The Kumiho

The Kumiho farm the terraced centre of the island and fight over it, in a white-against-black war that has run longer than anyone can document and has never once become a battle.

Intensely physical and fiercely ambitious where their sisters above are austere, they cultivate mystical fox marbles in which they store power and wisdom, and losing one is the worst thing that can happen to a Kumiho short of dying.

The Two Colours

The white-furred hold the sunlit riverbanks and present themselves as elegant protectors of the harvest. The black-furred work from copse-hidden farmsteads and specialise in illusion, tactical deception and spiritual subterfuge.

They rarely engage in slaughter, which would ruin the crops they are fighting over. The war is prosecuted instead through poisonings, broken contracts, competitive shapeshifting and late-night skirmishes under the moon — and both factions attend the same festivals, observe the same water-rota, and marry across the line often enough that the colours are a politics rather than a lineage.

The Terraces

Beneath the feud, the Kumiho are the working population of the Elderlands: engineers, terrace farmers, drain-crews and clerks. Rota Hall keeps the paddies watered on a rota four centuries old, and holds, in practice, more power than anything above it — a fact the Hall is careful never to state.

Lowmist at the foot of the terraces handles every piece of business the Kitsune would rather not conduct at a shrine, which is most business.

Ways

The feud is genuine and the cooperation is also genuine, and outsiders consistently fail to believe both at once. A Kumiho will poison a rival's well in the evening and turn out at dawn to help clear that rival's drain, because the drain is the rota's and the well was personal.

The Huli Jing regard the whole arrangement as a luxury purchased by their watch on the Gates. They are not wrong, and the Kumiho know it, and this is why nobody in the Foxglades has ever refused a Huli Jing anything.