The Vle-Ya were willing to palaver with humans, but found it difficult to do so. The slightest touch of sunshine or snow was unbearable for them, and the tongues of mankind were, to their ears, so slow and stilted that misunderstandings were common. For every human who listened to a Vle-Ya speak of what their long years had taught them–the lay of the land, how to grow and harvest, what the trees and animals wished to say had they the tongues for it–there was another who found them insulting, frightening.

They had been in decline for many years before mankind had arrived; tradition held that the number of Vle-Ya had been set at the dawning of the world, and they did not deign to reproduce–every encounter that ended in bloodshed and every accident in the dark and secret parts of the forest diminished them forever. In time, the leader of the Darkwood Vle-Ya, Ervolos, called for the mayor of Brightspear to parley at forest’s edge at midnight on midsummer.

The exact words between them were taken to Mayor Burrowe’s grave, but he reported that Ervolos had spoken of the dwindling of his people, and that there were no longer enough to discharge their traditional duties as keepers of the forest. He charged the humans with its stewardship and opened the lands to settlement. He and the remaining Vle-Ya departed the next day, never to be seen again. Some say they settled in a smaller forest near Harwickshire, others that they walked into the sea at Durnsmere.

But every family that settled in Darkwood kept their memory alive through the telling of tales, and many a farmer felling trees and clearing the land has worried what might happen should the Vle-Ya return.