Halfling

The people who were not planned¶

Every people in Valdrin has a founding. A first king, a first hold, a god who shaped them or a god who cursed them. Halflings have a circumstance.

They are elf and human in exact balance, claimed by neither side, and there is no halfling word for homeland because there has never been one to name. What there is instead is the oldest and most reliable fact of halfling life: wherever a halfling is born, somebody there would have preferred otherwise.

A thousand years is a long time to be told no¶

Here is the part outsiders never think through. A halfling lives a thousand years.

Not sixty, like the human half. Long enough to watch the family that turned them away die out entirely and be forgotten by the town. Long enough to be refused by a magistrate, then by his son, then by his grandson, each of them refusing on the authority of a decision he was never present for and cannot explain.

Nothing about the halfling situation ever resolves, because nobody involved ever dies of it. The wound does not scar over. It is simply carried, by the same person, for centuries, while the people who inflicted it turn to dust and are replaced by strangers who inherited the reasoning and none of the memory.

Two answers, and the many who gave neither¶

Out of that came the two conclusions that are now the bitterest enmity in the settled world.

The Forlorn Outcasts chose coexistence, and chose it as a conviction rather than a compromise. Something new can be built, they hold, without erasing what came before. It is a position that requires being spat at and continuing to hold it, for a very long time, on purpose.

The Sintari took the identical wound and reached the opposite verdict: that mercy is weakness, that coexistence is a lie sustained by submission, and that the hatred aimed at them was always envy wearing the mask of fear. They answer fire with inferno and consider the arithmetic settled.

They are not two peoples. They are the same people, with the same parents and the same century of insults, arguing about what to do next. That is precisely what makes it unbearable, and why no outside power has ever mediated it successfully.

What tends to get lost is that most halflings alive have joined neither. 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 the bulk of the race declines to stand on, and both of them know it, and neither is comfortable saying so.

That silence costs the unaffiliated more than anyone. A halfling turned out of a port because a Sintari raid happened three provinces away has been charged with a conviction he does not hold, by people who never asked, and the only faction that will take him in afterward is the one whose case has just been proved for it.

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

What nobody's responsibility teaches¶

Ten centuries of belonging to no one produces a very particular competence.

Halflings improvise, repair, negotiate and endure. They are clever in the way of people who have never once been able to assume that help is coming. They are rarely the strongest hands in a settlement and very frequently the ones who notice the granary is running short before the ledger does, then mention it to somebody who will be thanked for it.

In your settlement¶

Halflings work well and get on poorly, and both are structural rather than personal.

Take halfling settlers and a Purist bloc will form around them faster than around any other people, in almost any mixed colony, because the argument was imported generations before your charter was sealed and it does not need your help to start.

Set against that: they are quick, capable, deeply resourceful, and they will still be working for the colony long after every human name on the founding roll has been chiselled into a wall.

Decide early whether you are prepared to defend the choice, and then defend it. Halfway is worse than either end, and the halflings have seen halfway before.