Tsen Shenlin

Shenlin grew up in Hwanggot as the youngest of five children of the Tsen family. From a young age she was fascinated by the ghost stories her grandmother, a superstitious woman, told her. As she grew up, she became a voracious reader in the pursuit of stories of ghosts and folklore from all across Tien Xia. It was in a book on the perhaps not-so-factual-history of Shenmen that she first heard of Willowshore. And there at age eleven she decided that she was going to live there one day.

This desire, forgotten over the following years, was reignited over a decade later when Shenlin learned that her cousin Lan had gained the honor of becoming an apprentice under the woodcarver guild. She soon joined him and has lived in Willowshore for some years now. Cousin Lan now specializes in carving religious iconography, some inspired by the stack of dusty books taking over the downstairs living space. In his downtime, he will carve small charms out of the scrap wood for Shenlin to add to the clothing she embroiders. Sometimes these charms end up on the small tapestry hanging from one of the rafters in Shenlin’s bedroom, surrounded by little embroidered depictions of folktales and the little lines that trace between some of them.