Feefan

Body

"Extremely hairy, with wide white-blue eyes, beneath thin peaked eyebrows that extend off their face four inches. Short in form, these grey-brown skinned children of the forest have cupped ears, woven close to the sides of their heads to collect sound." Their mouth "is always concerned looking." Short legs, long arms, long fingers, and two feet of hair off every portion of them. "They glow from beneath their skin at night, turning their body hair and skin translucent to reveal their luminescent firefly-esque blood." Four to five feet, fifty to a hundred pounds, one to two hundred years.

Their sap is the light: the same fluid that every Irugaine runs on, carrying a cold-burning compound the Feefan cannot switch off, only bank, and the two feet of hair is the shutter, lying flat to hide and lifting to show. A Feefan hiding is a Feefan with its hair down. The wide eyes take in the whole of a night garden at a thousandth of the light another kin needs and are useless by day, so the Feefan sleep through the sun in heaps under the leaf mould, and any daylight business of the Lumenhalo is done by whoever drew the short straw and is squinting. The cupped ears are the other half: they hear the small night-things moving and they hear a Boalden breathing at four hundred yards.

Society

They rule by the Unison. Fireflies flash together, and the Feefan decide together: when a matter is put to a garden at night, every Feefan glows, and the glow falls into a rhythm, and when the whole garden is pulsing as one the matter is decided in favour of whatever the rhythm settled on. A Feefan who will not fall in stands dark, and a dark Feefan is not punished, only unlit, and few can bear it long. There is no chief. There is a Firstlight, the eldest, whose pulse the others tend to fall in with, and who is careful never to pulse first.

Life

They eat nectar, tree-sap licked from the bark, moths, beetles, and the small night-things of the garden; a Feefan eats little and often and never by day, and a Feefan kept awake through three days of light goes dim and then goes quiet and does not recover.

Harvest

Taken from them: the blood, which is the lantern-oil of the deep and glows for a year in a sealed vial, and which is taken, sometimes, from Feefan caught alive by the Under Realm's lamp-traders, who are the reason the Feefan let the surface come to look at them and never let it come close; the hair, which is warmer than wool and twice as long; and the ear-cups, which the Nu'uman spymasters want and which the Feefan burn on their dead.