Chapter Text
The man sat at a makeshift desk, lit by the glow of the fire burning nearby in an old metal storage vessel. He was a Halffoot, in his Autumn, tall and thin by his people’s standards, with greying red hair and grey eyes. He was scruffy and unwashed, clearly he had seen better days, but then, so had the world.
The man placed his tools on the desk. A leather bundle, containing a sheaf of papers that had clearly been scavenged and roughly sewn together. A jar, still labelled in Dwarvish as containing blueberry jam, now repurposed to hold homemade ink. A thin wooden box, opened carefully, almost reverently, to reveal a brass-nibbed pen. The metalwork on the pen was exquisite, the work of a true master craftsman, the wooden handle delicately carved with a pattern of twisting vines.
The man took up his pen, dipped it in the ink, and began to write. Not Dwarvish, nor Elvish, nor Common. Instead a script composed of complex, intricate characters, interweaving with one another in ways that must have conveyed some sort of meaning, given the slow, careful hand with which he wrote. It was the hand of a master scribe, clear, deliberate, efficient. No ink or space wasted. He wrote the following:
From The Testament of Hrenbuvos Kelkallou se Karvriha, translated from the original Classical Halfish
The skies darken with ash and the waters are fouled with blood and the earth shakes to its foundations, the Dwarves and Elves destroy the world to hurt one another, no longer having any prospect of victory, only of making the other lose more. There are few of our people remaining, I know not if any will survive this war, but if they do, I hope that this work will help them to know our past, and if they do not, it might serve as our epitaph.
Once, we were a proud people. We had great cities and temples, our craftsmen were renowned across the world, our lands fertile and well-cultivated. Our borders with Kobolds, Orcs and Ogres were long ago settled, and even as Elvish expansion pushed them from their homes, we held firm.
The encroachment of the Elves lead our Chiefs and Thains to collaborate ever more, eventually forming a single council to speak for all the cities and towns. This council sought the aid and protection of the Dwarvish clans of the Eastern Continent, long our trade partners. This bought a few generations of peace, but only because the Elves are patient, their unnaturally extended lives inclining them to deceit and long plots.
Some years before I was born, the Elves stirred the Trolls of the Northern Continent to war, the tall brutes forcing many of their own to flee. At first, we welcomed these bedraggled refugees, livers full of pity for their children. But the Trolls are no less greedy than the Elves or Dwarves, no less warlike and quarrelsome than the Kobolds and Orcs, and soon they demanded lands to call their own.
They tore into the Dark Earth, ripping out metals and burning forests to make way for too-large fields, without sufficient windbreak or irrigation. They payed no heed to the words of the Chiefs nor the Thains, nor the entreaties of the common Folk, who saw the damage done and knew the consequences that would follow. The Trolls raised one of their own as King, and declared the lands to be their property, as if the Dark Earth could belong to any human. They drove the Folk from the lands, aided by fell Elven sorcery, for the Troll King had as his lover an Elf mage.
They drove the Folk from our eastern lands, and the Orcs and Kobolds from the lands nearby, and the Ogres into the Northern Mountains. They made commerce with the Elvish colonies, building roads to link their conquered cities to the Elf-ports of the eastern coast. Meanwhile, the Great Council of Chiefs and Thains met in Brinyagwin, the White City upon its hill, and planned for the war all could see coming.
The Council made bargains with the Dwarves. The clever hands of the Folk to make the delicate components of their most advanced devices, for weapons and aid building fortifications against the Trolls. The Chiefs sought to make peace with the Trolls and Elves, inviting them to visit and trade. For a time, this balance seemed to hold, but as ever the Elves were full of deceit.
From The Tragedy of the Halflings, Serenil of the House of Tol, Kerensil Press, Unredacted Version*, Translated from the original High Elvish:
The Halflings once had a civilisation of their own, back when the Western Continent was overrun by tribes of Orcs and Ogres and packs of Kobolds. They built cities that were very impressive for such small, shortlived beings, who fall somewhere between true humans and the beastly Orcs and Kobolds. Their society was a fascinating one, reliant on complex pheromonal cues that are still poorly understood[1] as much as on spoken language, organised into intricately interlocking nests, almost more like ants or bees than humans or demihumans.
Unlike the current day, in those times any given Halfling might belong to two or more nests, depending upon their context. All Halflings had a home nest, ruled over by a queen**, in which they would raise their young and engage in extraordinarily complex social lives[2], whilst when engaged in commerce or craft they would be part of another nest, ruled over by a commander***. They might even be temporarily part of other commander-lead nests while performing certain tasks, and might switch their home-nest and queen for a variety of reasons, including marriage, divorce, unresolveable personal conflicts or simple geographic convenience.
