre has made Entropy circle practice grimly relevant beyond its traditional scope. Ecosystems in crisis produce accelerated decomposition: dying forests, collapsing fish populations, the organic refuse of mass displacement. Entropy druids from Verdania and frontier territories have been exchanging notes, and their shared assessment of the current rate of biological system failure is one of the more carefully suppressed documents in circulation. Senior archdruids know what it says. They have not shared it with community leadership, which is itself a data point.
Circle of Mutation
The Sylvan Remnant on Verdania did not choose to develop a tradition of studying aberrant growth and environmental adaptation. The Gyre made that choice for them. As sphere after sphere collapsed and refugees arrived carrying animals, plants, and microorganisms from a hundred different ecosystems, the Verdanian biodome absorbed waves of introduced species, novel pathogens, and organisms stressed into expressing traits they had never expressed in stable conditions. Someone had to study what was happening. The Circle of Mutation was the result.
Mutation circle practice is the newest druidic tradition within Trisurus, and it is regarded with a mixture of fascination and alarm by established practitioners. Its core insight, that ecological disruption generates adaptive response, and that a druid who can read those adaptations can understand the severity and direction of environmental stress, is genuinely valuable. Its methodology, which involves close study of specimens that are frequently in the process of becoming something difficult to classify, is less universally appealing. Mutation circle druids tend to be calm, methodical individuals who became calm and methodical because the alternative was considerable distress at their working conditions.
Within traditional druidic communities, Mutation circle practice is essentially unknown as an independent tradition, though elements of its methodology appear in more advanced ecological diagnosis work at major grove sites. The established druidic circles have been watching the Verdanian tradition's development with interest and some theological concern. Traditional naturalistic teaching on mutation has historically emphasized stability and the return to natural form, and the Mutation circle's acceptance of transformation as potentially permanent challenges that framework in ways senior druids have not fully resolved. Senior archdruids have invited several Verdanian practitioners for extended study. The conversations have been productive and theologically uncomfortable in equal measure.
Circle of the Forged
The Trisurus Fleet maintains, diplomatically, that it does not consider druidic practice a relevant category for the professionals who manage its life-support ecosystems. The professionals in question maintain, equally diplomatically, that they are ecologists and engineers who occasionally commune with the deep living systems aboard Fleet vessels as a matter of professional methodology. Both positions allow all parties to avoid a number of uncomfortable questions about the relationship between ancient natural theology and interstellar shipbuilding, which is probably for the best.
The Circle of the Forged emerged from the intersection of Verdanian biodome management and Fleet engineering culture, practitioners who work with living systems deliberately integrated into constructed environments. Fleet vessels incorporate bio-luminescent guidance systems, oxygen-processing plant colonies, and fungal nutrient networks; the Forged circle tradition grew from the understanding that someone needed to manage these as living communities instead of installed components, and that the most effective way to do that was to develop a genuine relationship with them. Fleet command has never formally acknowledged that it employs druids. It has, however, consistently ensured that the life-support biological systems are maintained by personnel with the relevant specialized training, whatever that training is called.
Within traditional druidic communities, the Forged circle is essentially absent from practice, which is theologically sensible, as wild territories do not contain much constructed infrastructure that natural systems need to coexist with. However, trading clans' druidic traditions have begun incorporating elements of Forged methodology in the context of managing merchant-built water control structures along river territory, which has generated the predictable amount of inter-clan theological commentary.
Circle of the Old Ways
The guardian clans do not innovate. This is not a criticism; it is a precise description of a deliberate institutional choice made and remade across generations of conservative leadership. These communities defend the sacred sites of the druidic tradition, ancient groves, stone circles, sites of cosmic significance, and they have been doing so long enough to have strong views about what defending a sacred site actually requires. It requires knowing exactly what was done before, by whom, and why, and then doing that thing with the same precision it has always been done with. Innovation is how you accidentally stop doing the essential thing you were supposed to be doing.
The Circle of the Old Ways is the guardian clans' druidic tradition, and it is the most theologically conservative faction within the druidic circle. Old Ways practitioners maintain practices, rituals, and forms of sacred site management that other traditions have modified, simplified, or abandoned, and they regard other traditions' attitudes toward modification with visible patience that does not quite conceal visible judgment. They are not wrong that continuity has value. They are also not always right that every traditional practice encodes irreplaceable knowledge, but they will ask you to prove it instead of taking your word for it, and they have enough institutional authority at major grove sites to make that requirement stick.
