Bugbear

Huge, hunched, and covered in coarse fur, bugbears feed on fear the way other fey feed on nectar, and they harvest it by slipping into the dreams of sleeping creatures. This makes them the monster in every Faerie nursery tale.

It also makes them the gentlest goblins awake. A well-fed bugbear has no reason to frighten anyone. A starving one is the only kind most Faeries have ever met, and the Kingdom has built a whole folklore on the sample.

Appearance

The largest fey in either category — a bugbear standing upright is nearly twice a Faerie's height — with dense dark fur, small deep-set eyes, and a gait that reads as menacing mostly because of the size.

Their eyes are poor. The Nightwood is dark at noon and bugbears navigate by smell, hearing, and the sense of who is asleep nearby, and a bugbear brought into daylight is the least dangerous large creature in the world.

Attuned Magic

Nightmare. A nascent bugbear can sense fear at a distance and sharpen an existing bad dream. A powerful one can enter a sleeping mind, shape what it finds there, hold a conversation in it, and leave the sleeper with a memory they cannot distinguish from a real one. Bugbears consider the last of these a serious crime and punish it internally, a fact the Kingdom has never bothered to learn.

The reason it is a crime is doctrinal as much as ethical. Every fey lost their memories at metamorphosis; memory is the one thing nobody in this world can verify; and a people who can write into it have concluded, unanimously and for a very long time, that they must not.

Life

Solitary or in small groups, in root-hollows and fallen giants, spread thin across ninety square kilometers of unmapped forest. Work is foraging, hunting, and hosting — a gathering forms wherever several dream-ranges overlap, because that is where being physically present is worth the walk.

Names. Given by whoever first dreamed you. A new bugbear is met in sleep before they are met in person, and the name comes out of that meeting, which means every bugbear's name was chosen by someone who had already spoken to them and whom they do not remember meeting.

Arrival. A new bugbear is fed for a year. Not trained, not questioned — fed, by everyone in range, deliberately and generously, because a hungry bugbear frightens people and a bugbear who begins that way rarely stops. It is the single most practical piece of social engineering in either realm.

Sleep. Everyone in the Nightwood sleeps more, and dreams harder, and treats the results as news. Spore-bloom weeks — three days of shared dreaming, twice a year — are the province's calendar, its politics, and its entertainment.

Society

Spread thin and organized around sleep. Bugbears claim territory by dream-range rather than by ground, so a bugbear's holdings are the minds that fall asleep within reach of them — which makes their borders unmappable, their politics incomprehensible to outsiders, and their census figures a matter of opinion. Ursk, the Dreamer Beneath, holds the largest range in the Nightwood.

The Nightwood is the only region in the world where the ruling power knows what its subjects are afraid of, in detail, every night.

Currents

Ursk's Reach. The ranges that have merged with his, and the holders who now defer. Government by overlapping presence.

The Waking Party. Bugbears who hold that dream-range politics cannot answer an army and want ground held, borders drawn, and Hollowgate fortified. Their elders call this a category error.

The Border Trade. Hollowgate's commerce with the Spriggans: foolsfire in, dreamer's-cup out, and neither crown informed.

The Unmet. Whatever else lives in the deep wood, with which the bugbears have arrangements — routes not taken, seasons not entered. Ask about them and a bugbear will change the subject so courteously you will not notice for an hour.

Relations

Quietly good with the Spriggans across the unmarked border in the Twilight Veil — both peoples make their living in the dark, and both are used to being described as monsters by people who have never been there.

Playing One