The presence of both queen and commander is necessary for the stability of any Halfling community. At the most basic form, a single nest containing both queen and commander might form a small village or hamlet, though until recently this would have been considered unusually precarious and only occurred in very sparsely populated and remote rural areas. If the commander is removed, the nest becomes vulnerable, as Halflings are not by nature confrontational, preferring to hide from threats, and as such can be driven out easily. A commander gives off pheromones that embolden and focus Halflings, making their already sharp senses more attuned and giving them the confidence and recklessness to fight, or to venture beyond their nest, or perform a risky task. A Halfling nest can survive for a few generations without a commander, but it will not thrive, and eventually it will encounter a threat it cannot simply hide from and collapse.
The queen is even more vital. The queen gives off pheromones that both calm their nestmates and trigger a submissive response, and their presence and unquestioned authority is necessary to maintain harmony and effective function within the nest. Without the queen, the complex social dynamics of the Halflings rapidly spiral into discord, while the lack of those calming pheromones leave the Halflings stressed and sickened, growing ill and withdrawn over time. A commander can fill the gap for a time, holding the nest together until a new queen emerges, but should there be no commander or the commander be unable to manage the dynamics of the nest, it will soon collapse entirely. The Halflings of the collapsed nest then either join a nearby nest, or should one not be available, simply waste away and die.
*From its publication until the Melini Incident, this text was available to the public only in a highly redacted form, omitting any reference to Halffoot cities or complex socio-political structures. The only unredacted copies were kept in the Imperial Archive, accessible only to those with clearance. Serenil of the House of Tol died in suspicious circumstances some three years after the publication of the redacted version, before her appeal of the censorship order could be heard.
**Translator’s Note: The term used here refers to a bee or ant queen, and is not gendered.
***Translator’s Note: The term used here refers to a military commander, usually of a scouting or expeditionary force.
[1]For more on these pheromonal cues, see Endocrinology of the Human and Near Human Races, Mirthis of the House of Val, Kerensil Press.
[2]For more, see Social and Sexual* Dynamics of the Halfling Nest, Kerisel of the House of Tol, Kerensil Press.
*Translator’s Note: the term used here refers to copulation between domestic animals, not people.
From History of the Western Continent, Part II, Between the Catalysms, Hal Oreskom, University of Kahka Brud Press, translated from the original Low Gnomish:
The last centuries of the Intercataclysmic Era were marked by a destabilisation of the states and cultures of the Western Continent, as the ascendant Elvish Empire pushed further into the continental interior from its coastal colonies, clashing with the Kobold and Tallman kingdoms of the south and the Orc and Ogre nations of the North. In response to this, the Halffoot cities of the north-west sought alliance with the Dwarvish clans of the Eastern Continent, foreseeing that the Elves would not be content with only part of the Western Continent.
The Dwarves were powerful enough to block the Elves from directly attacking the Halffoots, who became an increasingly important part of the wider Dwarvish economic sphere, producing vital advanced components for the most complex Dwarven machinery and weapons. While this made them indispensable to the Dwarvish clans, and thus ensured their protection, it also made them a target for the Elves as the cold war between Elvish and Dwarvish powers escalated.
The Halffoot cities tried to maintain a balance, opening their cities to visitors from both sides and acting as intermediaries for diplomatic talks, but the Elvish Empire could not abide their presence on the Western Continent, nor their close trade links with the Dwarves. Much as they pressured the Gnomish cities of the Southern Continent and the Tallman kingdoms of the Northern Continent, the Empire attempted to coerce the Halffoots to cut ties with the Dwarves and submit to Elvish dominion. Unlike the Gnomes, the Halffoots were too weak, most having insufficient mana to perform even basic magic, and too short lived to be given any level of respect by the Elves, but unlike the Tallmen they did not simply submit, nor did they allow the Elves to divide and conquer them. Elvish pressure was instead the catalyst for the formation of the first and thus-far only large Halffoot state, the Confederated Cities of the Dark Earth’s Children[1].
Unable to attack the Confederation directly without drawing the Dwarves into the war, the Elvish Empire instead worked covertly to undermine it, by driving Orcish and Kobold refugees into more sparsely populated areas and stirring discontent until those refugees rose in rebellion, then moving in to ‘restore order’, slowly encroaching into Halffoot territory. When Orcs and Kobolds became too rare in the region to use, the Empire fomented discord among the Tallmen of the Northern Continent, driving many to flee to the northern part of the Western Continent, displacing most of the remaining Orcs, Kobolds and Ogres either into the mountains or to the south and west. The Tallman kingdoms that formed in the aftermath were client states of the Elvish Empire in all but name, each ruled de jure by a Tallman monarch, and de facto by their Elvish court mage.
