The elves and their goddesses are really closed-off from any other races, in their own private forest. There really isn’t contact with many of the other races in order for them to be eligible. I haven’t really fleshed out the other races because they aren’t relevant to the story; it’s a very elf-centric world.
That pseudo-internet idea is definitely something some mycodryads (love that name for them btw) have pulled off. When advanced enough, it can actually be used to achieve full immortality (not just typical elven longevity) by downloading your consciousness into the fungal network. One fungal dryad got literally blown to pieces and survived by storing his consciousness in the mycorrhizal network of the forest for literal years. Most ingenius part of that is that there was absolutely nothing anyone could do about it because they’d essentially have to raze the whole forest to get rid of him.
And no, they’re not bound to a specific tree like the more traditional interpretations of dryads. They’re more tied to the forest itself rather than a specific tree, and some like the bestial dryads have no real connection to trees at all.
Nope, I only referred to them as fungal dryads, haha. Thanks for the new term!
Yeah, pretty much only Thorne has ever pulled that off, and he was honestly insane. Super powerful, mad genius, bent on destroying the gods. Not exactly a typical Dryad. Unfortunately, his no longer having a physical body created a loophole that made the gods unable to strip his power away. He was less of a person and more a stream of consciousness intertwined with nature itself; they couldn’t divorce nature from him anymore because he’d made himself an actual part of it.
Ultimately, they ended up getting him trapped in a partitioned-off section of the mycorrhizal network then absolutely obliterating that section and him with it. Normally killing him that way would be impossible without destroying the entire mycorrhizal network and thus the whole forest with it, because even if you destroy the section his consciousness is currently residing in he can just move down the line to another section like a fucked up game of wack-a-mole, but they were able to get him trapped in a closed-off section he couldn’t easily escape from that was small enough that they could just obliterate the entire thing without taking down the whole forest.