Wode Elf

Wode elves are slight and quiet-moving, with long pointed ears and large, dark, reflective eyes. The eyes are the one feature people reliably remember: the rest of a wode elf is oddly hard to hold in memory, and two descriptions of the same elf often disagree.

That is the working of their talent, which is called glamor. Glamor is not invisibility; it makes people pay less attention to a wode elf than they meant to. A wode elf can stand in an open street and go unremarked, because everyone nearby has just found something else to look at. In the forest it has leaf-shadow and birdsong to work with; in a town it makes do with corners, crowds, and doorways nobody uses. It is partly skill and partly instinct: it strengthens and weakens with mood, and most wode elves learn to direct it.

Many wode elves say they descend from the sylvan spirits of the wodes, the deep forests. Not all of them believe it, but nearly all feel the connection: even a town-raised wode elf grows uneasy in places with no green in them. A forest is something they belong to, not somewhere they visit, and they speak of damage to one the way other people speak of injury.

The old blood keeps to the deep wodes of Eastryn, in the Vale's misted east, and most Vale folk will never knowingly meet a deep-wode elf. The rest live scattered through the mingled towns, usually nearer the settlement's edge than its centre.

Among the other peoples of the Vale they are known as misleaders of travellers and quiet tricksters. The stories repeat themselves: guides who arrive unasked, directions that prove accurate only partway, companions who vanish once their usefulness has passed. Wode elves rarely deny the stories, and sometimes quietly confirm them. From their side nothing was abandoned; the interaction ended when interest did.

In a mixed community a wode elf usually takes the work of the edges. The dwarf maintains what a town stands on and the high elf maintains what it knows; the wode elf knows the country around it — what moves past the last fence, which paths are safe, and which have stopped being safe. They work as foresters, guides, and finders of lost things and lost people.

They dislike confrontation, and prefer an encounter to end before it becomes one. In the deep wodes the watching is constant: a careless traveller is turned around without being able to say when it happened. Most of the misleading is not play. A traveller turned aside is usually being turned aside from something. Wode elves guard the deep forest like people keeping something undisturbed, and they do not say whether that is for the traveller's sake, or the forest's.