The southern Tallman kingdoms turned to the Gnomish cities for aid and training in magic, and were able to hold off the Elvish Empire well enough that they were permitted to retain a higher degree of independence, while the Kobold kingdom of Bidvarku, deep in the southern desert, isolated itself so thoroughly that the Elves were content to simply ignore it. Soon, the Halffoot Confederation was the only part of the Western Continent not under Elvish domination.
[1]This name references the chief deity of the classical Halffoot religion, a chthonic mother goddess usually called the Dark Earth, it being customary to avoid using the actual names of deities unless one specifically sought their attention.
From Languages of the Classical World: Part III; the Western Continent, Chapter 7: Halfish, Firen of Izganda, University of Izganda Press, translanted from the original Northern Dwarvish:
Halfish is an unusual language family on multiple levels. The dominant theory posits a relationship with Ogreish and Northern Tallmanish, but a recently posited competing theory instead groups it with Orcish-Kobold languages based on the grammar and vocabulary of recently discovered archaic Halfish texts, supported by anatomical and cultural parallels with these demihuman races, though this is highly controversial and considered offensive to Halffoots.
Classical Halfish was the common prestige language of the Halffoot cities of the northwestern Western Continent in the Intercataclysmic Era, based on Brinyagwinish with influences from Classical Dwarvish and the dialects of the coastal cities. It was written in a logo-syllabic script derived from an indigenous logographic system used in the region in the Archaic Era, after the First Cataclysm, and is a relative of Old Orcish and Bidvarkan scripts. Classical Halfish script is particularly notable for its complexity and the difficulty of interpretation, and is now only decipherable by a handful of experts[1].
Archaic and Classical Halfish had an Ergative-Absolutive morphosyntactic alignment, preserved in most modern Western and Southern Halfish languages[2], and polysynthetic case marking with 12 noun cases[3] and a distinctive temporal aspect system that derives from the ablative and allative cases[4]. It also has a system of intitial-consonant mutation triggered by the end of the preceding word, making texts written in Common alphabetic script often more difficult to decipher than those in Halfish script. This has been inherited by some Eastern and Southern Halfish languages, but largely lost in Western and Northern Halfish.
It can often be difficult to interpret Old Halfish texts, particularly when written in languages other than Brinyagwinish or Classical Halfish, as all modern Halfish languages descend from Classical Halfish, and other Old Halfish languages are poorly attested, often only in fragmentary texts with inconsistent orthographies, sometimes featuring unique characters without known meaning. The Old Halfish language family appears to have begun diverging some centuries prior to the First Cataclysm, in the particularly poorly attested Dungeonbuilding Age, adding additional difficulty. Much of the history of Precataclysmic and Intercataclysmic Halfish languages and cultures may be irretrievably lost, or preserved only in restricted Elvish records, and so may as well be lost.
[1]A heated debate in the field concerns the interweaving of characters. Most agree that this is simply a stylistic and cosmetic choice of the scribe, but some posit that the visual interconnection of the characters conveys paratextual information about the topic and the scribe’s own opinion. This theory is supported by the recent discovery of typesets in the ruins of Brinyagwin that had many variants of characters interwoven in different ways. However, the inability to interpret what these interweavings mean weakens the position of this theory.
[2]Eastern and Northern Halfish languages have largely shifted to either Ergative-Accusative or Nominative-Accusative alignements, most likely influenced by Dwarvish and Northern Tallman languages.
[3]Ergative, absolutive, dative, genitive, locative, instrumental, vocative, ablative, allative, commessive, equative, prolative
[4]The past tense is conveyed by adding the ablative prefix onto a verb, while the future tense is conveyed by adding the allative prefix to a verb. This can be combined with the perfective, imperfective continuous, discontinuous, optative, aversive, and dubiative apsect and mood suffixes to convey completion and the speaker’s opinion on the reliability of the information and whether it is a positive or negative event. This temporal aspect system has been retained in all modern Halfish languages, even those whose case systems have collapsed and otherwise lost the allative and ablative cases.
From Travels Among the Barbarians of the West, chapter 15; the Halffoots, Pattasil of the House of Tol, privately published, translated from the original High Elvish:
A more delightful people may not exist upon this earth than the Halffoots, a Bright, Cheerful and Contented Race who are Happy to live their Simple lives ensconced among their own. They lust not for Power or Land, nor aspire to Dominate or seek any Greater purpose, nor do they Resent us who have Longer lives and Understanding. Rather, they Pity us for our Ambition and Greed, and Joyfully and Generously welcome us into their cities and homes, where they ply us with Food and Drink and try to teach us their Simple Joys.
