Waywatcher Kindreds

The waywatcher kindreds keep the loneliest vigil in all Athel Loren. Where the other asrai dwell in the settled glades, the waywatchers live apart at the forest's very eaves, alone or in small silent bands, for years and decades together, spans that would swallow a mortal life whole. They guard the secret paths by which the wood may be safely walked and, more vital still, the waystones: the graven monoliths that fence Athel Loren's wild magic, whose failure would loose horrors the asrai do not name aloud. It is a duty of stillness and near-total solitude, and it works a slow change upon those who keep it.

Every road toward the wood passes beneath their watch, and every soul upon it is weighed in silence: this one a pedlar to be let by unknowing, that one a war-band that will not pass at all. When they loose, they are never seen to do it: an arrow crosses a distance at which the bow makes no sound, a man folds without a cry, and the column presses on not knowing who will drop next. Even their own kin find the waywatchers' glades only by leave freely given. They are the forest's first sentinel and its withheld mercy both: the cold certainty, settling on every trespasser at the treeline, that he was dead the moment he stepped beneath the eaves, and merely has not yet been told.