Sintari

The other answer¶

The Sintari rose from the same shattered origins as the Forlorn Outcasts and drew the opposite conclusion, and they are no more the halfling people than the Outcasts are.

That distinction is one the great powers have stopped making, and the Sintari have benefited from the confusion more than they will admit. Every halfling shopkeeper turned out of an Aethrassian port because a Sintari raid happened three provinces away is a recruit the Sintari did not have to persuade, and Cinderreach does not have to argue its case where the chanceries have already argued it for them.

Certainty, and where it leads¶

Generations of scorn hardened into conviction, until vengeance came to be mistaken for truth.

They do not see themselves as a compromise between two peoples. They see themselves as the rightful culmination of a flawed world, and they read the hatred of humans and elves as envy wearing the mask of fear. Mercy is weakness. Coexistence is a lie sustained by submission. They answer fire with inferno and consider the arithmetic settled.

You called us the error. We have decided to be the correction.

Sintari declaration, recovered from a burned Aethrassian outpost

The empty seat¶

The Sintari keep no god, and their reasons are not the philosophers' reasons.

No god is needed to establish what was done to them, and none is needed to establish what is owed for it. The evidence is on the record, in three chanceries, in a hand nobody has ever tried to deny. What follows from the evidence is a matter of arithmetic, and the Sintari did the arithmetic, and there is no seat in their thinking from which anything could tell them the sum is wrong.

This is what makes them unlike every other hostile power on the map. There is no sanctity to appeal to, no oath to bind them, and no doctrine of restraint anywhere in the structure, because restraint was the thing they were asked to practise for eight hundred years while nothing changed.

Not opportunism¶

They tolerate outsiders exactly as long as those outsiders do not stand in the way of what must be done. This is not a negotiating position. It is a schedule.

Qal Sahid records its standing toward them at ninety points below neutral, Aethrassia and Ithelanne at eighty, Lyaud and Vuskar at seventy. Those are not diplomatic figures. They are casualty figures that somebody has converted into ink.

The one warm line on the roll runs to the Outcasts, and it is the thing about the Sintari that nobody can explain tidily. They will not raid their cousins. They will shelter them, arm them if asked, and take their refugees without conditions, and then go back out and do the thing the Outcasts have spent a thousand years telling them not to do.

Meeting them¶

There is no arrangement to reach.

Prepare the defence, keep the granary deep inside the settlement, and understand that a Sintari raid is not opportunism and not banditry. It is a position paper, delivered by people who have thought about it longer than your kingdom has existed, and it will be followed by another one.

What the rolls record¶

Standing with other powers¶

Denied to its settlers¶

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