Overview
The Root-Cellar Halfling is the patient, remembering eye of Rootcellar Hills, a small, root-cellared halfling of the green hills who tends the deep root-cellars and the hill's oldest stores, the hold's patient, remembering, and most certain eye. It stands under a meter tall, low and patient, with the kind of certainty that comes from a life measured in kept stores rather than years. Where the Oath-Weaver halflings weave the old oath, the Root-Cellar halflings of the hills tend the deep cellar, and they have been tending the first cellar on the first hill for a very long time.
Habitat
The Root-Cellar Halfling keeps to the deep-holds of Rootcellar Hills, a range of soft, green, rain-fed ground where the root-cellars are deep and the ale is a treaty. Its dwellings are dug into the faces of the cellar-walls, hollows of soft earth and laid stone coaxed into a home that catches the warm rain-light on its inner face and the shelter of the hill on its outer. It favors the older cellars where the stores run deepest and the tending is oldest, the places where a root can be read without the hill's own motion breaking it.
Appearance
A Root-Cellar Halfling stands about 0.91 m tall, small and low, with sun-freckled cream to soft wheat skin that reads as bright in the hill's own light. Its coat is a fine brown of hair over the shoulders, worn short and neat so it does not catch the root, and its eyes are pale gold, bright and patient beneath the brow, the color of the rain-light's own glow at dusk. It wears a patchwork of cloth and leather in muted wheat and soft green and carries a single tending-stone at its belt, set with a single root-loop at the brow, the loop of a tender.
Behaviour
The Root-Cellar Halfling is patient, careful, and profoundly certain, a creature of long tendings and long attention who rarely surprises and rarely is surprised. It observes before it tends, often for hours, watching a cellar or a person or a bargain until it understands the shape of the store, and only then does it tend, and then with a care that feels rehearsed over years. It is not unkind, but it is not easily moved, and a debt named by a Root-Cellar halfling is a debt the hill will keep long after the tender has gone.
Natural Weapons & Defenses
The Root-Cellar halfling is no open-ground fighter and carries no blade, for its power is the store and the cellar itself, not force. Its primary defense is the hold, for it knows every corner of the deep-holds and can lead a pursuer through Rootcellar Hills for days until the pursuit loses its nerve and its balance. Should it be forced to act, a Root-Cellar halfling is slow and precise, 4 m/s through the cellars and careful, and it fights to unmake a threat rather than to wound it, cutting a root, dimming a light, or tending a store until the threat is spent.
Magic Alignment
The Root-Cellar halfling has no magic of its own, and it does not want any, and the not wanting is the whole of its way of dealing with the world, for a halfling that has a store and a word and a cellar does not need a spell. It is not attuned to any art, and it is not bound by any word that is not its own, and the not being bound is the whole of its way of being free. Its one signature thing is the tending, which is not a magic but is a thing that the halflings of the hill have tended for a very long time, and the tending is the keeping, and the keeping is the whole of its power.
Society
The Root-Cellar Halflings live in Rootcellar Hills in small, patient, and low deep-holds of perhaps twenty to sixty, bound by the stores they tend together rather than by blood or by place. There is no elder and no ruler, for a halfling that has tended the most and kept the most is simply the one the others listen to, and the listening is a tending and the tending is the whole of their society. Decisions are made in the cellar, by a company of gold-eyed tenders that has already decided and is only agreeing, and once made they are kept, for a halfling that breaks a tending is a halfling that has broken the whole of what it is.
Culture & Lore
The culture of the Root-Cellar Halfling is a culture of the tended store, a whole way of life organized around the idea that a word that is patient and careful is the only honest word in the hill. They keep no records, for a halfling that has tended a store does not need a record, the tending is the record, and the tending is patient and careful and does not fade. Their stories are slow and patient, told in the cellar at the dusk, and they are stories of stores tended and roots kept and the patient, careful difference between them, told in a voice that is barked and means every tending.
Home
Rootcellar Hills is the Root-Cellar halfling's home and its tending, a range of soft, green, rain-fed ground where the root-cellars are deep and the ale is a treaty, where the halflings tend their stores and their patient, careful words. It is a strange and patient place, one that stands as if it were a very old animal holding its breath, and the Root-Cellar halfling has learned to live inside that hill rather than against it. The warm rain-light that runs up through the cellars is the hill's own, a soft green glow that the halflings have come to read as the color of a tended store.
Relations
The Root-Cellar Halfling keeps a long, careful truce with the other creatures of Rootcellar Hills, a truce of tended stores that has held for a long time and is the oldest and most fragile thing in the hill. To the warm rain-light of the deep-holds the Root-Cellar halfling is a patient, careful, and absolutely certain presence, a gold-eyed tender that is at home in the cellars and in the root-cellar, and the light has learned to glow wide and let the tendings pass, for a halfling that has tended you has decided you are a keeping and not a lesson.
In the Story
In the story of the hill, the Root-Cellar Halfling is the patient, careful edge of the tale, the place where the stores are tended and a store is read and a keeping is read. It is the figure that tends a new store in the dusk and holds the root very patient and very certain, and the figure that, when the truce with the oath-halflings grows thin, is the one that remembers what the truce cost and keeps the old store patient and careful and absolutely certain.