Warhammer Lore! The Forest of Athel Loren,

[Music] greetings and salutations friends and welcome back after a long break to some warhammer lord back to the old world and in this case the dark gloomy glades of atholoran of course i've already done a video on the wood elves but they are quite a separate thing from the forest of athelorin atholoran is not alive that would not be the correct word but it is conscious in a way it sees the world around it it protects itself from external forces and it also builds bonds with the various races and species that have set up their home within the forest it cooperates with them in a fashion that is far beyond mere accidental symbiotes and far more designed for example it has built a relationship with various dragons that have begun to nest and build their lairs within the forest and it has extended this relationship to include the wood elves naturally these dragons would have no real reason to cooperate with the elves on their own these are not the ancient noble dragons of oath one these are descendants of a far crueler kind that inhabited the old world a race of dragons that views themselves to be superior beings to the lesser races a race of dragons that would be more than happy to feast upon any and all soft squishy creatures that may reside around them and yet not only are they not aggressive towards the elves they do not prey upon them they are even willing to cooperate with them to a certain degree and if a young elf prince builds enough of a rapport with a dragon then a partnership and perhaps even a friendship would be possible and speaking off the elves the elves are of course also not a natural feature of athalorun they were brought in much much much later at one point in time athelorn itself was a very different entity to what it is today it was for one much larger and inhabited almost exclusively by a magical beings of various types primarily spirits and other non-corporeal entities at that time the forest of atholorin was truly vast and the roots of the great oak of ages stretched across the old world and allowed the spares to travel alongside it as a magical sort of highway but then came the collapse of the polar gateways and the great war against chaos all of the races were fighting for their very existence athalorin was at first spared the invasion of the demonic creatures because they sensed some form of a kinship with the creatures that resided within the forest that is not to say that they were chaotic creatures themselves although well as we should all know by now chaos is not necessarily good or evil there is far more to chaos than the ruinous powers chaos is or whatever mortal minds wish it to be and if one has enough knowledge about how chaos and the immaterium works one can even shape reality specifically by using this influence in the case of athelorin there is much to suggest that it was created for a specific purpose by the old ones for you see the forest is a vast focal point of magical energy it gathers and directs the winds of magic allowing it to flow through its branches and trees and then the great oak of ages standing at the very central point of all of this gathers the magic around itself absorbs it whilst reacting to it to the point of even changing its physical shape and then whilst essentially eating the magic it turns it into a physical form it creates acorns with it the acorns then fall to the forest floor during the time of life where the wind of life girash blows most strongly through the forest this allows the great oak of ages to essentially neutralize magic much like normal trees neutralize co2 which is of course poisonous to humans the great oak of ages takes magic which if it were to flow freely through the world well whilst it itself would not be poisonous it would allow demonic entities to freely manifest which would be a rather considerable health hazard to everybody else in the world and of course the old ones themselves were not at all fond of chaos energy when it was uncontrolled and unfocused and so it would make all kinds of sense for them to create such a thing like athelorin to not only guide control but also to devour some of that excess magic of course the forest was never designed to handle anything even remotely like the kind of magical deluge that occurred when the great polar gateways collapsed but due to the efforts of the lizardmen and the high elves the tide of magic rolling into the world subsided and became far more manageable still a fair bit beyond what was ever truly intended but at the very least not apocalyptic and that in turn also stopped the great war against chaos the demons could no longer manifest freely across the old world and slowly but surely the supreme races at the time the lizardmen the high elves and the dwarves began fighting back and repelling the tides of demons still in existence and slowly but surely the dominant races of the time the high elves and the dwarves began pushing back destroying what demons remained and re-establishing order over the world athalorin meanwhile a withdrew into its new borders the forest had shrunk drastically and the roots of the great oak had been severed to the point where they could now only function within modern day athalorum the tree spirits as well the dryads the branch wraiths and the tree men also retreated with the forest boundaries and became little more than myths to the other races there was however a small group of elves that knew the truth they had fought alongside the forest spirits during the great war the forest spirits had sullied out from atholorin breaking their uneasy truce quote unquote with the demons to save the elves the elves asked for further aid but the three men under the command of durthu one of the most ancient and venerable of their numbers could not provide them with any more help with the truce broken the demons had now recognized the creatures of athalorun as enemies whether they were their kind or not was now immaterial and the forest was under siege from all directions after a long debate the various ancient of the forests decided that the elves would be protected they would be brought within the forest and put to magical slumber because they could not be trusted to roam free the forest spirits were not at all entirely confident that the elves would be able to adapt to their new life within the forest and they certainly could not let them go after lauren even all the way back then was very suspicious of the other races and with good reason the dwarves as you can probably imagine were not overly kind to forests in general considering them little more than kindling and fuel for their growing industry the high elves were better but they too were an arrogant lot seeking to