Athel Loren, the Enchanted Forest

Athel Loren is an ancient and sentient forest on the southern frontier of the Old World, home to the reclusive Wood Elf Realms and older, stranger powers still. More than mere woodland, it is a living, dreaming entity that thinks in seasons and remembers in centuries, and it suffers no trespass upon its borders lightly.

The forest is a place where the veil between the mortal world and the realm of the fae wears thin. Within it dwell not only the elusive wood elves but the tree-spirits, dryads, and the towering treemen who are the forest's own wrath given walking form, all bound in an uneasy pact with the enigmatic woodland gods who slumber and wake with the turning year.

Athel Loren's moods are perilous and its geography treacherous, for paths shift, time flows strangely beneath its boughs, and travellers who enter uninvited are rarely seen again. The wood elves ward its borders with silent arrows and merciless ambush, waging endless war upon the Beastmen Brayherds and other corruptions that gnaw at the forest's edges. In the depths of winter the forest and its guardians grow cruellest of all, and even the wood elves themselves are not always safe from the ancient tree-spirits whose hatred of everything that walks on two legs has never truly cooled, so that Bretonnian knights and Imperial woodsmen alike trade fearful tales of the singing dark beneath the boughs and warn their children never to stray beneath its eaves.

Though the wood elves share the blood of their kin on distant Ulthuan, they have grown wholly apart, their loyalties given first and always to the forest that shelters them. Athel Loren keeps its own counsel and its own ancient laws, a green enigma at the heart of the Old World that neither serves nor trusts the affairs of men and gods beyond its eaves.