Hakaan

Hakaan are the largest of the Vale's peoples; a grown hakaan stands over nine feet tall, and their bodies are made of living stone, grey and heavy. They are strong in proportion, and most of the Vale meets them in the trades that need that strength: the quarry, the mill, the building yard, the haulage road.

What sets them apart is Doomsight. A hakaan may, at any point in life, see their own death: one clear moment showing how it comes and where. It never shows a quiet death in bed; the death it shows is always caught up in some larger event, a flood, a war, the fall of a house. Not every hakaan receives it, but one who does is expected to go and meet it, and hakaan custom treats refusal as a disgrace that falls on the whole household rather than on the one who turned away.

Hakaan account for Doomsight through their origin. They believe they descend from giants of the first age, stone beings far larger than any hakaan living, and that those giants bargained with Cyrvis for foresight. Cyrvis took their size and strength in payment, and then, as a trickster does, kept to the letter of the bargain and no further: the giants had asked to see the future, and he let them see only one part of it, the part nobody wants to see. Hakaan therefore think of themselves as a diminished people, the remainder of that bargain: cheated, and still keeping their side of it. It has left them with no particular feeling toward Cyrvis; they neither worship him nor blame him, and unlike most of the Vale they will say his name in ordinary conversation.

Because Doomsight is the only reason most hakaan ever have to leave home, hakaan do not travel by choice. Most are born, work, and die in one place, whether a farming village of their own or a hakaan quarter in one of the larger towns, and they take the Saints of that place as their own. Their names record this. At home a hakaan uses a single forename. Away from home they add a marker naming where they belong, 'of Kanzu' or 'Kanzu-kin', and a hakaan who names no home at all is called Outwalking.

This is why a hakaan on the road is treated across the Vale as a bad omen, and the belief is correct. A travelling hakaan is almost always following their Doomsight, and Doomsight comes to far more hakaan in troubled years than in quiet ones, so when several are seen leaving home at once, something large is moving in the world.

None of this makes them grim. Hakaan are friendly, open, and quick to trust, and the likely reason is that a people who might learn the day of their death at any moment see little point in spending the days before it being guarded. The one thing hakaan custom does not forgive is a hakaan who saw their death and did not go to it.