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.
Units
Deepwood ScoutsScout · InfantryHidden archers who become one with the forest, loosing their first arrows from cover the enemy never suspected and never see until it is far too late.
DryadsBattleline · InfantryBeautiful and terrible tree-spirits who tear intruders apart with clawed, bark-hard limbs, the animate fury of the forest given lithe and lethal form.
Eternal GuardElite · InfantryNoble spear-kindreds who stand the winter vigil, guarding the sacred glades through the dark months when the forest sleeps and its king lies dead.
Glade GuardBattleline · InfantryThe archer kindreds of Athel Loren, whose longbows speak from the green silence long before any invader sees an elf to fight.
Glade RidersCavalry · Light CavalryFast cavalry of the outer glades, riding forest-born steeds down secret ways that open before their hooves and close behind them.
Sisters of the ThornSpecial · CavalryMounted handmaidens of the Thorn Sisterhood who ride to war weaving protective enchantments and hurling crackling curses drawn from the forest's dark magic.
Tree KinElite · Monstrous InfantryLumbering elder tree-spirits, half Dryad and half Treeman, whose crushing wooden limbs shatter shield-walls and fling armoured warriors aside like kindling.
TreemanMonster · MonsterThe eldest spirits of Athel Loren walking to war in bodies of ancient heartwood: the forest's own wrath, roused only once its verdict is already passed.
WardancersElite · InfantryLoec's laughing devotees, who wear no armour, swear no fealty, and treat every battle as a sacred dance performed in the trickster god's honour.
Warhawk RidersSpecial · Flying CavalryElven scouts mounted on great mountain hawks, who plunge from the clouds to strike the enemy's rear and rise away before a single blow can answer.
WaywatchersScout · InfantryHidden sentinels of the forest's borders and secret paths, who watch every approach for decades at a time and are seen exactly as often as they wish to be, which is never.
Wild RidersCavalry · CavalryFey, half-wild elven horsemen sworn to the Hunter God, who charge with reckless ecstasy and spear-points wreathed in the raw magic of the wild.
Characters
ArielThe Mage QueenThe Mage Queen of Athel Loren: an elf maiden remade as the vessel of the goddess Isha, whose grace sustains the living forest and whose grief can darken it for a season.
DrychaThe Mad SpiritA vengeful branchwraith who hates all warm-blooded creatures, elves included, and dreams of a day when the forest devours every last intruder from the world.
DurthuEldest of AncientsOne of the most ancient Treemen in the world, a towering elder spirit whose slow-burning wrath at the wrongs done to the forest has hardened into unforgiving hatred.
Naestra & ArahanThe Sisters of TwilightTwin sisters who are two halves of a single soul (one of the dawn, one of the dusk), riding the ancient forest dragon Ceithin-Har as the wardens of Ariel's will.
OrionThe King in the WoodsThe King in the Woods: the hunter-god Kurnous made flesh, reborn from the Oak of Ages with every spring to lead the Wild Hunt, and dead again with every midwinter.
Subfactions
Glade Guard KindredsThe archer kindreds who form the great body of every asrai host: hunters and wardens who take up the longbow whenever the forest calls. Every realm of Athel Loren musters them, and every approach to the forest lies beneath their arrows. They are the pact made ordinary: an entire people raised to defend a wood that is at once their home, their temple, and their oldest neighbour.
Wardancer KindredsWandering war-troupes sworn to Loec, the trickster god of dance and laughter, who travel between the glades performing the old myths with blade and body. They wear no armour and swear fealty to no lord, honouring only the dance itself. When war comes, their performances simply acquire an audience that does not survive the show.
Waywatcher KindredsThe loneliest of the asrai, who dwell for decades at the forest's eaves guarding the secret paths and the waystones that fence Athel Loren's magic. They are the first to see any threat approach and the last thing an enemy never sees. Even other elves find their glades only when the waywatchers permit it.
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