So Generous and Guileless are these folk, that one might even Purchase from them their Very Souls! So long as something of Value is Given in exchange, the Bond between Daemon and Human may be dissolved without killing either. In this way I acquired my Favourite souvenir of this journey, an Adorable Flying Squirrel daemon I have named Nut-Seeker. Her Human was a Kind and Gentle lad, who Offered his Daemon to me with only Minimal Prodding, and it cost me only an enchanted scarf! Though if you should wish to Acquire one of your own, I Suggest that you do so as you are leaving, for the Halffoots did become Skittish and Evasive after I Bought her, and there is Much Fun to be had in Halffoot cities besides.*
It is Best to arrange to visit during one of the many Festivals throughout the Year, where they Honour their Queer Animal gods or Commemorate their History or Mark the Changes of the Seasons and the Movements of the Stars, or Sometimes Seemingly just Because they want an Excuse to Revel. The Strange way in which the Little Folk communicate Without Words leads to a Palpable feeling of Excitement and Fun throughout the Community. Their Joy is Infectious, and even the Sternest and Most Dignified of Imperial Courtiers cannot Help but be Caught Up in it.
I visited the Greatest of the Halffoot Cities, a Charming Little Place Called something Unpronounceable - as All Halffoot Words are - that I was Told means White City. It is Well Named, for it Rises upon a Hill, in Five Tiers of White Stone Walls that Shine in the Sunlight, with Red Terracotta Tiled roofs just Barely poking Above. Within the Walls a Warren of Narrow, Winding streets and alleys conceals Multitudinous Delights and Wonderful Surprises. From Cute little Pubs and Restaurants to Impeccably tended Gardens to Temples covered in Exquisite Relief Sculptures and Mosaics. While one Must, Unfortunately, become Accustomed to Ducking Awkwardly under Low Doorframes and Ceilings, for the Halffoots build their Dwellings and Businesses For their Own Convenience and None Other, I Found it to be Worth this Minor Indignity to Explore such a Diverting location.
*Translator’s Note: This paragraph was initially censored by the Imperial Press Office, for “Presenting the Empire in a Negative Light”. In a later, Postwar edition, however, it was restored, while all mention of Halffoot cities or complex architecture were redacted in order to present them as simple rural people.
From Religions and Cults of the Classical World, Chapter 9; Halffoots, Orcs and Kobolds, Ed. Liris of the House of Ryn, University of the Southern Central Continent Press.
The Halffoots of the Classical Era had as complex and varied a pantheon of gods and corpus of myths as any other race. Their gods mostly took the form of animals, and were referred to as such, because it was considered impolite to use a deity’s real name unless one was directly addressing them, so as not to distract them from what they were doing without cause. Exceptions to the general tendency towards animal formed gods are the triad of highest gods, usually referred to as the Dark Earth, the supreme mother goddess, Midsummer Herself, the goddess of fertility, passion, new beginnings and births, and Midwinter Himself, the god of travellers, hunters, memory and the dead. Below them was a sprawling pantheon of animal deities that often varied significantly between communities, representing more specific domains or local geographic features. Among the more widespread were Cat, god of the hearth, Magpie, goddess of merchants and thieves, and Weasel, god of medicine.
Many of these lesser gods were shared with nearby Orcish and Kobold cultures, and some, like Weasel and Cat, survive in the Bidvarkan pantheon as minor deities, while the triad instead is composed of Earth, Sun and Moon. Little is known for certain about the actual practice of Classical Halffoot religion, as relatively little written material from that time survives and modern Halffoot religions are much changed, having lost most of their gods and adopted a philosophy of impermanence and transience, likely in response to the cultural traumas of their displacement, the Great War, and the daemon trade.
As they are now a people in what may well be terminal decline, this pessimistic philosophy appears to provide a comfort that their old gods could not, and even the supreme triad has faded in many Halffoot communities into little more than figures of speech.
Some ethicists argue that given the culpability of Elvish imperialism in the destruction of the Halflings, Elves have a responsibility to protect them and provide a gentle end to their race. Others argue that modern Elves are not responsible for the acts of their parents and grandparents, and while sad, the decline of the Halffoots was an inevitability given their unsteady position between human and demihuman, the separability of their daemons proof that they’re really closer to demihuman than human.
Questions:
How does classical Halffoot religion compare to Orcish and Kobold beliefs? Is it reasonable to infer likely practices from modern Orchish and Kobold religions?
Do modern Elves bear any responsibility for the decline of the Halffoots? Do Elves of the Central-Southern Continent?
Do you think Halffoots are human or demihuman? Why?
What do you think should be done about the Halffoots?Research Assignment:
Choose a Halffoot deity and try to determine the following: Name, Region of Origin, Orcish or Kobold Equivalents, Surviving Influence.