On the distant outskirts of Archet one balmy midsummer's night, a mere slip of a girl was scrambling out of her window, fleeing her family’s ramshackle farmstead home. She had no clue as to where she was going or how she would live, what she did know though was to leave she must; better to take her chances with the greater unknown than the known future that had been planned for her by uncaring and greedy parents.
By daybreak she found herself on the border of a large forest. It seemed, at least to her, a good place for a runaway to hide so she ventured in. Wandering this way and that for most of the morning it soon became obvious that even if she wanted to leave there was no way of finding her way back, the forest had swallowed her whole.
That was that, no longer was she Gwyyneth of Archet but rather Gwyyneth of Chetwood. She took a moment to rest and consider all these things, sitting beside a tiny stream in a quiet forest glade; hungry, afraid and alone but in that moment if asked the girl would have told you she was very happy. She was free and her new life stretched before her.
Dinner that night was a handful of berries. Her bed, a pile of leaves piled high in the cleft of a huge tree. She slept surprisingly well and early dawn the next day she was awoken by a gravelly voice.
“Well, well, what do we have here?”
