The druids of Veldmere, practitioners of the Old Ways who serve the island's natural balance and seek to maintain the covenant between the land and its people. They hold no political authority, operating at the margins and tolerated more than respected. That is, until something goes wrong that the High Faith cannot explain, and then they are consulted.

Before the first Monarch was crowned, the druids governed the island under the name Halthorl Moot: spirit-lords who mediated between the Vel and the Haltija. When the Kingdom formed, they became keepers. Tending the old shrines, preserving the Old Ways, continuing to reach for the forest guardians. The Fall struck them hard. The spirits have grown harder to reach. The Oldwood is largely closed to them. Their sacred sites within the forest are lost or endangered. Their covenants are fraying.

The Circle tend to the old shrines, maintain sacred groves and standing stones against Chaos and decay. They keep Old Ways alive through rituals of planting and harvest, practice the rites of Sacred Time, make forms of address for land-spirits and the dead. Whether the covenant with the forest can be repaired is the Circle's central question.

Relations with the High Faith are complex: officially tolerated, unofficially suspicious. In some areas, Circle druids and parish priests coexist peacefully. Some clergy view the Ring as dangerous pagans; others as potential allies against Chaos.