From the journal of Ardebast Raconteur:

My knowledge of the Tinkerwood is based solely on the word of my friend, Cyran the Tinkerer. It is an extraordinary tale that, were it not for my faith in my friend, I would discount as a fabrication. Cyran is not given to telling tall tales or exaggerating, so I believe everything he told me to be true. I plan on making the journey myself someday so I can see the wonders described to me with my own eyes.

As near as I can tell, based on what Cyran told me, the Tinkerwood has risen from the ruins of  the Lost Colony, which lied to the south of where Bree sits now, when Pelaria was young. The area has been mostly abandoned since the fall, mostly due to the difficulty in reaching it by paw. At one time, it served as a dumping ground, but as furs found better ways to dispose of their junk, the practice was abandoned.

From Cyran’s description, the Tinkerwood is a forest of metallic trees, composed of bits of fallen tinkers. I find it doubtful that a natural phenomenon caused the formations to take the shape of trees, though this of course has not been verified.

Perhaps most remarkable of all, is the being that resides in the Tinkerwood, a titanic tinker that towers over the landscape and who collects fallen tinkers to bring them to their eternal resting place. Cyran dubbed this terror the Undertinker.

The romantic in me would say that the Tinkerwood being where all tinkers go to die, their will to live on caused their metallic husks to assume the shape of the living, in this case, trees. It is just as likely that it is the Undertaker who shaped the tinker trees to honour the tinkers he brings there.

Carja’s Notes:

The Tinkerwood appears in the very first Animus story, Tale of the Tinkerwood. Ardebast’s romantic notion that it is where tinkers go to die reflects my original concept. Note that the title of the story was devised well after the story was finished. I had no notion of where the story would go when I started it. I was just writing a story about a rabbit out on a dark and stormy night. You could almost say that the Tinkerwood grew organically as the story went along. (Ha ha)