The Leshy

The Leshy hold the Twilight Forest: hunters, trappers, and occasional waylayers of Faeries foolish enough to wander in. Their villages sit high in the trees near the canopy, because they like to fly above it for the starlight — at the constant risk of owls, which at this scale are the apex predator of the entire province.

The Canopy

Living high is a compromise between two dangers. The forest floor in permanent dusk belongs to things with better senses than a Spriggan's; the open air above the canopy belongs to the owls. The Leshy have settled on the boundary layer and built everything there — platform villages, rope roads, trap-lines running down the trunks.

They make cloaks and armour from raven and owl feather, which renders forms already hard to see very nearly impossible, and which carries an obvious second meaning that they decline to disavow.

The Reputation

The waylaying is real, historical, and considerably rarer than the Kingdom believes. What survives is a working understanding: the forest is not a road, anyone crossing it uninvited has made their own arrangements, and a guide can be hired at the forest edge for a reasonable fee.

The Navi find this embarrassing and say so. The Leshy point out that the Duskmarket, which the Navi are very fond of, sits in their forest and does its best business precisely because nobody there asks questions.

Ways

Traditional in the way people are traditional when the alternative has not been demonstrated to work. They hunt, trap, cure and trade at the forest edge, and their material culture is almost entirely animal — bone, sinew, feather, hide.

Directly beneath them, through the forest floor, lies Sorrowloom and the Sullen. The two peoples have an old and largely unspoken understanding: the Spriggans do not dig, the Sullen do not climb, and whatever falls through belongs to whoever finds it.