The Sullen

Beneath the Twilight Forest lies an underworld built on the calcified remains of a prehistoric kingdom of insects and arachnids, and the Sullen live in it and make art out of it. Their complexions run from pale ash to deep charcoal-violet, painted with geometric motifs in crushed glowing mineral, and they drape themselves in midnight gossamer and velvet moth-down.

Sorrowloom

Arches cut from petrified mantis carapace, streets paved in iridescent beetle elytra, cavern vaults framed by fossilised arachnid ribs. Pale spectral lichen, weeping ghost-fungi and phosphorescent silk-moths cast violet and cerulean over the ancient ossuaries, and the silence hangs like an unplucked harp string.

It is a melancholy place and the Sullen do not dispute the name. They do dispute the implication: life is vigorous here, and a people who live among the bones of an older kingdom are not mourning it so much as keeping house in it.

Shadow and Earth

Their magic blends the density of Earth with the shifting arts of Shadow, which no other Gnomes attempt and no other race manages at all. A Sullen can sculpt darkness into physical substance or pass through stone as silently as an eclipse, and the two abilities are understood at home as the same skill viewed from different sides.

The craft that follows is what they are known for. Working the bone, horn and chitin plate of Sorrowloom's ancient beasts, they produce gossamer bone flutes, carapace jewellery and skeletal reliquaries of a delicacy that commands awe and very high prices across all of Everdew — including from buyers who would not sit down to dinner with them.

Ways

Reserved rather than unfriendly, and easily the most private of the three Gnome tribes. Where the Hearthkin fill a room and the Deepfarers run a shift, the Sullen work alone and hand the result over finished.

Their nearest surface neighbours are the Leshy directly overhead, and the two peoples have an old and largely unspoken understanding: the Spriggans do not dig, the Sullen do not climb, and material that falls through the forest floor belongs to whoever finds it.