control and subjugate nature rather than to coexist with it but the forest was changing it had not emerged unscathed from the war with chaos its very nature and being had to some degree changed many of the younger spirits had become twisted aggressive bloodthirsty cruel even the dryads had twisted themselves into new shapes more capable of waging war and they were very keen to make use of their new forms and the most extreme amongst them were the branch wraiths these were powerful dryad-like creatures capable of wielding the special life magic of atholorin they were the forests gardeners its caretakers and the ones shaping its ecosystem but with the war they had become far more aggressive they had become hostile towards all other races so regardless of whether or not they were worshipers of chaos or not they viewed them all universally as a threat to athelorin and were of the opinion that the only possible way that their beloved homeland could ever be truly safe was if these other races be driven to extinction and with their exalted position within athelorin as well the forest's very own gardeners and caretakers they had a lot of power a lot of influence and this of course where we arrive at the question of how precisely this functions within athalorin obviously the forest does not have a court or a parliament or any kind of internal political structure instead it's perhaps best to say that the forest as a whole has a temperament a set of humors when they are in balance nature is in balance when they are tilted too far to one extreme things get out of hand it gets overly aggressive it gets overly submissive perhaps it grows too fast it shrinks too quickly it does not resist invaders with the necessary vigor to ensure that they do not come again or it assaults them with such ferocious cruelty that any who escape will tell their comrades all about how the evil forest must be destroyed too much in either direction would be bad for aethel lauren or at least that was the thought of the oldest and most venerable of the tree men durthu within the forest the three men are i suppose you could say the heart and soul of the forest the ancient ones and they truly are old almost immeasurably so they are spirits that have permanently bonded themselves to their new barked homes and can only ever leave that body if it is utterly destroyed durathu was also as mentioned the one leading the forces of athalorden to the aid of the elves he was also the one who had argued the elves should be allowed to be kept within the forest of athelorin and revolted at the aggression of the branch wraiths he now sought to re-establish balance and fortunately for him events in the wider world was about to make this possible this was around about the time of the war of vengeance where the high elves and the dwarves fought a massive devastating war against one another a war that eventually the dwarves won in a way at the very least and whilst most of the high elves were evacuating the old world that had grown a considerable colony of high elves close to the forest of athalorin one that had been threatened on multiple occasions by the dwarves but the forest had apparently aided the elves in ways that the elves themselves did not fully understand they had myths and legends about the forest it was to them a ancient cold dark dangerous place but it is easier to discount old myths and apparent folkloric beliefs when there are angry dwarves with axes bashing down your doors one threat suddenly appears to be a lot more pressing than the other and so many of these elves fled into the forest some even saying that they were coaxed into doing so by the elves who were now reawakened the ones that have stayed in the forest under duratu's protection that had supposedly now been used to recruit the other elves to make up a full new community within the forest ruled over by their twin demigods ariel and orion these two would be the elves direct connection to the forest and the elves were now expected to live in complete harmony with the forest dorthu also thought that if the elves were treated correctly and raised properly to value the forest they would be a tool to maintain the balance of the forest and since the elves were adapted utilizing magic they could effectively supplant the branch wraiths and durthu's gamble paid off the elves were more than grateful for their new homes for protection against the dwarves who were currently engaged in the genocide of their race on the old world and the forest provided for them everything they needed homes and the great oaks food aplenty magic to learn and study and of course the great oak itself subtly working its mind [ __ ] magic upon the elves in time the wood elves would not only grow to supplant the branch rates as the forest's primary caretakers they would also become the forest's foremost protectors and defenders yet more importantly durthu's plan appeared to be working since the waddells were not magical creatures they were not affected by the increase in magical energy sweeping through the forest like the branch rates or the dryads were and since the wood elves had been saved by dorthu and informed of how to coexist with the forest by the very same people that durthu had once saved they established themselves not only as the caretakers and the protectors of the forest but also to a certain degree its conscience or perhaps that is not quite the correct term to use here maybe equilibrium is better as they always sought to maintain the balance of nature and ensure that no one extreme ever became dominant but durthu had overlooked one vital problem whilst the wood elves were not magical creature that is certain and so they were not affected by the winds of magic that did not mean that they were unchanging in fact it meant the precise opposite whilst creatures of magic act on the behalf of certain rules certain imperatives they are creatures bound by these instincts one might even say mortals however are far less predictable and whilst for many many many hundred years the wood elves upheld their compact with the forest and maintained the balance and the equilibrium above all that like all things that has to do with mortals would ever so slowly change the wood elves were a better choice than most simply due to the fact that elves are long lived and they value tradition almost above anything else and so the change was exceedingly slow almost to the point where even durthu a creature of near unimaginable age was almost able to overlook the subtle changes but nevertheless they were there slowly but surely the nature of the wood elves began to change and along with them so did the nature of the forest the wood elves had originally been raised practically to be in perfect sink