The theological and practical significance of the Old Ways tradition has increased sharply since the Argent Threshold's arrival in frontier territory. The site predates living memory as a sacred site, and the guardian clans' preserved records of its prior state proved invaluable when the area began exhibiting behaviors that no living practitioner had observed before. Old Ways druids were the ones who located the relevant observational records in the grove archives, and they have not been shy about noting that this is what happens when you maintain traditional practices rigorously instead of revising them for convenience.
Circle of the Symbiote
The mycorrhizal network beneath managed forest territories extends, by druidic estimation, across entire forest systems, a web of fungal connections linking tree to tree, grove to grove, and ultimately to the ancient deep root systems beneath major grove sites that druids describe as a living network of immense age and significance. The Circle of the Symbiote works with this network not as a metaphor for connection but as a literal communications and ecological support system, and they are considerably more certain about what is moving through it than they are comfortable publicly sharing.
Symbiote circle practice is technically a sub-tradition of the Land circle, and officially most Symbiote practitioners acknowledge that affiliation. In practice, the Circle of the Symbiote operates with considerable autonomy. Its work is specialized enough that even senior Land druids defer to Symbiote practitioners on questions involving fungal ecology, deep root communication, and what might charitably be called the forest's intentionality. Whether the network is conscious, whether this deep root system represents some kind of distributed intelligence, and whether the theology that frames it as something ancient and aware is metaphor or literal description are questions that Symbiote practitioners discuss among themselves with significant intensity and disclose to outsiders with significant caution.
The Gyre's disruption of the fungal networks has been one of the more technically alarming developments in recent ecological monitoring. These networks, built over centuries, are not easily re-established once broken. The Symbiote circle's assessment of current network degradation in territories showing Gyre-related ecological stress is part of the same sealed report as the Entropy circle's mortality projections, and senior archdruids have the same strong opinions about its distribution.
Circle of Wicker
The seven-day Greenfire Festival at the end of planting season is the most visible public expression of druidic practice among frontier cultures: enormous wicker constructions going up in flame, elaborate ritual processions through clan territory, the formal exchange of ecological pledges between clan leaders and their druids. Most community members understand Greenfire as agricultural religion; you do the ritual, the harvest improves, the cycle continues. Circle of the Wicker practitioners understand it as something considerably more specific.
The Wicker circle is the Confederation's tradition of ecological ritual technology, the use of structured ceremony, symbolic construction, and communal practice to effect real ecological outcomes. This sounds mystical, and the practitioners lean into that framing for public purposes, but the underlying mechanism is more practical. The construction and burning of the wicker structures marks specific land parcels for controlled burning cycles that maintain soil fertility. The ritual processions conduct population surveys of clan territory while appearing to perform blessing ceremonies. The pledges between druids and leaders encode resource management commitments in formats that the community will hold publicly accountable in ways a technical report would not be.
This is not to say the Wicker circle is purely pragmatic performance. The theology is real, the relationship with The Old Forest is genuine, and the practitioners who work this tradition for decades tend to acquire a quality of attention to communal ecological rhythms that functions as something more than technique. But the tradition's genius is in making necessary collective action feel like sacred obligation, which, on reflection, may be the most sophisticated thing any druidic tradition has ever done.
Legacy Traditions
The traditions below are recognized within the druidic circle's historical records and practiced among small lineages of initiated druids. They are not actively taught through the major grove curricula, and most have not been formally assessed by the senior archdruids' council in the current generation. Some preserve valuable knowledge from before the druidic community's formal organization; others represent evolutionary dead ends that persist because their last practitioners are still alive and still practicing.
Circle of Dreams — The trading clans preserve a small lineage of practitioners who work at the boundary between waking ecological observation and dream-state communion with the forest. Historically associated with the druidic tradition of seeking counsel at ancient stone circles during the liminal hours, the Dream circle's methods are difficult to teach systematically and nearly impossible to evaluate externally. The three currently active practitioners are elderly, and whether this tradition continues depends on whether it finds suitable successors before it loses its last living voice.
Circle of Spores — A legacy sub-tradition within the Entropy circle lineage, the Spores practitioners take Entropy's focus on decomposition and apply it specifically to fungal vectors of transformation: the spread of new growth through distribution of spores, the colonization of dead wood as the first step of forest reclamation, the use of fungal communities as deliberate instruments of ecological restoration. It overlaps substantially with the Circle of the Symbiote in methodology and has been in slow institutional merger with that tradition for approximately a generation. Practitioners of both circles regard the merger as inevitable; neither side is entirely enthusiastic about completing it.
