Wood Elf Realms

When the last ships of the elder race were recalled across the Great Ocean and the elven colonies of the Old World went dark, a scattering of souls refused the summons home. Hunters, seers, second sons, and the simply stubborn, they slipped away into the vast forest beneath the Grey Mountains — and discovered that the wood they fled into was no sanctuary but a sovereign. Athel Loren was awake. Its trees walked when no wind blew, its paths turned back upon themselves, and its spirits watched the newcomers with a patience that was also an appetite. That first winter would have ended them had Adanhu, eldest of the treemen, not stayed the forest's hand; he saw in the elves a swiftness and cunning the slow wood lacked and would one day need. From his mercy came the great pact: the elves would be the forest's wardens, its voice, and its arrows — and Athel Loren, in its own inhuman fashion, would suffer them to live.

Their descendants name themselves the asrai, and they resemble no other children of the elven diaspora. They build no cities and clear no fields; they dwell in halls the trees consent to grow, and they hold their realm not as owners but as parties to a bargain renewed with every season. For Athel Loren is a power in its own right — a single vast, slow intelligence dreaming through root and branch, in which dryads flit like moods and ancient treemen stand like memories. Its seasons are tempers, its glades have allegiances, and time runs strangely beneath the canopy, so that a traveller may lose a single night and emerge to find his grandchildren grown. Even the asrai walk carefully there, for parts of their own home are forbidden to them — above all the Wildwood, fenced about with waystones, where the forest's maddest spirits rage against a long imprisonment.

To the world outside, the forest's law is simple and absolute: do not enter. The Bretonnian peasants who plough the fields beyond its eaves leave bread and milk at the treeline, name its people the fay, and their fear is the truest wisdom in that kingdom. Those who cut Athel Loren's timber, hunt its beasts, or march beneath its boughs in arms receive no herald and no demand — only arrows out of the green dark, loosed by archers no eye has found, and then the forest itself: roots that grip, thorns that drink, trees that were not there a moment before. The asrai wage no wars of conquest and accept neither parley nor surrender within their bounds. Mercy is a virtue of lands that can afford it; Athel Loren keeps a harder covenant, and its elves ceased apologising for the terms an age ago.

Over the asrai reign two who are no longer wholly elves: Ariel the Mage Queen, in whom the grace of the goddess Isha endures, and Orion, the King in the Woods, who carries the hunter-god Kurnous within his breast and is reborn with every spring. From the King's Glade in the heartland realm of Talsyn they keep the pact's oldest rhythms — the Wild Hunt that scours the forest's enemies through the high summer, and the long winter vigil that guards its dreaming heart. Ages of this round have worked upon the elves as water works upon stone. Outsiders still ask whether the asrai mastered the forest or the forest mastered them; the asrai themselves no longer understand the question, for a bargain kept long enough becomes a nature, and there is no elf beneath those boughs whose soul is any longer entirely his own.