Gwinbrennan

  A well known painting said to have been painted by Saint Dynadin the Ode Singer hangs in the foyer of the manor of House Kenver in Sans Arsinian. The painting depicts slender folk with long, conical heads, and skin like ash bark. They tend to a forest garden built atop the ruins of an old city. They tend to the ferns like they are their children. The title of the painting is simply “Gwinbrennan”.

  Information on these folk is hard to acquire. When the capital fell the sky dimmed. Accounts say that an intense chill swept the continent and killed many harvests. Saint Tomevel Rayleigh describes in his autobiographical works the decline of woodlands surrounding old cities. He tells stories of villages encircled by trees bald to the bark “reaching up to Kesh like the boney fingers of the starved at the table of a lord”. At the same time travel between settlements was becoming increasingly more dangerous. While the world of Torenian Den declined, it seems that the outer wildlands became evermore deadly. In these wilds is where we find the Gwinbrennan.

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  To this day Gwinbrennan can be found tending to the most primal forests of Kesh. Many believe that they were birthed into this world as a part of Kesh’s curse so as to maintain the danger of the outside world and reclaim human structures in the name of plants and nature, though Cotha sources suggest that these Den were merely dormant throughout human times of civilisation. It can be well argued in fact that just as we named the Cotha “Glass Elves” the Gwinbrennan are the ones we once called “Wood Elves”.

  From "A folkloric-ethnography of the lands" by Lady Zelah Tremaine and Sir Edwin Hopper