Spriggan

Spriggan

Born of shadows in a forest that has never seen noon, the Spriggans are the Kingdom's illusionists, its thieves, and — by a margin nobody at court will acknowledge — its most important merchants. Nothing shines in the Twilight Veil, which is precisely why Spriggans covet things that do. Light itself is currency there, hoarded as bottled foolsfire, polished chitin, and stolen dew-glass.

They have a reputation among the other Faeries as treasure hunters at best and outright thieves at worst. It is deserved. It is also, they will point out, a strange thing to be scolded about by a nobility whose gardens are built from soil hauled out of the provinces.

Appearance

Grey through charcoal, with matte skin that does not catch light and wings patterned like bark or the shadow of leaves. A still Spriggan in dim conditions is genuinely difficult to see without magic, and Spriggans are still very often.

Bright light is genuinely painful to them, which is why Spriggan envoys to the Eternal City attend at dusk, hooded, and are described in Ring correspondence as furtive.

Attuned Magic

Shadow. A nascent Spriggan dims a lamp, deepens an existing shadow, or blurs their own outline. A powerful one raises full illusions, walks unseen through a lit room, and can put a convincing double of themselves in one place while standing in another. It is the subtlest of the attuned magics and the only one that regularly beats a glamour at its own game.

Its commercial application is provenance: a Spriggan can make an object hard to look at, which is why Duskmarket goods cross checkpoints and why the Queen's Customs has stopped pretending its inspections mean anything in the Twilight.

Life

Clan-holds built into standing trunks and fallen giants, lit by rented foolsfire and shuttered by law. Work is trade, brokerage, farming glow in the Lampfield beds, and the several professions the Kingdom would rather call one profession.

Names. A Spriggan name is an asset, not an identity: it accrues credit, and it is changed when the credit runs out. Most Spriggans hold three or four in a lifetime and a few maintain several at once, which is legal in the Twilight and fraud everywhere else.

Arrival. A newly arrived Spriggan is given a stake — a small loan of light, goods, or standing — by whoever takes them in, on terms. It is the whole culture in miniature: nobody is abandoned and nobody is given anything. The first debt is repaid or defaulted, and either way it becomes the first entry in a name.

Light law. Carrying an open light off the marked roads is illegal, because a light on the forest floor is visible for a mile and a half and everything that hunts here hunts by it. Lanterns are hooded, shuttered, and rented.

Society

Mercantile and clannish, organized around the Duskmarket — a settlement built on and inside a fallen giant of a tree, where anything at all can be bought and nobody asks where it came from. Grismer, the Hollow Baron, presides over it without holding any office the Kingdom recognizes.

Credit is the government. Grismer's book clears the province's trades, and the sanction for wronging a counterparty is not violence but ceasing to be cleared, which is the end of you.

Tribes

The Veil sorts its people by how much light they are willing to live with.

All three trade through the Duskmarket, which sits on the seam between forest and vale and belongs, officially, to nobody.

Currents

The Lampfield Combine. The foolsfire growers, who control the light supply and therefore everything else, and who have kept the price stable for two centuries at a level that makes them rich.

The Wick-Cutters. Light thieves who run unlicensed glow into the Rookeries and are folk heroes to everyone who cannot afford a lantern. The Combine calls them saboteurs; they call themselves a distribution problem.

The Shutter Watch. The province's law: hooded-lantern patrols, underpaid, overextended, and about a third in Grismer's pocket by the most charitable estimate.

The Border Trade. Hollowgate's commerce with the bugbears across the unmarked frontier — smuggling by Kingdom definition, the local economy by any other.

Relations

The Kingdom's official position is that the Duskmarket is a den of thieves. Its unofficial position is that the Ring's noble houses do a great deal of business there through intermediaries, particularly in items they would rather not be seen buying. The Twilight Forest borders the Nightwood and the border is not marked; Spriggans and Bugbears understand each other rather better than either admits in mixed company.

Playing One