Among the Nissri of Thalorien, Tryll has always been the one who listens a little deeper than the rest. While her kin follow the music of leaves or the soft calls of forest birds, she climbs to heights few others dare—slender branches that sway beneath her weight, narrow stones overlooking ravines, or lonely ridges where the wind moves unchecked. There she stands for hours at a time, eyes half-lidded, body perfectly still, as rain gathers on her shoulders or sunlight pulses warm across her skin. In these long stretches of silence she becomes part of the forest’s architecture, a quiet sentinel shaped from bark and breath, listening to tremors no one else can hear.
Even as a youngling she sensed strange undercurrents—small shivers through the soil, odd pauses in the wind, hollow pulses that seemed to rise from far beneath the roots. The Elders humored her concerns, smiling gently as she tugged at their arms, but dismissed her warnings as nerves or childish imagination. Yet the signs grew stronger, the tremors more frequent, and Tryll’s stillness became laced with unease. She felt something stirring in the deep places of the world, something old enough to predate even the forest itself.

The night that followed—remembered now only as the Night of the Hollow Wind—has long since passed into a kind of soft-spoken legend. Those who were there rarely describe it in detail, and Tryll herself has never once told the full tale. What the forest remembers is simple: the ground had begun to breathe in a way no soil should breathe, swelling with slow, rhythmic force, as though something beneath it sought the surface. The Elders slept, unaware, but Tryll felt the shift in the air like a hand clasping her heart. And when no one listened to her final warning, she carried it instead to the Forest Guardians—older, sterner spirits of the wood who needed no words to understand the dread in her wide, trembling gaze.

What rose that night from the deep hollows of Veythar was a being of shadow and stone, ancient enough to have slept through ages of shifting realms. The Guardians met it with all the force Thalorien could muster, and by dawn the creature had been driven back into the depths from which it came. The clearing still bears the scars, softened by decades of moss and memory, but every Nissri knows that without Tryll’s persistence—without her uncanny sense for the rumblings beneath the world—the forest would have awakened to ruin.

It was the Guardians who named her after that night, not in ceremony but in quiet recognition: Tryll, the Hollow-Sense, the one who hears what lies below and what lies ahead. She accepted the name with a small nod and, true to her nature, slipped away before the praise could settle around her. By the time anyone thought to seek her out again, she had already climbed back to her chosen perch in the swaying canopy, listening once more to the shifting breath of Thalorien.
And though many seasons have passed, the forest still trusts her instincts above all else. When the wind changes in ways no one else notices, when the roots murmur of distant unrest, when the air holds a tension too light for ordinary senses, every Nissri knows to look for Tryll.
For she will already be listening.