Glade Guard Kindreds

The Glade Guard kindreds are the great common body of Athel Loren's people, and the plainest expression of the ancient pact that binds elf and forest. They are no caste of soldiers, for the asrai keep no standing armies; they are hunters, wardens, and keepers of the glades who take up the longbow whenever the forest calls them to its defence. Every realm beneath the boughs musters them, from the outer marches to the deep heartland, and every road and game-trail that approaches the wood lies, whether the traveller knows it or not, beneath their nocked arrows.

Theirs is the pact made ordinary: an entire people raised from childhood to defend a wood that is at once their home, their temple, and their oldest and most demanding neighbour. A child of the kindreds learns wind, range, and the shooting-lanes between the leaves as other races learn their letters, and comes to adulthood able to put a shaft through a helm's eye-slit at a range that would beggar belief anywhere else. They ask no glory of it and look for no songs. The forest must be warded; they are its wardens; and along the marches of the Wood Elf Realms it is said, with little exaggeration, that no invader has ever lived to describe the archer whose arrow found him.