Forlorn Outcasts

The choice, not the people¶

The Forlorn Outcasts are not the halfling people. They are one of two answers halflings gave to the same question, and a great many halflings gave neither.

Most halflings in Valdrin are not Forlorn and not Sintari. They are shopkeepers in Aethrassian ports, pilots on Vuskan crews, farmhands in valleys where the argument is a thing that happens somewhere else. The two factions are the organised ends of a spectrum most of the race declines to stand on, and both know it, and neither finds it comfortable to say.

Wellmeet is the Forlorn settlement the others were measured against: founded on open ground, walled late and reluctantly, and named for the only thing its founders were asking for.

Between rejection and resolve¶

Born of human and elven blood and carrying a heritage neither side fully accepts, the Outcasts endure in the space between. Branded an abomination by some. Tolerated, conditionally, by others.

Their answer is coexistence, held as a conviction rather than a compromise: that something new can be built without erasing what came before. It is a harder position than either of the ones it sits between, and it is maintained daily by people who are handed fresh reasons to abandon it.

We will not answer hatred with fire. We will answer it with a house, and another house, and another.

Forlorn creed, spoken at the founding of a settlement

A thousand years of holding it¶

The thing outsiders never think through is the arithmetic. A halfling lives a thousand years.

Which means a Forlorn elder holding to coexistence is not making a decision once. She is making it again after the magistrate refuses her, again after his son refuses her, again after his grandson refuses her on the authority of a ruling he was never present for and cannot explain. Nothing resolves, because nobody involved dies of it, and the people who inflicted the wound turn to dust and are replaced by strangers who inherited the reasoning and none of the memory.

The Path is what makes that survivable. The Outcasts keep the Hallowed Path, a godless code walked toward personal perfection, and its central claim is precisely fitted to their situation: dignity cannot be granted, and therefore cannot be confiscated.

The cousins¶

Their most bitter enemy is not on their standings roll. It is on it at twenty points above neutral.

The Sintari took the identical wound and reached the opposite verdict, and the Outcasts have never been able to hate them properly for it, which is its own kind of wound. Cordial is the honest word. It means the two will trade, will shelter each other's refugees, and will not fight, and it means every Forlorn assembly spends part of every session on a disagreement with people they refuse to call enemies.

They are my cousins. They are not wrong about what was done to us. They are wrong about what to do next.

A Forlorn elder, asked about the Sintari

Meeting them¶

Reliable, patient, and unusually willing to trade with anyone, including powers that will not receive their envoys.

They ask one thing, which is that you do not repeat what has already been done to them. That is a lower bar than most powers manage to clear, and the Outcasts keep a list of who has and who has not, and the list is in a thousand-year memory rather than a ledger.

What the rolls record¶

Standing with other powers¶

Denied to its settlers¶

This people never builds: Woodcutter, Forester, Deep Mine.