The wardancer kindreds belong to Loec, the trickster god of dance and laughter, and they live apart from the settled glades in wandering troupes that answer to no lord and hold no land. Barefoot, unarmoured, and inked from brow to heel with the tales they carry, they travel the hidden ways between the asrai realms to perform the old myths at the great fires in blade and body and breath. To the asrai these are no idle entertainments but living scripture: every leap and whispering blade-pass retells some fragment of the sacred stories, and to watch a troupe dance is itself a form of worship.
They swear fealty to nothing beneath the boughs but the dance itself, which the graver kindreds both revere and quietly distrust, for a wardancer answers only to his own laughing god. When war comes to Athel Loren, the performance merely acquires an unwilling cast. The troupes spill through an enemy's ranks too swiftly for the eye to hold, and what few survivors carry away is never the memory of the wounds but of the laughter: bright, unhurried, and pitiless. For the wardancers, a battle is one more telling of the oldest tale their god ever taught: that death, performed with sufficient artistry, can always be made to play the fool.
Order of battle
The Wardancer Kindreds field the units of the Wood Elf Realms, a detachment from the roster:
Other Wood Elf Realms formations
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.
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.
Discussion
- No comments yet. Be the first to reply.