with the forest and to maintain balance above anything else but the way in which they maintained that balance began to slowly change wood elf society began to evolve they were far less susceptible to the influences of the forest than many other creatures unlike for example the mighty forest dragons who essentially became to a degree at least subservient to the will of the forest the word elves began constructing their own hierarchical system they began making their own clans they began having their own ambitions and their own values to begin with this was seen as a natural aspect of balance for surely if you wish for true balance you must by definition have opposites but it is extraordinarily difficult to maintain a perfect balance between two extremes and would help society began slipping more and more towards an interventionist side and so did the forest in general even dortho one of the primary advocates for neutrality and balance is starting to lose his patience with certain aspects of the other races think of athalorin not as a forest for a moment but as a living breathing entity for in many ways it is now imagine that entity existing for hundreds of years thousands of years tens of thousands of years and that entity is constantly exposed to the aggression of other entities ever since the great war against chaos the forest has seemingly been besieged pushed back to its very last bastion its ability to travel across the world hampered or in the worst case outright severed and then have that very same forest be under de facto attack from the nearby races the dwarves view athalorn as little more than kindling dangerous kindling admittedly but kindling nevertheless the high elves used to view the forest with distrust and disdain they viewed it as an entity separate from their own authority at least for the time being but they never viewed it as an independent force nor ever would they do so the idea that the high elves would ever consider anything to be of a higher authority than themselves is downright ludicrous and as for the humans the brutonians they fear and suspect the forest although they are probably one of the closest races beyond the wood elves themselves of course to have actually entered into something that resembles a respectful relationship and alliance with the forest if a britonian peasant or knight gets lost in the forest they are probably the only people in the old world that might nourish some sort of hope of being allowed to leave again now misunderstand me correctly not much hope for as far as the wood elves and the forest spirits are concerned anything and everything that has crossed the boundary cans is fair goal but well some hope is still hope but again the bretonnians are the exception practically the sole exception whereas all of the other races orcs dwarves other humans beastmen chaos invaders demons undead all of these factions have done nothing but invade attack and hurt the forest and this again has been going on for thousands of years what do you think living being would do in those circumstances what do you think a animal would do if exposed to nothing but constant abuse for all that time it seems quite likely it would begin to lash out would it not to grow more aggressive and more distrustful the forest of athelorin has been a very closed society for well as long as virtually anyone even turthu can remember but now it is beginning to consider another path another option if merely protecting itself leads to no end of continuous abuse only broken up by short and highly impermanent pauses then maybe just maybe the best way to truly regain peace and balance is to remove all the threats and recently this has been a position more and more popular amongst the wood elves themselves the previous protectors of the balance are now beginning to speak quite openly about how to restore balance in the most permanent fashion possible not realizing of course that this probably would not result in balance but something quite opposite to it the branch rates on the other hand are still waiting for their time to return once again for they would not be happy even if the forest of athelorn spread across the old world choking out all life that was not it they wish to be the ones in charge again they do not like the wood elves they in fact outright hate and despise them as nothing more than yet another living parasitic entity feeding on the forest not to mention well they stole their job all those long long years ago and reduced them to little more than servants in what was once their very own realm it turns out that although calling the forest of atholorin alive may not technically be correct the force certainly is capable of emotions hate being a rather prominent one at the time and if it was not for games workshop deciding that the entire world was about to explode who knows maybe arthur lauren would have taken the offensive for once rather than merely sitting by perhaps the wood elves would have attempted to expand its borders and recreate the forest of old and let us not forget the differences of opinion between some of the more extreme spirits and the wood elves the situation might possibly have escalated into a full-scale civil war and in such a conflict on what side would durthu be i wonder what happens when a symbiotic relationship becomes one of mutually assured destruction and of course what happens with the forest as a whole as mentioned it is an entity that reacts to what happens within it and it is even able to react in a limited fashion to protect itself possibly even by warping the minds of the creatures that rest within how would it react i wonder if its various defenders and caretakers began murdering one another over differences of opinions that certainly would have been an interesting scenario to explore but well boom no more of that nonsense oh well anywho i'll wrap up the video there this has been uh my lore video on ethel lauren a rather interesting little forest in and of itself that both acts in a symbiotic relationship with the creatures that inhabit it but well it also takes a rather active part in creating that symbiotic relationship and is it truly symbiotic if one of the two parties forces itself upon the other another interesting question until next time i have been arch thank you all very much for watching and i hope to see you all again soon until then have a good day [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] you

Channel: Arch

Views: 96,598

Keywords: arch, Warhammer, Wood Elves, Forest, Athel Loren, Old World, warhammer fantasy, lore, Dryad, Tree Man, branchwraith, wood elf, durthu, wood elves warhammer

Id: l55QiXEtLyU

Length: 27min 33sec (1653 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 02 2019