Hafuwë

The Hafuwë are the small people of Eldamar. At full height they stand about three feet, and they are small and wiry with it. A man who worked alongside two of them complained that they could slip away from him whenever they liked, and he was not paying them a compliment. Yara, three feet of her and one arm, rides behind a six-foot man and is faster than he is.

There are two other words in common use for them and both are insults. Halfling is the commoner, and calling them the little people instead is no better and no politer; the people who say either would mostly be surprised to be told so. Past their height and their build, nothing anywhere gives their lifespan, how they age, what color they come in, or how a Hafuwë is put together at all.

They are widely said to eat no meat. The saying travels confidently and has never been confirmed by anybody who was asked to. A merchant’s daughter on the road west had it that the little people eat only plants and admitted in the same breath that she had never met one, and did not know. Koa Attila, who as a very small child lived in a town where some of them lived, remembers watching them eat and does not remember what.

Eldamar and Elsewhere

Their homeland is Eldamar, the Elden lands, north of Peredhel, and what is said of it depends on who is doing the saying. In Idir it is magic forest, a northern realm of woods where strange things live. Nearer accounts have a colossal untamed rainforest, air heavy with moisture, at war on every border, every day. Whether the Hafuwë come out of Eldamar itself or out of a land next to it was never settled either.

They are not alone in it. Eldamar is the fey realm as much as it is theirs: the Fay bind themselves each to a particular oak that carries their markings, and the soul-eating hags of the night are held to come from there. They are also not confined to it. Hafuwë live in real numbers in the Barren Lands, in the cities of Peredhel, and in Idiran towns, though they are reckoned uncommon as adventurers alongside the gnomes and the námomycin. Where the Saltmarch has three names, theirs is the one that calls it the edge of their own forest, while Peredhel’s surveyors named the same ground for its salt.

Bhaasha

Their tongue is Bhaasha, which they share with the fey and which is written as well as spoken. It belongs to the Sylvan family, and Sylvan did not begin on Erôth: it came from a distant realm by a road that has long since faded out of knowing. The survey of the tongues takes the Hafuwë speaking a Sylvan language as evidence that they came from that land too. No other account of where they came from was ever written down.

The Maranashaya

Among the Hafuwë, Marg’s reapers are called the Maranashaya, and are said to take the form of shifting shadows in the underbrush, blending into the forest until it is time to claim a soul. The Hafuwë do not fear them. They hold them a part of the natural cycle of the forest. Elsewhere the reapers are said not to speak, not to feel, and to show nothing. When a Hafuwë dies the body is left in the forest, so that the Maranashaya can guide the spirit back to the ever-living jungle.

They keep rites and spirit practices enough of their own that one of them can be the person on a crew who knows them. What those rites are has not been set down, and no god of their own appears anywhere.

Campaign Updates

The Hafuwë the company knows best is Yara, who ambushed them in the hills and stood down on learning they were not gnolls. She is a warrior-healer of the Order of the Broken Chain, devout of Vroga Waruk, and both of those are Barren Lands institutions she trained into rather than anything her people gave her. She joined the company after the gnolls of the Valley of Doom killed the two she had been trained with, and she has been at the Crack since.

Two more were brothers. Eralan and Jahi Rasi hired on to Dwayne’s expedition into Idir to strip Wraithblade Keep of Mól relics for a payout big enough to retire on, put up by somebody with money. Eralan was the elder and the crew’s lead scout, cautious and observant and the one everybody trusted; Jahi was its lorekeeper and kept its notes. The keep killed nearly all of them. Jahi died there. Eralan was cut alive out of the cocoons in the basement, barely breathing, and was carried unconscious for the better part of a week before he woke in Loshev and asked after his brother. He has since been offered a post with the town guard.

Kithul was set upon in the woods by a party that included a pair of Hafuwë, and Dwayne has wondered aloud whether they were the same two. Nobody has established it either way.

Eldamar itself has never been visited. What reaches Idir of it comes down the trade roads as goods: darkwood grown there and shipped south through the Vala, and the Eldamar sequoia, a tree of centuries whose seeds will not germinate without fire.