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General infoThe wights are the youngest, but still the third most numerous, of the Five Known People. They're mostly known as "children of the wilderness," though in later years many of them have moved into various civilizations and become "urban wights." These wights are often seen as guards, law enforcers, bouncers, soldiers or manual laborers of various kinds, often in the service of some dwarf Clan or other. Rumor has it that wights were created by Rauken, the Protector of Animals, and here is certainly a slight animalistic streak to the wights; they have sharp senses and great instincts. and are also very strong and tough. A lot of humans and some dwarfs look down on them as being stupid and uncivilized, but while it's true that wights in general aren't great intellectuals they are quick learners and often surprisingly hard to fool. They're also extremely strong and tough -- they're immune to just about any diseases and to any known poisons, and on the whole have iron constitutions and health.
Wights vary more in shape and size than any of the other People. While hair and skin color variation are about on the level of dwarfs (and the number of wights with dark skin and light hair is rather high), they can vary so much in looks that it can sometimes be hard to grasp that they are all the same species -- an adult wight might be barely a meter in height (like Tufty) or can be over two meters tall (like Snuggles); they can be slender or stocky, ugly or beautiful, hairy or almost completely hairless (though beards are very rare in male wights and almost unheard of in female wights) What they all do have in common is large, pointy ears, long furry tails, and big feet with powerful claws -- which is why no wight ever wears shoes. A common quirk is that they're very proud of their tails, and vanity for a wight will almost always center around the tail. Wights live on average 400-500 years.
Societies
Wights don't really have any kind of organized society. They have a few traditions and customs that are common to all wights, but apart from this there aren't any official wight laws, norms or taboos. There are small villages and even underground "kingdoms" of wights, but these are all based on ideas that have been "borrowed" by humans or dwarfs and usually not taken that seriously. If you meet a wight who calls himself "king" that doesn't necessarily mean anything more than that he has, or has had, some semi-important role in a wight collective -- or that he's won the title in a game of cards.
Families, breeding and childrenMost wights live with large, extended families; parents, siblings, uncles and aunts, cousins, lovers or just friends who have decided to live together, all in an extremely informal and rather chaotic system that nobody except the wights understand... and quite often they don't understand it either. It's all made even more complicated by the fact that wights don't have surnames, family names or Clan names, and as such it's not always that easy to know just who's related to who, and in what way. Marriages don't exist -- even if lovers might decide to live together permanently, wights in general just don't see the point of ceremonies like weddings.
Wight children generally grow up with their extended families, with parents and often several "extra parents" -- while the birth rates among wights isn't as low as with, say, the elves, they are low enough that wights who want children are encouraged to enter polyamorous relationships in order to make conception more likely. The result is that a fair number of the world's wights have no idea who their biological father is -- and while this would be a shame for most humans and dwarfs, and a complete disaster for dragons, it's a pretty common and accepted thing among wights. (One interesting thing about wight births, however, is that twin births are notably more common than for any of the other People; about one in six births is a twin birth. As such, a lot of wights have a twin.)
Wights generally enter their Hotblood phase when they're around twenty, and originally that was also when they began being considered adults -- though the urban wights, who tend to have picked up a lot from the dwarfs, have heightened the adult age to thirty-five, just like with the dwarfs. Forest wights still come of age at twenty.
There's no formal wight education. Forest wights are usually taught by their families (and it all depends on just how much said families actually know), while urban wights are usually offered an education by dwarf Clans, who often employ wights for various tasks of labor and have realized that it's better to have workers who aren't completely ignorant. The education is paid for with work -- the rule of thumb is that a wight owes as many hours of service to the dwarf Clan in question as hours of education received. As such, a lot of dwarfs and wights strike up friendships from an early age when they go to school together, and many dwarfs when starting their own business will employ their old wight classmates.
NamesWights have a unique naming custom: No wight can have more than one name at a time, and the name can only be one word -- but this word can be anything, and any wight has the right to change their name at any given moment if they don't like the old one. Only once in a wight's life is it acceptable to be given a name by someone else -- and that's the first name they get as newborns. because babies can't be expected to name themselves. It's not that uncommon for a baby wight to be named "Baby," "Tiny," "Cutie" or "Princess" by doting parents... or in some cases "Crybaby" or "Loudmouth" by sleep-deprived parents.
During childhood, most wights begin to catch onto the fact that they can in fact have any name they want, and this tends to lead to a period where they constantly change names, trying out new ones in rapid succession -- sometimes friends and siblings may swap names, sometimes they decide to have the same name, sometimes are just nonsense words or words the wight in question thinks sounds good -- or a swear word, because it's funny to have your mother yell profanities when she calls you in for dinner. Or sometimes they decide to keep the name a secret and refuse to answer unless address by the name they haven't told anyone what is. Most people who know wight children quickly learn to ask "What's your name today?" because the answer might not be the same from day to day.
After some time, though, most wight children get tired of changing their names so often, and start realizing that it's really rather practical to have people actually know what to call you, and so they stop with the "childish" namechanging and start choosing their names more carefully, and hanging on to their names for longer. Older wights tend to stick to one name, unless something happens to make them decide to change it.
Nicknames are generally discouraged, as an old wight superstition views them as bad luck.
Relationships with the other People
Wights have their strongest and best relationship with dwarfs -- after all, many wights, especially the urban ones, grow up with dwarfs as teachers, classmates and employers. Their relationship with humans is a little more complicated, as there used to be more of an open war between the two people -- but mostly they get along nowadays.
While urban wights tend to have the same non-relationships with elves as humans or dwarfs, forest wights find them very fascinating but also a little weird. There are rumors that small groups of forest wights are allowed to live in the elven forest, though this might just be a rumor. Wights usually don't have too much to do with dragons either, but not for lack of trying on the part of the wights.
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