Maren was the Earth Mother, wife of the Sky-King, the living world given a face. When the war came she would not take up arms even at her husband's side, because war unmakes the world she is. For that refusal she fell to mortality.
The mother in the margins
Now she walks the dying age as the Green Mother, doing small mercies at the edges of things: a healed animal, a warmed child, a green shoot coaxed out of poisoned ground. Nothing that turns the age. Everything that is still, barely, worth saving.
Small mercies
Her tragedy is that her virtue and her failure are the same thing. The gentleness that makes her stop for the small life is the gentleness that would not fight for the whole. She is right, and the world is dying of her rightness.
The refusal that costs
The saga will press on that refusal. Whether a mother who would not fight can be made to, and what it would cost the living world she is if she ever did, is the hardest question anywhere in the mosaic.