Circle of the Shepherd — Once a major tradition among agricultural druids focused on the spiritual dimensions of animal husbandry and herd management, the Shepherd circle has contracted significantly as community lifeways have shifted. The practical knowledge it encodes, the long-standing relationships between specific druid lineages and specific animal species, the deep understanding of herd psychology and breeding practice, remains genuinely valuable. The tradition is maintained by perhaps a dozen practitioners, most of them elderly druidic farmers who learned it as a practical necessity before it became a legacy tradition. Their grandchildren tend to be competent farmers who do not feel the sacred compact with the same urgency.
Circle of Wildfire — The druidic relationship with controlled burning is ancient and practical, and the Circle of Wildfire is the most extreme expression of it, practitioners who understand fire not as tool but as teacher, who have worked with fire ecology long enough to develop a relationship with conflagration that other druids find alarming for the same reasons they find Moon circle practitioners alarming. The tradition is essentially extinct as a formal Circle but persistent as individual practice; several Old Ways and Land circle druids carry Wildfire methodology absorbed from single teachers who were the last of their formal lineage.
Circle of Dragons — Managed forest territories have had historical relationships with draconics inhabiting their borders, and a small druidic tradition emerged around those relationships: practitioners who studied draconic ecology, mediated territorial disputes between dragons and clan settlements, and maintained the theological framework that understood draconic fire and decay as extreme expressions of the natural cycle, not supernatural intrusions into it. Whether there are currently any practicing Dragons circle druids within the druidic community is a matter of some uncertainty. The last formally acknowledged practitioner died approximately forty years ago, and the question of succession remains unresolved.
Circle of Shadows — The hunting clans' scouts occasionally produce practitioners whose relationship with camouflage, darkness, and the ecology of ambush becomes something theological, an understanding of shadow as its own ecological niche, inhabited by specific organisms with specific adaptations, navigable by those who have studied it long enough. The Shadows circle emerged from this observation and has historically been kept close within the hunting clan culture. It is not formally recognized at major grove sites, which suits its practitioners fine. Officially, the Circle of Shadows does not exist. Several things that happen in the deep forest are officially explained in other ways.
Circle of the Blighted — The most controversial legacy tradition in the druidic circle's records, the Blighted practice originated among druids who studied Gyre-adjacent ecological collapse as a distinct phenomenon instead of a deviation from the healthy norm. Their theological position, that the Gyre's destructive work is not violation of the natural cycle but an expression of it at a scale that transcends individual sphere ecology, has never been formally adopted by the circle and has been explicitly rejected by senior archdruids on multiple public occasions. The practitioners who hold this position are not expelled from the circle, because the druidic tradition does not expel druids for theological disagreement. They are watched.
Circle of the Hive — The insect ecology of managed forest territories is staggering in its complexity: pollinators, decomposers, soil engineers, and the hundred species that link the plant and animal communities together through relationships that most observers never notice until they fail. The Hive circle developed among agricultural and Land druids who specialized in insect community management, producing practitioners with intimate knowledge of colony structures, swarm behavior, and the cascading consequences when keystone insect species decline. The tradition peaked perhaps a century ago and has contracted with the broader insect population declines the Gyre has produced, which is simultaneously a cause and a consequence.
Circle of the Petal — The herbalists and healers of the agricultural clans have always occupied a specific intersection of agricultural knowledge and healing practice. The Petal circle is the formal druidic tradition that emerged from that intersection: practitioners whose primary relationship is with flowering plants as both ecological community members and healing resources, who understand human and animal health as an expression of plant community health, and who have spent generations documenting the medicinal properties of their territories' botanical diversity. Much of this knowledge exists nowhere else. The tradition is practiced but not growing, and the documentation project that several Petal circle elders have been conducting at major grove sites has taken on urgency as Gyre-related botanical loss accelerates.
Circle of the Warden — Before druidic communities had formal political structures, the territories of what are now the major clans were managed by a loose network of druidic wardens, practitioners who combined the ecological stewardship of the Land circle with a territorial authority that made them, in practical terms, the governing authority of their assigned forest section. The community's political organization absorbed most of these functions into clan governance, but a small lineage of Warden practitioners persists, maintaining the old territorial divisions and the records that go with them. The Wardens consider themselves accountable to the forest first and to clan governance second, and this position produces occasional friction with the guardian clans, who have comparable feelings about the priority of their obligations.